Too many Americans are spurred to achieve, rather than to attach. - Thomas Lewis

Everything a person is and everything he knows resides in the tangled thicket of his intertwined neurons. These fateful, tiny bridges number in the quadrillions, but they spring from just two sources: DNA and daily life. The genetic code calls some synapses into being, while experience engenders and modifies others.

A person cannot direct his emotional life in the way he bids his motor system to reach for a cup. He cannot will himself to want the right thing or to love the right person or to be happy after a disappointment, or even to be happy in happy times. People lack this capacity not through a deficiency of discipline but because the jurisdiction of will is limited to the latest brain and to those functions within its purview. Emotional life can be influenced, but it cannot be commanded.

Because other mammals have expressions, does that mean they have feelings — a subjective experience of the emotional states they display? That idea was scientifically risible not so long ago. Now some emotion scientists endorse the proposition that other mammals possess emotional consciousness — that they feel. This reversal delights animal advocates eager to make an argument for panprotoplasmic parity. But when the zoophile Mark Derr writes, “The question of whether animals possess consciousness, intelligence, volition, and feelings has long been settled in the affirmative,” he must be reporting the consensus from a species other than our own. Animals may have decided the matter to their own satisfaction, but human beings, as far as we know, are still debating it.