Privilege is being able to make your feelings the basis of policy

At one point when I was living in Berkeley in a very shared space, and in which I was the only woman, I had a house-mate who could not be relied on to lock the front door. I was the only female in that space, and I was the only one upset about his failure to lock the front door. He kept saying that we weren’t really in any danger, by which he meant he didn’t feel threatened by an unlocked front door. Even though the very helpful person who was going around Berkeley spraying sidewalks with “a woman was raped here” with the date had sprayed a relatively recent date quite near our front door, he continued to insist I was being irrational.

I have to say that the other guys in the household could only be persuaded to be more careful about locking the door because I threw a fit, and they liked me. I don’t think they ever thought my perception of threat was rational.

And that is one thing that is very wrong about American public discourse in a nutshell.

Largely because of the rational/irrational split, Americans tend to frame beliefs as emotional or rational—assuming that there is a binary, or at least a zero-sum between the two. The more emotional you are, the less rational you are. If you have strong feelings about something, then you aren’t rational about it. That’s wrong, but even more wrong is the inference, that, if feeling strongly makes you irrational, then if you don’t particularly care about something, your position is rational.

And, therefore, that housemate, call him Joe, could sincerely believe that his position was rational, whereas mine was distorted by my feelings.

In fact, his position was grounded in feelings, more so than mine. I could provide evidence that leaving a front door unlocked was unsafe. He didn’t try to refute that evidence. His argument was there wasn’t a threat because he didn’t feel threatened. His argument was profoundly an argument about feelings. His feelings. And his argument was grounded in a sense that only his feelings mattered. The problem with his position wasn’t that it was grounded in feelings, but that he lived in a world in which only his feelings should be the basis of policy (locking the front door or not).

I once completely alienated a colleague in another department who wanted to be able to have a gun while teaching because he had feelings about someone coming into his classroom and fantasies about shooting them. But he posted an argument that people opposed to campus carry were irrationally afraid of guns, whereas his position was rational. His opponents’ position was grounded in feelings, he said, but his was grounded in a rational assessment of the situation. His feelings. I took issue with that (with considerable vehemence) because I am so fucking tired of people (like him) whose position is grounded in feelings and fantasies yet who condemn any critics as irrational. The problem with his position wasn’t that it was grounded in feelings, but that he lived in a world in which only his feelings mattered because he pushed them out of the realm of argument (feeling safe by having a gun while teaching). (He unfriended me, and hasn’t had me on a graduate student committee since. I mention this simply because it made no difference to me, but could to a faculty member more vulnerable.)

I wasn’t saying that his position was wrong because it was grounded in feelings, but that his irrationalizing of the opposition was demagogic. We all have feelings. He had feelings of threat, and those feelings fueled his policy commitments. He felt threatened by the idea of a shooter who would invade his classroom (whom he could shoot before that shooter sprayed the room). The problem with his argument was that he normalized his own feelings, and irrationalized the feelings of anyone who disagreed with him. It wasn’t what he argued that was a problem, or even how he argued, but that how he argued–from his feelings–wasn’t open to argument. I was saying that wanting to have a gun in a classroom is a position based in fear was, for him, a rational position but that people fear guns in classroom is a reason to dismiss the argument. And that was an irrational way to think about various positions on the issue.

I’m not saying that his irrational irrationalizing of people who disagreed with him means that his position about guns was therefore wrong and mine right. I’m saying that his ignoring how his own position was grounded in feelings, and his irrationalizing of the opposition, meant that his position was irrational. It was grounded in treating the same behavior—policy positions grounded in fear—differently, based purely on the basis of in- or out-group.

The way to make his position rational wasn’t for him to dismiss his fears and fantasies about a classroom shooter, but to put those fears and fantasies up to the same conditions of falsifiability as the people who feared a shoot-out of people who all thought someone else was the bad guy, students implicitly threatening faculty, or various other concerns. The way to make his position rational was to make his feelings just as rational and just as much up for argument as the ones he was demagogically dismissing as irrational.

