Rules Of The Game #3: Feelings Change

[koganbot]

Rules Of The Game #3: Feelings Change

Key sentence: "What's dangerous here is that feelings seem to be incontrovertible."

Comments always welcome, though attempts to post comments at the Las Vegas Weekly sometimes go through, sometimes don't, so you might want to also post any comments here that you try to make there, to ensure I see them.

EDIT: Here are links to all but three of my other Rules Of The Game columns (LVW's search results for "Rules of the Game"). Links for the other three (which for some reason didn't get "Rules Of The Game" in their titles), are here: #4, #5, and #8.

UPDATE: I've got all the links here now:

http://koganbot.livejournal.com/179531.html

Comments

[koganbot]

I know very little about Japan, and what I believe about Japan is probably very stereotyped and also simplistic or incorrect or obsolete. But in one way what you say here is very surprising to me and in another way not at all.

The surprise for me is that I tend to associate an emphasis on feelings with individualism and with an emphasis on personal identity, whereas the clichés about Japan are that it emphasizes group over individual identity and that it is more hierarchical so emphasizes people's status in relation to each other. Back in my New York days I had a psychotherapist who was a Japanophile and loved visiting but said that one disagreement she had with her Japanese peers is that Japanese had no word for "identity," at least not one that matched up with western psychology's use of the term. (E.g., think of Ashlee Simpson (whose dad had been an adolescent psychologist as well as a Baptist minister), telling Jessica, "Oh I love you now/'Cause now I realize/That it's safe outside to come alive/In my identity.") The thing about feelings is that they seem individual, idiosyncratic, so if they're considered incontrovertible then the individual shouldn't have to modify them on behalf of the good of the group, or subordinate them.

Where it's not a surprise is that another supposed Japanese trait is to make decisions based on consensus. "Consensus" doesn't mean that everyone agrees 100% in the decision but that everyone endorses the decision and feels that he or she has been taken account in it - so there are no clear winners or losers. Now feelings about a song aren't usually a matter for group decision, but my point here would be that an emphasis on feelings is a way to stop conversations and call off arguments. This can be used against someone, as if to say, "Those are your feelings, and I respect that, but since they're only your feelings they have no jurisdiction or sway over anything else." Or this can be used to defend oneself: "These are my feelings and therefore you can have no argument against them." So to emphasize feelings can be a way to amiably agree to disagree, or at least to agree to disagree in a way that has no clear winners or losers.

In challenging the idea that feelings are incontrovertible, I'm taking away a tool that allows people to shut off argument. Of course, there can be good reasons to shut off argument, if you think the issue is a nonissue or that it's relatively unimportant or that it's important but not in this particular context or that the destructiveness of the argument outweighs its benefits or there are more pressing matters, etc. But "feelings are incontrovertible" is not itself a good reason, and it can be a substitute for stating one's actual reasons, or even figuring out what they are. (On the other hand, strategically it can be better to say to someone, "Well, I can't argue with your feelings, even though I feel differently" rather than "I think you're so stupid that there's no point in continuing this discussion.")

But then, in my column I'm not sure if I'm ready to make the leap to how we explain and justify our taste or if instead I want to stay a bit longer with where taste comes from and how come it clusters in social groups. (But then, when I do get to talking about how we justify our tastes, I'll point out that we sometimes alter our tastes - our feelings! - to try and align them with our justifications. So the column's subject matter should keep looping back in on itself.)