Feeling as power

In last week’s column I had written about the flooding as it pertained to my spate of boredom. I was at the time questioning this feeling in the wake of other people’s pain and misery. A friend, having read the piece during the week commented and thus began for us, a conversation that I am certain will continue over the week as we throw the ideas back and forth. There was, however, to my mind a crucial point in our exchange. Speaking about the outpouring of assistance that came in the immediate aftermath of the flooding, she noted:

“The efforts may continue but, in a sense, the urgency and momentum fades.”

“Exactly!” I replied, “I think it’s the reason we don’t have the staying power as a society to work consistently towards change. Urgency fades quickly and we fall back into old habits.”

“Yes because our engagement with empathy is very short,” she replied thoughtfully.

It was a beautiful statement! I could not have expressed it better.

“You were speaking about people’s inability to think,” she said in that thoughtful, measured way that characterises her speech, as we sat that evening over cups of tea, “And while you were talking I thought, I don’t think the issue is thinking, I think it’s feeling.”

Writer Tim Parks in conversation with philosopher and robotics engineer Riccardo Manzotti in The Challenge of Consciousness (New York Review of Books, November 21, 2016), asked about the nature of consciousness.

R Manzotti: “For most people ‘consciousness’ will have various meanings and include awareness, self-awareness, thinking in language. But for philosophers and neuroscientists the crucial meaning is that of feeling something, having a feeling you might say, or an experience. An easy way to think about it would be pain. Instinctively we all agree that feeling a pain is something. It’s an experience…experience is always something that we feel.”

My friend was right. It was feeling. I had been speaking about it in several columns over the year in relation to our people’s sense of citizenship and nationalism but I don’t believe that I had expressed it forcefully or even focused squarely on how crucial feeling and empathy were to the process of becoming a nation. Her words brought the idea into focus in a more profound and direct way. I had made general comments that if people didn’t feel a sense of belonging, then there was only so much that we could accomplish. Nationalism was an abstract idea, so was patriotism. They were imported ideas from societies that had a history of experiences that fostered the formation of such ideas. On a very surface level we can look in on countries like America or the UK for instance and ask the question, “Why is there a strong sense of nationalism here? Why is that necessary or why was it necessary to have cultivated it?” A simple possible answer may be “economic power,” or in the case of British colonialism, “expansion of empire” as well. Here in Trinidad, our experience has fostered a different sense of nationality. We unite many times around a regional identity – the West Indies in an activity like cricket, for instance, which is perhaps the one activity that pits us against the world in a tangible way. We experience cricket in an emotional way. It is not an abstract idea with which we cannot connect. And that makes the difference in our experience of belonging. How do we bring that home, to our island?

How do we create a feeling of belonging a deeply rooted sense of loyalty towards each other? Is it also linked to our feelings of safety?

Safety not only deals with crime, but it is also economic and political.

I ask some questions and leave the thought for the reader to begin unravelling. Do we, as a people, feel safe under any administration? Do we feel that we shall be cared for by our representatives? Do we as a people, care for ourselves? Perhaps the last question should come first given that our concern for ourselves as whole, generally speaking, governs the way we vote. It is also linked to how we feel about our place as citizens and our sense of loyalty towards work, nation and others. We are at a point where as far as political parties go, we supposedly have no other options. Our question then becomes – How do we create an option? What systems do we require to ensure that our needs as citizens are met?

Looking after ourselves is partly our responsibility, not solely that of the administration and we can insist on this as a people. But first, how do we come to that point where we feel that we have this power, this right and the motivation to push for change?

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"Feeling as power"

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