Does that mean he was wrong about guns in classrooms? No. But it does mean that he was claiming a privileged place in public deliberation—his feelings are beyond consideration, but that the people who disagree with him have feelings mean their arguments can be dismissed. And that is the problem.

We all have policy commitments that come from our feelings. We are never in a situation in which one set of people have rational policy affiliations free of feelings, and the other is driven by feelings. That isn’t to say that feelings are some kind of bedrock of belief, or that feelings are beyond argument, or that all feelings are equally valid. Not all feelings should be the basis of policy.

Imagine that I feel threatened by seeing a gopher snake. (By the way, I am.) I grew up in an area in which, for reasons I still don’t understand, the local fire department engaged in tremendous fear-mongering about rattlesnakes. Every year, they’d come to the elementary school and talk about the dangers of rattlesnakes. I still remember their saying you should never jump off a rock, since a rattlesnake might be under it. If you believed them, then rattlesnakes were not only everywhere, but spent all their time trying to bit people. I believed them.

Gopher snakes look like rattlesnakes, and a gopher snake on dry leaves can do a damn good impression of a rattlesnake rattling. I remain really bad at snake identification, and so I feel very threatened when I see a gopher snake (or, in Texas, a rat snake).

That I feel threatened by gopher snakes doesn’t mean gopher snakes are a threat.

Elsewhere, I argued that people advocated the mass incarceration of Americans of Japanese ancestry because those advocates confused their feeling threatened by Americans of Japanese ancestry with those people being a threat.

Feelings are judgments. They are assessments of threat, trustworthiness, credibility. And feelings have evidence, and therefore can be changed, if people are 1) willing to consider why we believe what we do, and 2) we are willing to admit that our feelings do not constitute reality. I feel threatened by gopher and rat snakes. I probably always will. But I can consult a good guide to snake identification and determine that this snake is not a rattlesnake. I might still feel threatened by the snake, and that’s fine. What matters is that I do not advocate a policy–kill the snake–grounded in feelings that are about me, and not about the snake.

Politics is about feelings, and feelings are judgments, and policies are grounded in judgments, and policies should be open to falsification. My judgment about gopher snakes is falsifiable and false, and therefore shouldn’t be the basis of policy.[1] That some people feel threatened by interactions with police is a judgment, and open to falsification, and supported by data. That some people feel threatened by transgender people, immigrants exactly like the people from whom they’re descended, angry women, sex workers, the liberal elite, being asked to wear a mask, and so on—are those instances of people feeling threatened, or certain groups being threats? And we answer that question by asking whether the feeling of threat can be articulated as a falsifiable claim, and then look at the data that might falsify it.

We feel threatened by all sorts of things. But, if people want their personal hobgoblins to be the basis of policy, then we need to argue about whether our fears are rational (can we talked out of them, is the evidence we use to support them a kind we would consider good if it showed we were wrong, and so on).

If our feelings can’t be rationally defended, that doesn’t mean we aren’t allowed to have them, or that we’re bad for having them. I can spend my whole life feeling threatened by gopher snakes, even if I can’t make a rational argument for their being threats. But that I feel threatened by gopher snakes shouldn’t mean I’m allowed to pass laws exterminating them.

The politics of irrational feelings is always a politics of privilege. The people with political power can make their rationally indefensible feelings the basis of politics by simply appealing to the feelings shared by others in power—fear of Democrats, Black voters, immigrants, accurate information about climate change, fairness in politics.

If we want a well-functioning democracy, then we need one in which we all argue about policies, and that means arguing about our policy commitments—i.e., our feelings. And it has to be a world in which we are open to feeling differently, or, at least, acknowledging the others feeling differently might be reasonable.

Feeling unconcerned about an intruder is not inherently more rational than feeling concerned about one.

[1] Were I to say that rattlesnakes are sometimes pretending to be gopher snakes, then my position would be non-falsifiable, and not an appropriate basis for policy.