Learning v. emotions

Humans learn so much more than other animals that we lose sight of the fact that we are afforded some knowledge at birth already.

I thought of this looking at birds in the yard and recalling that no one shows a bird how to build a nest, it is an instinct, a bit of knowledge they are born with.

So what could Sonya have been born knowing? Well, the screams and cries are the first, obvious thing. Sonya knew that she was not alone. She knew that her cries are communication. She knew to scrunch up her face with a frown, another form of communication. This tells me that Sonya was born knowing she could communicate verbally and facially (of course she's still working on these, but the concept was there to begin with). She also communicated something. She was very afraid. Her lip quivered. Her eyes looked up pleadingly at me with big tears in them. Sonya was obviously born with a whole host of emotions. No one taught her these, she was born feeling. Might sound obvious, but I think that we sometimes lose sight of the fact that we all are born with the same capacity for emotions. These emotions should not be casually discarded, they count for something and are ingrained into our species from inception.

Being a man of faith, it is easy for me to view emotions as the guiding light of God. Being a student of science it is easy for me to interpret emotions as a potential competitive advantage for a fragile, communal species that needed to work together in order to overcome predators and prey. Either way, it seems absurd to discard the role that emotions have in the manner in which we think. Learning and schooling accomplish much, but without emotional stability they lack a solid foundation. In our society we often chose to try and master our emotions, therapeutically, rationally, and more oft than not, chemically. Perhaps we should embrace the role emotions played in the founding of our species instead. Without emotions, could people live together? Can anyone survive independent of others for long?

Well, I obviously believe that we should attend to our emotions in the same manner in which we were born - with a deep richness. We have these feelings for a reason and they can serve us well far more than they should serve us wrong. The fact our species persists is proof-positive.

The alternative is to battle withourselves to hide our emotions:
Or worse, a future of our species devoid of emotions entirely. This would only be possible with the removal of flesh from intelligence:

"We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality."
- Albert Einstein