Nothing More Than Feelings

Observing the behavior of my students as they interact with other faculty, it occurred to me that Millennials are now running with the torch of hypocrisy with absolutely no hindsight. While the hypocrisy of human beings is nothing new, it seems odd that it doesn’t occur to our social justice warriors, Millennials, that in seeking restitution for hurt feelings (whether anyone meant to hurt their feelings) they take no heed of whose feelings they hurt in the process.

For example, as Millennials go to war over trivialities such as Halloween costumes, college

presidents have to give in to whatever demands their students make in an effort to save their own job. One could scarcely imagine the stress Peter Salovey, the President of Yale University, recently underwent after a campus-wide email detailing how students should deal with Halloween costumes that they deemed offensive. Worse, that situation escalated and in early November 2015, an incident at Yale saw “…students surround[ed] Nicholas Christakis—husband of Erika [Christakis], a professor of sociology and medicine, and master of Silliman. One African-American woman, seemingly speaking for the crowd, told him that his wife’s email [about Halloween costumes] and his failure to apologize for it made her feel “unsafe.” When Christakis earnestly explained that he would need to consider the matter before apologizing, the woman shouted at him, “Be quiet!”; “Why the f--- did you accept the position!”; “If that’s what you think, you should step down!”; and “You should not sleep at night! You are disgusting!” She then turned and walked away” (as reported by Peter Berkowitz). While Millennials are not going to stand for having their feelings hurt, they think nothing of how they make anyone other than a Millennial feel.

One would suppose this failure to apply their ideology equally stems from a lack of shared values. Nonetheless, if the desire to spare the feelings of Millennials only applies amongst themselves, this is an indication of a culturally relativist practice, which surely Millennials do not mind since they go out of their way to respect – almost – all cultures.

The problem is, Millennials don’t respect the cultures they have the ability to usurp or wrest power from. Millennials respect, say, the practices of the Islamic State, since they believe all culture is relative and as such who is to say IS’s murderous tendencies are wrong. Millennials, however, don’t actually have to ever deal with IS directly. If they did, they would quickly find out IS has no respect for the belief of Millennials and getting upset about an email about Halloween costumes would soon be the least of a Millennial’s worries. And that’s just the thing; if all cultures should be respected because their practices are relativistic, there is absolutely no reason for anyone who is not a Millennial to respect the beliefs or practices of Millennials because to not respect the beliefs of Millennials is neither right nor wrong. As many liberals before them, Millennials fail to see this error in their philosophy. As many people before them, Millennials are blinded by ideology.

And so they go to war against the people they can control. Using the fact that colleges are for-profit, Millennials battle against college professors and administrators who don’t want to simply give them a degree without a student actually working for it or with whom they have a difference of opinion. Lost on Millennials is the fact that if colleges were not for-profit, a college administration would never give into their demands. Millennials get their way not because their demands are reasonable or philosophically justifiable, but because college administrators are capitalists. (Also lost on Millennials is that capitalism begets inequality and they fail to realize this because in actuality a Millennial’s smart phone is more important to them than social justice.)

But all of this is a symptom of a more pressing question, one I keep asking for which no Millennial can answer: Why is it more important to spare a person’s feelings* than to have a reasoned, civil debate in which we may have to settle for “agreeing to disagree”? If a person falsely believes that 1 + 1 = 3, why is it worth not correcting them, because it might hurt their feelings? If an attempt is made to build a person’s self-esteem by giving them an award for simply showing up, doesn’t this make it more likely that when that person’s feelings do get hurt, for whatever reason even by accident, that person is going to be ill prepared to deal with it? Why do feelings matter more than the analysis of a situation?

[* By person we should take to mean anyone that agrees with Millennial ideology or that may disagree with Millennial ideology but lives outside of the U.S.]

In my opinion, that is, the opinion of a seasoned thinker experienced in life, I rarely if ever have my feelings hurt because someone said such-and-such about me. I’ve been called plenty of names and shouted out and vehemently disagreed with but all these things amount to are words. Words by themselves have no power. All power lies with the person hearing the word. In order to be insulted or offended by words, one has to internalize them and make the decision for those words to hurt them. If one sees a Halloween costume that offends them, the offended party has to decide that they are offended. Granted, what is deemed an offensive costume may be a symptom of some systematic oppression, but this merely means there is a chance to have a debate with someone and possibly have the offender understand why a costume is offensive. I might add to this that if a certain group currently possesses more power than another group, I do not believe one should be offended by past transgressions such as in the case of a Jew seeing a Nazi Halloween costume. (I am open to debate on this point, though.)

Feelings are irrelevant in the face of more pressing concerns. IS, economic inequality and climate change do not care about the feelings of their victims. Nor is everyone special; it is quite clear the opposite is true as we see it again and again every day and there would be no CEOs or celebrities if everyone actually were important. I certainly understand the desire to ignore inconvenient truths, but this doesn’t make feelings more important than anything else out of necessity. While I would agree that it is basically cruel to hurt someone’s feelings intentionally, there should not be consequences for unintentional harm, as Millennials would have it. While we can never know someone’s true intention, neither can we know whether someone is truly having their feelings hurt or trying to manipulate others to their advantage. Millennials should beware the trappings of power; power corrupts and that corruption will wind up hurting someone’s feelings. Don’t be a hypocrite by refusing to examine your own beliefs, Millennials. If you want to be the stewards of the future, try to avoid operating from false premises like all of your predecessors. 

