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Samizdata slogan of the day

· Slogans & Quotations

Thinking has been given a bad press. Feeling did not devise a law of gravity: thinking did.
– Madsen Pirie, quoted in a Guardian article on ’emotional literacy’

August 25th, 2003 |

14 comments to Samizdata slogan of the day

  • S. Weasel
    August 25, 2003 at 7:38 pm

    Wow. I read the article and I thought it was a piss take at first. But these people are serious.

    It always matters that we are sufficiently in touch with our own emotions to be in touch with those of others.

    Have you ever known anyone in touch with his or her emotions that could get past the obsession with his or her emotions sufficiently to pay a moment’s attention to anyone else’s emotions?

  • Guessedworker
    August 25, 2003 at 8:21 pm

    No clearer distinction could there be between the usual requirement for intellectual direction and coherence in government and New Labour. Antidote simply MUST sweep all the Party doubters of their feet and into a glorious miasma of excruciatingly embarrassing, liberal empathy. Please, please, please let them proclaim their newfound psycho-babble politic to the people. Imagine the Manifesto cliches: “The world is just a great, big, inclusive onion” … “He ain’t heavy, he’s my Minister Without Portfolio” … “New Labour loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah”

    Things can only get wetter.

  • R.C. Dean
    August 25, 2003 at 8:25 pm

    Ah, the contemporary cult of feeling. So many modern ills are traceable, at least in part to this repellent oddity of modern culture.

    In part, it is a necessary part of the PC, multi-culti attack on rationality and enlightenment. If you are going to drag down logic and reason, you had better have something to put in their place.

    In part, it is a luxury of people who are not challenged to produce tangible results. Is it any wonder that the redoubts of the cult of emotion are found in academia, the government, and consultancies?

    Among its more noxious manifestations is the utter corruption of TV coverage of the Olympics, which features barely 10 minutes of competition per hour, what with all the soft-focus tear-jerkery going on. The language, sadly, is also infected. Many people now say “I feel” what they really mean is “I think.” The schools, in their desperate evasions of accountability, also rely on the cult of emotion to disguise their utter inability to communicate facts and habits of thinking – education these days is generally a matter of pacifying students and making them feel good about themselves.

    Bah.

  • Brian Micklethwait
    August 25, 2003 at 9:09 pm

    Alex

    What an amazing article.

    Haven’t heard much about this since then though. luckily for the government.

    Emotional literacy as a political issue. Bloody hell.

    I think this is the kind of thing that truly dominant political parties do. They think they can do anything.

    Hey, I know, let’s re-engineer their souls. They’ll vote for that.

  • Johan
    August 25, 2003 at 9:54 pm

    S. Weasel, spot on there. Focusing on your emotions won’t help you a bit in feeling connected to how others feel. Humans are not all the same, so how can you set up universal rules to how everyone is feeling? Hint: collectivist beliefs are helpful…

  • Dishman
    August 26, 2003 at 12:46 am

    Now The State wants to take nanny people’s emotions?
    How big a step is it from that to thoughtcrime?

  • Guy Herbert
    August 26, 2003 at 5:57 am

    There’s a corrollary: The stronger you feel about something, the more emotive the issue, the more important it is to stop and think rationally about it. Otherwise the herd-poison has dominion.

  • Richard Cook
    August 26, 2003 at 10:49 am

    This really makes you want to toss in the towel.

  • Rob
    August 26, 2003 at 11:33 am

    What with this and let-the-government-help-you-with-your-emotional-well-being-and-relationship-problems Connexions, something is definitely up.

  • Dave Farrell
    August 26, 2003 at 12:19 pm

    Er, thinking didn’t devise a law of gravity. It just resulted in finding out what it was. Think, boy, think!

  • Rob Read
    August 26, 2003 at 2:30 pm

    Reading the Guardian article has got me in touch with my emotions! I now feel a profound rage and fear of these lunatics currently imposing themselves of us. My rational thoughts are “Give me a gun NOW! I need to defend myself from these forced state-communities”.

  • JSAllison
    August 26, 2003 at 3:15 pm

    There was a novel done in the fifties I believe, turned into a movie starring Tony Curtis, about a military asylum (Captain Newman, M.D.) where he was instructed to use the phrase ‘I feel…’ because the inmates would find that construction difficult to argue against where saying I think, I believe, I know would set off arguments lasting hours.

    Those who do not know film, are condemned to relive forgotten movies…

  • lucklucky
    August 26, 2003 at 3:29 pm

    “Reading the Guardian article has got me in touch with my emotions! I now feel a profound rage and fear of these lunatics currently imposing themselves of us. My rational thoughts are “Give me a gun NOW! I need to defend myself from these forced state-communities”.

    hehe Rob how true!!

    The Nobel peace winner José Ramos-Horta
    just wrote a article in a Australian newspaper supporting death penalty to terrorists that blasted UN building in Baghdad (Sergio Viera de Mello was the UN head in Timor at time of independence in 90´s).

  • Rob Read
    August 26, 2003 at 4:00 pm

    I am personally against the death penalty. It seems such a let off for the criminal.

    Then again the only Prison reform I’m interested in is “how can prison hold more prisoners, more cheaply”

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