Ideas Matter: Culture Wars: then and now, episode 7: Emotion and Reason

Under the seemingly all-encompassing umbrella of ‘mental health’,
the public sphere appears saturated with claims about emotional
damage. This lecture explores such claims of emotional harm and
analyses the conversation-stopping effect of dismissing the
rational human subject and the degeneration of public debate into
never-ending culture wars.


LECTURER Dr Ashley Frawley – senior lecturer in public health,
policy, and social sciences at the University of Swansea; author,
Semiotics of Happiness: rhetorical beginnings of a public problem


TALKING POINTS IN THIS PODCAST • The rise of new emotional
problems and emotional solutions to existing problems. •
Underlying their rise and fall is a belief that human
subjectivity, conceived of as defective psychology, ultimately
underlies most social problems. • Diminished views of
subjectivity are partially rooted in a perceived gap between
Enlightenment beliefs in the rational, free-willing subject and
the apparent failure of these ideals to exist in practice. •
Human nature is conditioned by the real possibilities of a given
time period and social formation. It is not that human beings are
by their nature irrational, but the possibility of a society
governed by human rationality emerged at a time when the
conditions for the full exercise of that rationality did not
exist. • Instead of trying to understand social conditions and
their constraints on human freedom and rationality, we have
jettisoned freedom and rationality altogether.


BIBLIOGRAPHY Resilience: The Governance of Complexity by David
Chandler, Routledge, 2014


The Death of the Subject Explained by James Heartfield, School of
Cultural Studies, Sheffield Hallam University, 2006


The Meaning of Race by Kenan Malik, Palgrave, 1996


THE ACADEMY 2019 In the context of today’s instrumental
approaches to knowledge, The Academy summer school is a modest
attempt to demonstrate the value of scholarship, and of the worth
of the university as a place of free enquiry dedicated to the
pursuit of truth.


IDEAS MATTER PODCAST Ideas Matter is a podcast that takes the
most important issues of our times and explores the ideas and
intellectual trends that have shaped where we are today.


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