Emotional Baggage

I’ve recently been accused of lacking empathy and not valuing emotions enough when considering issues great or small. In due course, this question was posed to me which had already been on my mind: Is it better to live a life where one reacts to life’s issues or events with emotion or with reason? To rephrase it ever so slightly, should emotions be valued ahead of reason when it comes to dealing with life’s issues or events? Most basically put, should we more often go on gut instinct or would it be better to philosophically shred every issue to bits? I will not deny that emotions certainly are valuable regarding our experiences as individual human beings but when another person or persons enters the equation, I believe reason ought to trump emotion.

This is certainly not how the world has answered the question put to me, not now and not historically. Even many people I regard as otherwise intelligent place a premium on emotion and not enough value on reason. To them and the rest of the world, I would like to take a moment to consider the toll reacting to the world on a visceral level has taken…

Racism and ethnic pride (code for advanced tribalism) surely dates back further than written records. What is racism usually based upon? A feeling that people who looks different and/or act differently are somehow inferior to the racist without any examination as to whether the opposed group is actually inferior. Consider the Nazis: If black people were as inferior as Nazis claimed, how could black people have defeat Nazi athletes at the Olympics? And, did the Nazis conduct any studies to conclude Jews were the cause of Germany’s problems in the 1930’s? (They may have, but were those studies conducted without biases clouding the facts?) Racism continues today in its many instances, even subtly, such as with parents who demand their children marry within their race or culture, and not for any other reason than their emotion. 

Homophobia is similar in nature and history to racism; it is based in emotion. Homophobes have long invoked the ‘ick factor’ in their argument against homosexuals. The problem is that when you reason about the ‘ick factor’ the argument falls apart. The ‘ick factor’ can be used against any group of people whom one dislikes, even the ones claiming homosexuality is ‘icky.’ Or, at least here in The United States, many homophobes employ The Bible to condemn homosexuality as they feel The Bible is the word of God. Of course, The Bible as the word of God cannot be proven any more than The Koran is the word of Allah which may lead us to think we shouldn’t condemn groups of people for reasons not based in reason. Several states in The United States now allow homosexuals to marry just like interracial couples before them because as time marches on, it becomes ever more clear that the arguments against homosexuals are emotionally derived and not rationally driven. 

Then there are the Charles Ponzi- and Bernie Madoff-type scoundrels who prey upon everyone’s desire to get rich quick in order to steal from them. That over-riding desire to become rich has made people vulnerable to even the most ludicrous scams, such as Nigerian “princes” who fleeced many people when that scam first appeared. The second Bush administration used fear to sell the American public the invasion of Iraq; fear and tragedy is likewise used by American news outlets to keep viewers tuned in. “If it bleeds, it leads,” has long been the U.S. media’s unofficial protocol. There are also crimes-of-passion whose most notorious figures include John Hinckley, Amy Fisher, and Amy Nowack, to say nothing of other domestic abuses that are committed out of anger or the pursuit of power. Even now, in 2013, emotionally driven insanity has expelled a child from school because the sign-language he uses to say his name apparently looks too much like a gun.

To be fair, we might ask what has reasoning done for humanity? For one thing, it has advanced science over religion as a way of knowing how the world works and this has resulted in a much more comfortable lifestyle for much of humanity. Medicine is a scientific invention and science is the noble child of philosophy. (Even many so-called holistic medicines work, having been shown to work by reasoning medicine men of ages past.) Reasoning has also allowed for social justice, as previously mentioned. As you’ll notice of our day and age, where there is little social justice, there is also little reasoning. If we, as a species, took time more time to reason, it seems likely many of the greatest tragedies in history could have been avoided. 

If we think about the Nazis again – it always comes back to the Nazis; they’re just so useful in thought experiments – if they or the nation of Germany had stopped to think about whether the Jews and gypsies were actually the cause of the country’s problems, if they had taken the time to really come to the right conclusion or if they did come to the right conclusion think about a solution that didn’t involve genocide, incredible suffering could have been avoided. I feel similarly about the invention of the atomic bomb; there was little doubt that it could be built but how much debate took place over whether it should be built? Even if it should have been built, how much reasoning went into dropping not one, but two nuclear bombs on Japanese civilians at the end of WWII? Today, a similar lack of conscience has gone into the invention of genetically modified foods, as short-term profits are driven by the emotion greed with no consideration for what the long-term effects of such food might have on humanity or the environment that supports human life. I’m not sure the world would improve greatly by stopping to think once in a while, but not stopping to think has already proved to be disastrous. Why not go down that other road and see where it goes?

