All this stuff that is being shoved at us
Tony Blair still knows who women are.
When he was leader, there were no arguments about sex and gender, trans rights and toppling statues. Starmer will have to go into battle over the culture wars, he says. “The polls might say voters don’t care but if you dig a little deeper, what they are really saying is we don’t like all this stuff that is being shoved at us.”
I assume he is going to cite the third way again, but Blair comes down firmly on the side of the author JK Rowling. “They [voters] don’t want a situation where women can’t talk about being women. I have this conversation quite often with Labour people and I know their inclination is to walk round this issue, but I am telling you to go right into it and resolve it in a way that makes it absolutely clear where you stand. That is how to shut down the Tories on it.”
He is risking the ire of the trans lobby now. “Of course, we shouldn’t be transphobic and we should have equal rights for trans people. But equal rights doesn’t mean you can’t use the phrase ‘pregnant woman’. If you went to Sedgefield and had that conservation, they would think you were bonkers.” The younger generation, he admits, think differently. “Leo always says to me, ‘Don’t go there, Dad. There are feelings and there are facts, but right now feelings are more important.’ ”
It depends on what the feelings are, and anyway the feelings are about the facts – there is no crisp division between them. Feelings of rage that women will keep insisting on their own rights are not more important than facts about who is and who is not a woman. To put it another way: trans people aren’t the only people with feelings, women have some too, and we have very strong feelings about being disappeared by human rights organizations.
But he would never have therapy, he told me two years ago. “I just think if you’re not careful you get obsessed with introspection and it’s also because, in the work I do now, when I go and visit these countries where kids will be growing up in a family where at least one of the siblings has died of a childhood disease and the parents are scraping money together and living day by day, you kind of think the West’s desire to be endlessly self-absorbed is not very healthy.”
Yes you kind of do. And of course the two are deeply intertwined. The whole idea of being in the “wrong body,” of literally being the sex you’re not, requires a huge substructure of self-obsession to hold it up. There’s a lot to be said for just taking some things as written and doing something else with your life.
And you can either help raise the general level of happiness, or try to drag everyone else down to your own level of misery, on the basis of the old saw that ‘misery loves company.’ It would appear to me that the latter course is chosen all too often, and by far too many.
“There are feelings and there are facts, but right now feelings are more important. ”
That in a nutshell has been the recipe for tyranny, oppression, and genocide throughout human history.
Facts are what matters most. Facts should be what drives how we deal with feelings not the other way around. Allowing people to surround themselves in bubbles of skewed perception is killing us.
We need both. Feelings do matter. If they didn’t, nothing would matter – not violations of rights, not tragedy and loss, not genocide, not anything. But yes, we need facts too, including fact-checks on the feelings.
What can you have feelings about except for facts? If you tell me my cat has been run over, I am very upset. If afterwards I find that he wasn’t run over, and that he’s alive and healthy, I am happy. In ordinary life we establish the fact before having the feeling.
There used to be a mantra that education was about how to think, not about learning facts, which seemed to me like eating without food.
Well it is possible to have feelings that have no “about” to them. Clinical depression is that way, and transient moods can be that way. But feelings that matter mostly have some content.
There are lots of feelings about opinions. And about appearances. Whether those can be considered to refer to facts (or perceived facts) about those opinions or appearances, I don’t know.
@OB, Sackbut – okay, fair enough.
Which in many cases has been scrapped for validating feelings.
But one thing I find all the time: my students come to class with little to no knowledge about facts, and often believing facts are different for everyone depending on what they believe is real. I cannot teach them to think until I teach them how to recognize facts. Also, I have to teach them facts, in many cases facts they should have learned long before college.
@ iknklast #8
I processed that mantra to mean that education was not *merely* or only about rote memorization of facts; it’s possible to think about facts and to draw conclusions from the facts. My first history class in college taught me that there are different ways to interpret historical facts, and that there could be competing views about what was important in history, or even different ideas about what actually happened.
iknklast:
To which I would add that the history of science (vis a vis say, the history of religion) shows why we should base ourselves always always in empiricism, while remembering never to assume that our own reality is necessarily anyone else’s.
Highly relevant here and well worth showing is Akira Kurosawa’s 1951 film Rashomon‘ available these days on DVD; probably online (Netflix etc ?) as well.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/1999/aug/20/guardianobituaries2