I do not think my feelings will change ... but at least I hope they will.

• Author: Puterbaugh, Dolores T.
• Position: Psychology

IT IS MAY in a presidential election year and, in the midst of what ought to be one of the most intellectually rich dialogues of our culture, we have mushy, if not soupy, babbling in which words that originally referred to the highest intellectual and moral values are reduced to mere slogans for a primitive, unformed, and uninformed restlessness of spirit. For the past several election cycles, hope is the word--yet, what is hope or any other particular virtue? From what can be discerned here from what passes for political discussion, hope has been demoted from one of the three theological virtues--which foster all others--to what now is a warm, fuzzy feeling. Hope is a cup of hot cocoa on a cold day, or a purring cat in your lap, or closing your eyes and making a wish before you blow out the candles.

I am a psychotherapist. One of the most challenging tasks in that field is helping people separate their thoughts from their feelings. It seems that most individuals cannot differentiate between the two. "I feel that it is unfair," one complains, oblivious to the fact that "unfair" is a judgment call based on ideas, not an emotion. "I love my wife, but I'm not 'in love' with her," says another, not discerning the difference between the nausea and dizziness of infatuation-feelings, to be sure--and the steadier attitude of long-term, committed love, which had better have some of its roots outside of the fickle, reptilian part of the brain from whence raw feelings spring. This is not semantics: it never is my intent to be mean, picky, or difficult by challenging people to use "thinking" words to describe cognitions and "feeling" words to describe emotions. However, it is critical to insight, self control, and motivation to be able to distinguish between "I think" and "I feel."

The cultural rejection of thinking in favor of feeling has been a rapid erosion at the hands of postmodernists. This anti-intellectualist movement (embraced by a number of intellectuals and a greater number of wanna-bes), born decades before, truly hit its stride in the 1960s. It merits a great deal more explication but, in the interest of brevity, we can summarize that postmodernism and the "deconstruction" of Western Civilization rejected much of logic and rational thought and instead took the position of "who am I to say?" towards everything. This is the position of the antagonists in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged (1957) and the inspiration for Theodore Dalrymple's brilliant 2007 counterargument to postmodernist thought, In Praise of Prejudice.

In an environment where intellectuals assert that nothing is definite or sure (thus negating their own assertion, but never mind), emotions were handed the higher ground as pure, honest expressions of the true self rather than impositions from a cold, rational, profit-driven society. Thus, we have several generations of adults in which at least a sizable minority, if not a majority, worship their emotions and demand that their feelings be treated with respect--and thus validated. It also has led to children asserting that their opinion (uninformed though it may be and based primarily on feelings) is as valid as mine (however informed mine may be on the particular topic at hand). Young and old alike, they discount any mental functions that might differentiate them from Clancy, my cat, whom I respect and validate, but only as a cat.

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Faith, hope, and charity are what...