The Herald - The Herald Magazine
Is it time we faced the facts about feelings?
FACTS or feelings? Lived experience or empirical evidence? Is your truth better than my truth? We have arrived at a moment in the culture when the idea of emotional knowledge is seen as just as relevant as objective knowledge, Abigail Williams, Professor of English Literature believes.
“To call an argument subjective used to be a way of dismissing it, but now personally felt testimony has huge power in almost every sphere,” she argues in her new Radio 4 series I Feel Therefore I Am (Tuesday).
“This isn’t just a question of language,” she continues. “What we are seeing is a sea change in where we think knowledge and authority come from.”
I Feel Therefore I Am attempts to ask what has changed and when did that change begin? To do so in this opening episode Williams took us back to the 18th century’s cult of sensibility, when the greatest mark of sophistication, she suggests, “was to be able to cry buckets in public at the drop of a hat”. We then moved forward via the Romanticism of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley to today’s TikTok therapists.
And it’s all huge fun. Maybe there’s a whiff of binary thinking in the set-up, but this is a smart, fast-moving, accessible history of thought and how it has changed. And maybe how it hasn’t. Because while there may be a generational difference in how young people now embrace lived experience, they are hardly the first to do so. “Who said ‘Know Thyself? I think it was on the temple of Delphi,” one contributor pointed out.
And, the programme asked, if there is something a little narcissistic about the primacy of emotion over reason amongst today’s youth isn’t that a natural part of human development? And couldn’t some people frankly do with a bit more?
“You only have to look at some of the politicians of our modern age to see how our entire world is being affected by some extremely emotionally immature people acting out their neuroses on the world stage,” self-help publisher Pippa Wright suggested.
It didn’t come up in the programme but there is also the possibility that the media have played a part in all of this. I turned on the radio on Wednesday after Nicola Sturgeon announced she was to resign as Nihal Arthanayake announced: “I’m very keen to know from those of you listening to 5Live who are in Scotland how you feel about her?” It’s worth noting that it’s always easier to fill air time with feelings rather than facts.
Talking of politicians, on Monday, historian Phil Tinline did something I thought was nigh on impossible. He made Tory MP and arch Brexiteer John “the Vulcan” Redwood sound almost reasonable. In The Privatisation of British Gas, Tinline explored the Thatcher government’s decision to do just that in 1986, remembered in the popular imagination by the “Tell Sid” ad campaign encouraging people to buy shares.
Redwood was a prime mover in the government’s plans and he spoke rather well here about why he felt it was required and, also, where it went wrong. (There’s too much government interference in our energy companies now, he reckons. But he would say that, wouldn’t he?)
Redwood’s vision came to pass. Was it a good one though? Hmm. In a world where both shareholder dividends and energy bills are exploding, possibly not. And we now pay more for our energy than anywhere else in the world.
Back to emotion before we go. On Valentine’s Day on Radio Scotland’s request programme Get It On, presenter Bryan Burnett read out a message from one of his listeners, Susan.
“My hubby and I have been together for many years,” she wrote. “He now has dementia. He always gave me a Valentine and the first year he forgot I shed a few tears. But guess what? I got one this year. The lovely people at the day centre must have helped him make it and included his photo in it.”
You don’t need to be a paid-up member of the cult of sensibility to feel your eyes tear up at that.