Most legislation, I hate to say, is passed because it makes us feel better. Laws that send people to jail for 25 years for having and ounce of crack on their person are passed in order to make rich, white powder-cocaine users feel better about themselves. “Well, at least it isn’t crack,” they say. That one of those white cokeheads is our commander-in-chief should give us pause. Likewise, laws that let rich kids like the president inherit all of daddy’s money we can easily feel good about because we’re repealing the “death tax,” as if we’re taxing death itself right now. It makes us feel good to be against death, just as it makes us feel good to be “pro-life” despite the fact that many of these lives we’re supposedly “pro” will end up being miserable and tortured and short.
We feel good about the “closure” and relief” of a victim’s family when we put the victimizer to death for his crimes. Even “put to death” is an amelioration. What we mean is we kill him, but we know killing is wrong. Finding it too hard to say, then, we “put” death on him, as if it were a force out of our control and not a lethal injection administered by an executioner hired by the state and paid with our taxes. We even say “capital punishment” instead of “execution” since the latter sounds so old world. We say “closure” or perhaps “justice” instead of “revenge” since we need our factual vengeance to not conflict with our scriptural admonishment against seeking vengeance.
We even wage war to make ourselves feel better. I am beginning to think, in fact, that this is the primary reason we wage war at all. Agamemnon took his Greeks to Troy to try to assuage his jealousy and thus feel better. When kings are rebuked, matters of personal pride become matters of national pride. Taken to extremes, this becomes “nationalism,” the driving force behind Nazi expansionism. The Thousand Year Reich was sold to a German people beaten by WW1 and the economic devastation of the ‘20s and ‘30s as a way to regain that good old German pride, despite the fact that such pride was neither good, nor old, the concept of a German homeland being perhaps 100 years old at the time.
We can see the politics of feeling reflected in everything from the way the presidential races are run to the very language average people use to describe ideas. Even among those who should know better – the policy makers and pundits of the world – the term “I feel” is often substituted for a seemingly more accurate “I think” or even “I surmise.” This is most common in response to polls or person-on-the-street interviews where people are asked to react immediately to issues that often require complex consideration and reflection. “What do you think of the new tax bill?” a well-intentioned reporter may ask. The answer, more often than not, will begin “I feel . . . .” This is, of course, a wholly inappropriate response to a tax bill: few of us ever feel good about taxes. But if we think about it a little bit, most of us will probably concede that at least some taxes are a good idea.
I’m not suggesting an extreme dualism here where thinking and feeling are inherently separate. I’m no Mr. Spock. But feeling is too often substituted for deliberate, systematic consideration. Ironically, that deliberative process may then feed emotion, just as emotion is often the inspiration for thought. The more one thinks about the policies of the current Bush administration, the more outraged and angry one becomes. The intellectual dishonesty of, say, his arguments for invading Iraq – that lack of evidence for WMDs was positive proof that Saddam was hiding them, a textbook case of an appeal to ignorance – should make anyone who thinks about them at some depth feel insulted and angry.
Bush’s presidency itself is based largely on the culture of feeling. Do you feel afraid? Then vote for the candidate you feel will be stronger on defense, despite the fact that the other guy has actual combat experience during which he showed a good deal of real physical courage. George W. Bush’s “folksy, down-homey, Average Joe” image is what “resignates” with voters. And while that may make us feel good about him, and by extension about ourselves for voting for him, it’s a weak enough argument for voting for someone. If we thought about it, we’d realize that we should elect someone who is quite a bit above average, someone who will actually read the security briefings, someone who is able to outsmart our enemies instead of having to outmuscle them.
The culture of feeling may at least partially explain why so many Americans are abandoning moderate, mainstream churches for more conservative but more charismatic ones. The charismatic churches make you feel good about hating fags; the mainstream ones make you think about maybe why you shouldn’t. The charismatic churches make you feel saved; the old-line mainstream ones make you think about social justice and God’s call to be responsible for your fellow human beings. I suppose I’m not giving the charismatic churches a fair shake, but the emphasis they place on personal salvation being the only important thing implies a lot about how the culture of feeling has come to dominate American life.
If I were a neo-formalist aesthetic conservative, I’d blame Romanticism for all this, but that’s really giving artistic movements too much credit for forming public opinions. It’s more likely a combination of right-headed but wrongly implemented social programming in schools, pop-psychology, and, above all, advertising that leads us into the culture of feeling. Pop-psychology is sort of the charismatic Christianity of the secular set, and it also tends to overplay the role of the emotional life. It’s kind of a corruption of Freudianism: the therapist as personal savior. Problematically, it puts the onus for our relative places in the universe on our personal perceptions of our own happiness or success, or, at its most troubling, on our “effectiveness” as people. It treats emotional states as essentially mechanistic, able to be “fixed” through a series of ablutions or absolutions doled out by the PhDs in psychology as a priestly class.
Likewise, schools emphasize self esteem over intellectual accomplishment. This has, perhaps, done as much to denigrate education in the minds of kids as anything on MTV. Emotional states have become so much a concern to the K-12 set medicating children to just the right flavor is now the in thing to do, with 10 to 12 percent of children using Ritalin, according to a 1996 study. Real emotional health is a holistic concept involving more than just mood, but that has taken a back seat to the simple measure of immediate emotional state. Now, you’re not just supposed to do well in school, you’re supposed to feel good about it too.
But advertising has picked up and promulgated the concern with how we feel about things to an unprecedented level. Industrial production has managed to create such standardization and quality that the functional differences between, say, a $25 Timex made in China and a $2500 Tag Heuer made in Switzerland is pretty much nil. With most products being functionally the same, distinguishing between them must occur at an emotional rather than an intellectual level. Certainly the Maybach, with more luxury and standard features than a VW New Beetle is going to cost more. But levels of features are lifestyle choices. The differences between that $20,000 Beetle and a $20,000 Ford Mustang have little or nothing to do with the functioning of the car. It’s a marketing issue: who do you feel yourself more to be, a rough ‘n ready Mustang person or a cute ‘n cuddly Beetle driver? Certainly the materials and the construction of the Timex and the Tag differ, but they both do what a watch is supposed to do, tell time, equally well. Which one you choose depends somewhat on how much money you have, but much more on what image you’d like to project.
Advertisers feed our need for emotion. We need to feel good about our consumer choices since they’re all pretty much the same. However, it may just be our incredible success in the West at feeding and clothing ourselves, at keeping the rain off and the wolves at bay, that creates this need for emotion to begin with. Cut off by culture and distance and technology from our loved ones, forced to work in dehumanizing cubes with unfeeling machines, cyborgized as we drive our cars through traffic controlled by other machines, it is not all that surprising that we feel the need to feel. It’s little wonder, given this dearth, that emotion might seem the most important thing of all.
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