I’m not going to say there are never times when we shouldn’t revel in emotion. If I’m sitting on the beach alone watching the waves, feeling a breeze, the sun warming my skin, listening to the birds…no reasoning is necessary since I’m not dealing with other people and taking no action. I am able to be and enjoy the esthetics of my surroundings. Likewise, I can listen to music and let whatever effect it is going to have me take its course because it’s just between me and the music. Unless the stereo is loud enough to disturb my neighbors, there is no reason to restrain what the music I prefer does to me. Sex, of course, is also most fun when it is uninhibited, but such is a situation where there is someone else to consider and reasoning must come into play should an otherwise consensual partner no longer consent (or not consent at all). Emotions do have value, just not at the expense of other people.

Your thoughts?

A Clarification or an Apology?

A clarification or an apology? Think of it as one of those choose-your-own-adventure stories…

Regarding the criticism directed towards me for my last blog (in which I defend the business strategy of Abercrombie & Fitch) it has become clear to me that, generally speaking, people place more value in emotions than in analyzing issues with intelligence. This is not to say people who place more value in their emotions are unintelligent, simply that their lives are less governed by reason. In saying so, I suppose it seems obvious that I place less value in reacting emotionally to life’s various situations, preferring to analyze situations before reacting or making decisions. Naturally, it is not always practical to act in this manner, but I generally do so with situations that allow it. As such, I tend to accuse others of being oversensitive, whereas I have been accused of being unsympathetic or lacking empathy towards others. Having taken some time to reflect upon this disconnect, as it were, I found myself asking this question: Is it better to approach life emotionally or with reason (more precisely, with more emotion than reason or with more reason than emotion)? 

On the surface, it may seem that taking the latter approach to life robs a person of the many immediate pleasures any given moment may offer. To a certain extent I agree as there are certainly situations in which it is enjoyable to stop thinking and enjoy the moment. I suspect this is why people place such a high value on emotions. I’ve certainly been told that emotions are what make us human, but hearing this much makes me wonder if the advocates of emotions think we became intelligent (notice I didn’t say reasonable) by accident or as some kind of afterthought. As humans, we are both emotional AND intelligent; the question is whether one of these aspects of our existence should be held in higher regard than the other. 

In thinking about this – since I invest more time reasoning than living emotionally – I’ve come to a conclusion that surprised me. That conclusion came about by reflecting on the state of the world; at any given time in history, even now, the general state of the world has been one of misery, certain perspectives be damned. (Perhaps that is why optimistic people are in such short supply.) So, I thought, what has caused the world to be so miserable? At first I thought that it was because people tend to react to the world without thinking. All of humanity’s worst qualities such as anger, arrogance, bigotry, dominance, entitlement, tribalism – people assume these traits too often before giving the slightest thought as to why they act in the manner they do. Though we do cooperate when it benefits us (when we reason), think of how often we act benevolent with each other when we stand nothing to gain. I’m not saying people never act kind without expecting some kind of reciprocity, it just happens less than when cooperating is more than a zero-sum game. I do not believe people are basically good; given the chance to take advantage of another, more people give into the temptation than not, as several notable experiments have borne out. [e.g. the Stanford prison experiment, the Milgram experiment, etc.]

Next, I began to think about all the good human intelligence has wrought please insert sarcasm here. The advancement of atomic energy came at the behest to weaponize the technology, cars which get us to the restaurant faster so that we can eat a steaks (both contribute to our poisonous atmosphere), genetically modified plants that cannot reproduce on purpose; it would be easy to get carried away here. But when we think of the most recent tech “advancement,” Google Glass, I discovered the common denominator between emotions and intelligence that puts the human race at a disadvantage: People tend to apply emotion and intelligence before applying REASON to life’s myriad of situations. It’s not hard to think of what the unintended consequences of Google Glass might be, but did its inventors stop to think it might do more harm than good? No, I’m sure they automatically assumed the benefits of Google Glass outweigh its possible downside. (That is to say, it’s all about the money.) 

While I said earlier that human beings are both emotional and intelligent – weakly implying that both are important aspects of our existence – I think either on its own without any application of reason has been a bust for humanity. I think it is okay to be emotional…but not without also being reasonable. It is also okay to be intelligent, but not without being reasonable. And so I have discovered that reason trumps both emotion and intelligence. This, I believe, is where much of my dissatisfaction with my opponents in the Mike Jeffries debate came from, my belief that they were being unreasonable which they often took as an attack on intelligence. To be fair, I didn’t make this clear though I’m not sure saying, “I’m not attacking your intelligence, it’s that you’re not being reasonable,” would have helped. Or perhaps it would have if we as a species took the attitude that we need to stop, collaborate, and listen to each other. We need to stop perceiving that disagreements are attacks. We need to think about things before assuming all those ugly human traits I alluded to earlier, myself included.

I suppose it’s up to the individual to be more emotional than reasonable or more reasonable than emotional, but I certainly believe that abandoning reasoning altogether is one of the worst things a person can do not only for themselves, but for the world. I will not apologize for taking umbrage in instances where reason is abandoned when it is needed most. Not now, not ever.