When Feelings Became Facts: Rousseau, Burke, & Today’s Outrage Culture
by Steven Kessler, The Imaginative Conservative:
Edmund Burke understood that the individual’s own natural reasoning would never be as deep or profound as the wisdom of our ancestors, bequeathed to us through tradition and custom. He believed that looking inwards, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau advocated, would precipitate our demise…
On our college campuses, the clashes between liberals and conservatives have grown hostile. Liberal college students are habitually determined to prevent conservatives from speaking on campus by any means necessary, violence included.
One rationale that liberals have for this behavior is predicated on their emotional dispositions. Conservative political pundits will often use the phrase, “my facts don’t care about your feelings.” What the pundits mean by this phrase is that using one’s feelings and emotions as a basis for policy and action is fallacious. Our feelings can mislead us, our passions can subdue our rationality, and the truth does not care how it makes us feel.
The frequency of “feelings as facts” in the public discourse can lead someone to believe it is a formal ideological position. While it is not formally taught as one, those familiar with the philosophical and ideological origins of liberalism believe this idea is sewn into the very fabric of liberalism as an ideology.
To understand when feelings became the basis of facts, we must be conversant with the work and thought of the patron-saint and godfather of liberalism, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau’s ideology contains the subtleties and nuances involved in the process of making a person’s feelings the basis of facts. The most important starting point is Rousseau’s belief in the natural goodness of man. From his assumptions about the natural goodness of man, all his other premises and conclusions emanate. Rousseau declared,
The fundamental principle of all morality, upon which I have reasoned in all my writings and which I developed with all the clarity of which I am capable is that man is a being who is naturally good, loving justice and order; that there is no original perversity in the human heart, and the first movements of nature are always good.[1]
Related Posts
Tags
Share This
