Feelings are Facts
Sometimes a news interview captures a moment in time. You watch it and think: “Yes, that’s it, that’s the problem right there.” Such a moment just occurred in an interview on Channel 4 News with their anchor Cathy Newman and Milo Yiannopoulos, an editor at Breitbart News. Breitbart is suddenly all over the news because it is closely associated with Donald Trumps’s most senior advisor, Steve Bannon who is the executive chairman of the site.
Here is a clip of the interview:
On watching it I felt impressed by Cathy Newman’s tenacity and determination and slightly appalled at Yiannopoulos’s arrogance. However, I have my own biases, and so I ask myself: does he have a point? Too much grievance culture, too much political correctness?
Well, maybe, but that’s not THE point here, which is about his emphatic disregard for feelings — he emphasises repeatedly that he doesn’t care about feelings, he cares about facts. At one point he is also says ‘these things’ are not real, by which he seems to refer to racism, sexism and other sundries.
And this is why it’s such an important interview, because although Cathy Newman didn’t say it, the reason millions would be on her side is something we know so well that it’s hard to see it: feelings are facts. Feelings are a legitimate human response to the world. To deny the legitimacy of feelings is a kind of modern misanthropy.
You don’t need to bring in the scientific heavies to make this point, but Antonio Damasio comes to mind as one of many authorities who has made it abundantly clear that we need emotions to think well, and most perception is evaluative — a combination of thinking and feeling. So it’s basically delusional to say that feelings don’t matter or that somehow they are not ‘facts’. They are facts of a different kind, experienced subjectively, but open to inter-subjective validation, and with objective correlates in our physiology.
Now of course you can lose your way if you only care about feelings — it should not be a subjective free-for-all. But going the other way — denying the legitimate place of feelings in public discourse — is perhaps even more dangerous.
The moment reminded me of watching Swami Chakrabarti on Question Time in 2009, talking about torture in vivid terms, and sounding increasingly distressed and emphatic. Her answer was described as ‘emotional’ (not meant as a compliment!) by the person she was targeting, Geoff Hoon MP, to which she replied: “Yes, sir, I am emotional about torture.”
More recently, we see another white guy saying that what appears to be really important — ambient racism and sexism — is not important at all. This interview with Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi and R Emmett Tyrell features the beautiful line: “I find it very interesting. There seems to be a refusal to accept reality.” And later, “You are a white man. You don’t get to decide what racism is. You really don’t.” More generally there is a familiar attempt to dictate what ‘the facts’ are, but in a way that favours a limited and limiting conception of reality.
These are three of innumerable examples of exchanges that happen all over the world. The issue is not always related to gender, or race, and sometimes there are cultural differences in, for instance, how permissible it is to be angry. Aristotle’s famous line always bears repeating:
“Anybody can become angry — that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way — that is not within everybody’s power and is not easy.”
The point is not to avoid anger, but find it, feel it, and channel it with dignity. And it’s not just about anger of course, but also sadness, fear, disgust, love and so forth, and then there are more complex feelings like admiration or ‘fear about anger’, which I feel we could say more about.
We should be able to handle such things, but instead of using this material to get a deeper sense of what is going on, what we effectively see often amounts to men disconnected from their own feelings telling women to calm down.
In most cases the problem is not too much feeling or emotion, but too little. The real question to ask is the extent to which the emotion is grounded in reality — and what kind of reality is that? To call it subjective does not make it any less part of the world. And that’s the point right there — feelings are facts. They have different ontology so we can’t deal with them as if they were mere information — but they are generally more rather than less than that.
A democracy at ease with itself would not shy away from emotion. I am the founding director of an organisation — Perspectiva - that builds its work around a richer conception of reality — ‘systems, souls and society’ — our point is that to make political progress we need to understand the world objectively (Systems) subjectively(Souls) inter-subjectively and inter objectively(Society). This idea is distantly inspired by the Philosopher Karl Popper’s ‘Three Worlds’ view of reality.
The point is that reality is big and diverse and facts are many. But to be emotional is to be human. And sometimes our personal feelings are our best political facts.
