The absolutism of feelings and the culture of victimhood

The mantra of our age:

Stop Saying ‘I Feel Like’ - The New York Times

The imperfect data that linguists have collected indicates that "I feel like" became more common toward the end of the last century. In North American English, it seems to have become a synonym for "I think" or "I believe" only in the last decade or so. Languages constantly evolve, and curmudgeons like me are always taking umbrage at some new idiom. But make no mistake: "I feel like" is not a harmless tic. George Orwell put the point simply: "If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought." The phrase says a great deal about our muddled ideas about reason, emotion and argument -a muddle that has political consequences.

 

Natasha Pangarkar, a senior at Williams College, hears "I feel like in the classroom on a daily basis," she said. "When you use the phrase I feel like, it gives you an out. You're not stating a fact so much as giving an opinion," she told me. "It's an effort to make our ideas more palatable to the other person." ...

 

This linguistic hedging is particularly common at universities, where calls for trigger warnings and safe spaces may have eroded students' inclination to assert or argue. It is safer to merely "feel." 

Bradley Campbell, a sociologist at California State University, Los Angeles, was an author of an article about the shift on many campuses from a "culture of dignity," which celebrates free speech, to a "culture of victimhood" marked by the assumption that "people are so fragile that they can't hear something offensive," he told me.

 

Yet here is the paradox: "I feel like" masquerades as a humble conversational offering, an invitation to share your feelings, too but the phrase is an absolutist trump card. It halts argument in its tracks. When people cite feelings or personal experience, you can't really refute them with logic, because that would imply they didn't have that experience, or their experience is less valid," Ms Chai told me.

 

"It's a way of deflecting, avoiding full engagement with another person or group, Elisabeth Lasch Quinn, a historian at Syracuse University, said, "because it puts a shield up immediately. You cannot disagree." 

This is the inevitable end point of the ruins of the Meathead Generation, in which for the present generation "By far the most common basis for moral decision-making was doing whatever feels right or comfortable in a situation. Nearly four out of ten teens (38%) and three out of ten adults (31%) described that as their primary consideration." 

As for the culture of victimhood, when assertions are based on feelings rather than verifiable truths, then all relationships ultimately and pretty quickly devolve into assertions of power. 

No wonder that college campuses have become the main place "where victimhood is the way you assert your will to power."

... our society is shot through with Nietzschean ressentiment. Today it is a great sin on college campuses — and elsewhere! — to make anyone other than the “privileged” feel uncomfortable, challenged, or otherwise psychologically threatened by the use of the wrong words or concepts.

Oppressors insist on facts and even worse, insist that there is such a thing as objective, verifiable truth. But that's a "privileged" point of view, isn't it?