Who is to say that someone’s emotions are not real?
In the middle of the last century, a school of psychologists decided that they didn’t need to talk to people to tell what emotions they were feeling. These psychologists declared that all they needed to do to tell what someone was feeling was to look at the expression on their face. The Theory of Basic Emotions that they came up with supposed that culture was irrelevant. People all around the world had just a handful of true emotions, they said, and these basic emotions were the same for everyone.
The Theory of Basic Emotions doesn’t account for feelings like hiraeth.
Hiraeth is a feeling with many layers. It’s a longing for a place, but unlike homesickness, hiraeth can be felt for a place one has never been to. Often, hiraeth is felt for a place one can never go too. There’s a sense in hiraeth of having identified a place that feels like it should be home but can never be. Hiraeth can also be felt for a place that once was home, but has but has been altered so much that it can never be anything like what it was before, though we long for it still.
Another layer of depth within hiraeth is the idea that it’s a feeling that’s connected to the landscape of Wales in particular, a longing for Wales by those who have left it as well as a longing for a Wales that is as it ought to be or ought to have been, but never will be.
Those who support the Theory of Basic Emotions would tell us that people feeling hiraeth are really just feeling sad, or anxious, but do these broad categorizations do justice to the word hiraeth? The Welsh don’t think so, and all around the world, there are local words for emotions as specific and non-universal as hiraeth.
The proponents of the Theory of Basic Emotions are content to say to members of these cultures that they’ve got it wrong, that their way of categorizing their own feelings is excessively elaborate, an illusion that masks the simplicity within human feelings.
It’s not a coincidence that the Theory of Basic Emotions was concocted during the last days of colonialism, when people felt free to travel around the world telling people of other cultures that they had it wrong, that they didn’t understand their own lives, their own language, their own land.
It’s also no coincidence that the Theory of Basic Emotions is popular among Silicon Valley tycoons who are eager to transform human emotion into just another data commodity, something that can be as easily extracted as precious metal from ore, something that can be stolen as ruthlessly as natural resources were once stolen by colonial powers. The digital economy seeks to transform whatever aspects of subjective human experience into an object that can be measured and manipulated for financial profit.
Hiraeth may now be fairly used to describe the feeling we have when we long for a world that was free of the tools of digital extraction. Certainly, people could choose to abandon those digital tools, but the practical likelihood of that seems as distant as the mythological Wales of King Arthur and Merlin.
