Turn on any English language CBC programme as it churns out the breathless news of the day, and you will hear the same fundamental question: ‘how do you feel about such and such event?’ – not: ‘what do you think?’ The difference is telling, and it is evident our public broadcaster is still afflicted by aspects of Trudeau-era Romanticism. Here, for the benefit of the reader, is a succinct analysis of the hidden assumptions – and shortcomings - behind the idea that everyone is equal in feeling:
The phrase equal feeling is at the root of the
matter. Man is by nature good. He is by nature the equal of his fellow men;
that is to say, equality of men is really an equality of goodness. Now men have come to differ obviously in outward
circumstances, in wealth and power. That
in which they still preserve a rough sort of equality is feeling. Our desires are surely more nearly common
than anything else about us. If then we
assume that feeling, instinct, desire, are in themselves good, we have brought
equality into the practical world. We
have gained a powerful means of persuading people that inequality is not in the
nature of man. We have put inequality,
and the whole problem of evil, into the accident of things; that is, into our
environment. A little freewill can work
wonders with environment. We have solved
the problem of evil, and with that one assumption – that man’s feelings are
naturally good. That men have similar feelings
observation shows. Therefore men have similar
goodness. Hence something unnatural,
something foreign to man’s real self, has produced badness and inequality among
men.[1]
[1]
Crane Brinton, The Political Ideas of the English Romanticists (London: Oxford
University Press, 1926), p. 25.
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