The dark side of dialogue

"Search your feelings. You know it to be true."—Darth Vader, “The Empire Strikes Back”

In this epic scene, Darth Vader convinces Luke Skywalker of their kinship by compelling Luke to trust his feelings and sense-experience. What strikes me most about this line is not the classic plot twist that it forms but how its message embodies our culture. Feeling is used everywhere, as both a tool to find answers and a mine to discover truth. This raises a very pertinent question, which is, “Where should we look to understand the problems of our world, and what is the nature of truth?”

Often when we have an opinion, we are inclined to say, “I feel that, fill-in-the-blank.” Our culture prescribes this as a humbler and less domineering way to state a thought. There is nothing inherently wrong with feeling; but if we are to grasp our culture, we need to understand what our language really means. If one says, “I think,” he or she is posing that the following opinion is rationally accessible to everyone. But to say, “I feel,” suggests exactly the opposite. For what is felt is not open to all, but only those who identify with that same feeling.

Yet use of feeling as a tool to navigate the world and attain understanding has also transcended our society and politics. Senator and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has famously adopted his campaign slogan from the twitter hashtag #FeeltheBern. The very title of the perennially renowned “Me Too Monologues” at Duke reflects the concept of feeling, as if adapted from the statement, “I too feel that way and/or have experienced that.” This reflects a deep human need for empathy.

Whether or not we confront it, a substantial part of Duke students’ lives is driven by pain that is seasonal and continuous. Even on Duke’s isolated campus, it seems that every semester an event inflicts emotional wounds on a large part of the student body. Our campus copes by creating “safe spaces” for dialogue—places where people can hide in their feelings in the refuge of their experiences, away from all the sharp edges in the world.

Accordingly, the atmosphere of dialogue here at Duke is designed around the sharing of experiences. The basic premise of many dialogue sessions at Duke is that if Person X fully feels the soundness of Person Y’s experiences, then Person X will understand Person Y’s point of view and the disagreements and misunderstandings will dissolve. This has generated an entire culture of “just listening” to solve rifts. It actually functions in a very similar manner to Darth Vader’s encounter with Luke Skywalker. For when Darth Vader related his experience of fatherhood to Luke, Luke initially refused to accept it. But when Luke trusted his feelings, he found the truth about his father in them.

The problem with Duke’s atmosphere of dialogue is that the Star Wars model doesn’t work in this world. Duke has a very ethnically, culturally, religiously, socially and politically diverse body of students, possibly more so than any other elite academic school in America. Different narratives and worldviews are everywhere, which translates to feelings and experiences being opposed to one another rather than in sync. If everyone’s feelings and experiences are right, then the particular term “right” becomes meaningless. On the other hand, if there truly is a meaningful “right,” then people’s internal senses cannot all be relied upon as a source of truth.

We might wonder, “If we cannot use our feelings and experiences as our guides, then what can we trust?” Returning to the problem of pain on our campus, we must ask ourselves whether this situational pain is merely an undesirable conditional discomfort or whether it arose from an unjust act. If the latter is the case, the very notion of justice requires a moral law that would make such an action actually wrong at a level that transcends matter. Only then would morality not depend on time or culture or subjective personal preference, but an objective reference point—a Truth—that is alone trustworthy.