	Bob Hostetler > Writing

Feeling and Thinking

by Bob Hostetler

Newspapers nationwide trumpeted the news just a couple weeks ago: “Poll: Most Americans Feel U.S. will be Bogged Down in Iraq for Years.” The AP story reported that as many as 70% of respondents expressed pessimism about the quick effectiveness of U.S. efforts in Iraq. It also reflected something else: increasingly, feelings now triumph over fact in journalism, public “opinion,” and governance; emotion has displaced reason.

On the whole, we’re becoming much less likely to report what people think on a given subject; we report how they feel about it. We’re less likely to express our thoughts or opinions than we are to reflect our feelings.

The pharmaceutical company Bayer reports that “Three-quarters (75%) of Americans feel that America's new emphasis on national security will create new job opportunities in science and technology” (emphasis added).

Save the Doves spokeswoman Ritchie Laymon, on the 1998 statewide issue to end hunting of mourning doves, said, ''Most Ohioans feel doves are worth saving; we just hope they start seeing our ads and understand a yes vote will save the doves” (emphasis added).

A Columbus business publication reported, “More than 65 percent of Central Ohioans feel state and local governments should offer private businesses tax breaks to create or retain jobs” (emphasis added).

A San Francisco media poll (KTVU.Com/BayInsider.com) reported in July that “Majority Feel State is Going in Wrong Direction” (emphasis added).

A Canadian news outlet headlined a March 29, 2003, story: “Americans feel U.S. underestimated Iraqi strength” (emphasis added).

Of course, such usage stretches the meaning of the word “feel” as one American president once stretched the meaning of the word “is.” Do Ohioans truly feel that state and local governments should offer tax breaks to private businesses…or do they think so? Do Californians feel their state is going in the wrong direction…or do they think so? Do Americans feel the U.S. will be bogged down in Iraq for years …or do they think so?

You get the point: to hear us talk (or write), feelings are fast superseding fact in our culture, media, and government, a situation illustrated by the common practice of substituting the term “I feel” for “I think” in phrases like, “I feel that our schools are doing a good job,” and “I feel what a person does in the privacy of his own home is nobody’s business but his own.” Duke political scientist James David Barber calls it “a detestation of reason in favor of emotion.”¹

Why is this happening? Because we modern folk—enlightened as we are—don’t like the notion of objective truth. It just feels so…well, judgmental. As Ryszard Legutko, in his essay, “The Trouble with Tolerance,” writes:

[W]e are witnessing today the decline of strong philosophy, inhumanely objective and heirarchical, and the triumph of essentially weak rhetoric: the criteria of social coexistence, adaptable and malleable, have begun to play a more important role than the suprahuman criteria of truth.²

Like fuel added to fire, this trend of labeling our thoughts as feelings is not only likely to grow in the years to come; it’s also dangerous. As feelings rule increasingly in place of ideas in our society, it will be increasingly easy to believe utter nonsense (“If I feel it, how can it be wrong?”). It often takes investigation, examination, and deliberation in order to think through an issue; but a person usually needn’t do anything in order to feel something.

More dangerous still, in a culture where we treat thoughts as if they were feelings, disagreement and dissent must be disallowed (“How can you disagree with how I feel?”). Thus, disagreeing with someone constitutes an attack. Legitimate debate is stifled. Bridges to true understanding are blown to bits as soon as they’re begun.

There’s nothing wrong with feelings. And very often our opinions are based more on emotion than on reason. But feelings are not thoughts. And confusing the two—whether accidentally or strategically—is inaccurate and dangerous. Let’s not insult each other by implying that we’ve surrendered the ability to think as well as to feel. Or the intelligence to know the difference.

¹ Quoted in "The Politics of Separation," by William A. Henry III, Time,Fall 1993, p. 75.

² Legutko, Ryszard, "The Trouble with Toleration," Partisan Review, Volume LXI, Number 4, 1994, p. 616.

This article appeared in the September 5, 2003 edition of the Hamilton Journal-News.

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