Before we had feelings

 The most banal question asked by sports reporters on television goes something like this: “Jim, you have just scored the winning goal in the Cup Final/won the Olympic marathon gold medal/come first in the Tour de France, how do you feel?” This is lazy journalism, but it also illustrates a wider trend: a belief that what matters most is the sportsman’s immediate emotional response, rather than any reflection on the tactics they used to secure victory, the mistakes they made, or  the significance of the victory for their team. A similar primacy is given to ‘feelings’ in some news programmes, particularly those in which the newsreaders sit on sofas rather than behind desks. Great events are presented in terms of the emotions of those that have experienced them, rather than an analysis of why these events occurred and what their occurrence means for the future.

This emphasis on ‘feelings’ is something that has occurred in my lifetime, dating from the early 1970s. I remember a time when no-one was asked how they felt, and the resulting confusion some people experienced when they were first asked this question. Trying to explain this increasing dominance of ‘feelings’ over analysis is difficult, but one factor may be change in the nature of work and our relationship to the material world. When I was young, most people’s work was with material goods, doing things like welding, assembling products, digging coal, cooking or laundering clothes. In work of this kind, success or failure, competence or incompetence, was usually evident immediately. Most workplaces were dominated by men, and had the kind of boisterous and critical banter characteristic of much of male society.

But work with things has been increasingly replaced by a more abstract kind of work, in which groups of people collaborate to provide services to other members of the public, or design and market goods which are produced far away. There are many more women in the workplace, and female society seems to be characterised by mutual support and a particular concern (at most times) to avoid hurtful remarks. In workplaces of this kind, success or failure is less easy to observe, and it becomes harder for people to understand how the organisation as a whole functions and generates its outputs. In such circumstances, people are judged by the what they say and how they respond emotionally, rather than by what they achieve.

I remember this transition happening in my own life. After several short-term manual jobs while a student, I eventually became a social worker. Most of my colleagues were women, although men were usually in charge. I realised that I had moved into a very different workplace culture, in which there seemed to me to be acute sensitivity to almost anything anyone said. There were few words of criticism, but that meant that there was little opportunity to learn what mistakes were being made and what could be done better. But more important was the absence of analysis. Social work existed in a world without evidence or even data. We had no statistics on the types of problems experienced by our clients, no results from research about the most appropriate ways of responding to them, and no data about whether our efforts were successful or not. Almost all our interviews with clients were conducted individually and in private, so there was no opportunity to observe how others performed in their work. In the absence of relevant information, analysis would have been pointless because there was nothing to analyse, except the emotional reactions of individual clients. We worked in a world of feelings without meaning.