JANE AUSTEN WAS just twenty-­one years old when she wrote her first novel, Sense and Sensibility. Today, we understand her works as more than domestic comedies – they’re also acute reflections on her times. By 1811, when Sense and Sensibility was published, the many radical excesses and violent upheavals of the French Revolution had revealed just how badly things go wrong in politics, society and even everyday life when self-­oriented romantic sensibility is allowed to overwhelm Enlightenment sense.

Austen’s novel considers this problem through a tale of two sisters: commonsense, upright Elinor and her younger, more passionate and imaginative sister, Marianne, who is making some poor choices in the romance department. At stake for both women are conservative interests such as security, status and duty, but also the prospect of marital trust and long-­term contentment. The novel weighs up the proper balance between head and heart, judgement and spontaneity, reason and feeling. When Marianne protests against the crude insensitivity of those around her with her own spontaneous acts of rudeness, Elinor, Jane Austen’s literary proxy, quietly steps in to restore civility. Sensibility loves drama, but sense requires negotiating an accommodation between all parties that allows their small corner of society to go on.

Inevitably, sense wins out over sensibility, although not without a tinge of regret. As soon as seventeen-year-­old Marianne recovers from her entanglement with the weak but appealing Willoughby, she is briskly married off to solid, dull, older Colonel Brandon. We readers can’t help but sigh at this compromise and the mediocre respectability of poor Marianne’s future. But Jane Austen never shied away from reality or necessity.

Today, we tend to notice sense mostly by its absence in public and even private discourse. Sensibility is clearly in the ascendant, with personal feelings, beliefs, memories and intuitions elevated above reasoned argument, awareness of consequences and intellectual consistency.

In fact, it could be argued the great panorama of the public realm and our communal life is fast shrinking to the scale of the self-­idealising, self-­romanticising, self-­centred individual. The personal increasingly comes before the societal, and the unique and particular is raised above the universal. A feeling of persecution is an additional badge of honour, evidence of emotional refinement.

Jane Austen would not approve.

THE CONTEST BETWEEN Enlightenment and romanticism, between sense and sensibility, has been with us in one form or another since Aristotle and Plato.

In 1508 Raphael painted a fresco known as The School of Athens for the library of Pope Julius II in Rome: it’s an imaginary group portrait of history’s greatest philosophers and scientists. The viewer’s eyes are irresistibly drawn to history’s big two philosophers in the centre of the fresco. The empiricist Aristotle holds his hand out palm-­down as if to honour – or take the measure of – the solid materials of life on Earth. Next to Aristotle stands his former teacher, the elder statesman Plato, whose grand old hand points up and away from Earth-­bound matters towards ideal forms and the perfect society.

Aristotle believed that virtue of character was expressed in daily life by putting together the right feelings with the right actions, ‘at the right times, about the right things, towards the right people, for the right end, and in the right way’. His doctrine of ‘the mean’ – that is, neither excess nor deficiency – can be read as an argument for that classical Greek virtue of proportion. Aristotle had his gripes about Athenian democracy, much as we do about ours today. But his body of work always encourages us to conduct our lives in a sane, balanced and inquiring spirit as part of shared civic life. In Athens today you can still see the large open theatre on the lower slope of the Acropolis hill where Athenians enjoyed uncensored entertainment. This was as much a part of Athenian democracy as the Parthenon and the nearby Pnyx, where the first democracy conducted its democratic deliberations.

Plato, on the other hand, opposed Athenian democracy and cultivated a group of aristocratic young followers who felt the same way. He talked up the Spartan model: a system based on a slave class of ‘helots’, the separation of boys aged seven from their families for education by the state, and leadership via two kings advised by a council of elders. Plato may have imagined a transcendent God above all the other gods. He certainly believed the ideal society on Earth would be ruled over by a single ‘benign’ philosopher king who would take care of all the hard work of thinking and deliberation that devolves to the people in democratic societies and their assemblies. Plato was so committed to this ideal that he made the rough sea voyage to Sicily to offer his services as consigliere to Dionysius I, the tyrant of Syracuse. The experiment was not a success. As soon as Plato offered a helpful critique of the leader’s morals, Dionysius took offence and sold him into slavery. Plato’s friends had to ransom him back to Greece.

THE GODFATHER OF modern romantic sensibility is Jean-­Jacques Rousseau. He was the prophet of modern virtues such as authenticity, vulnerability, empathy and faux-­humble self-­exposure. His life was the very paradigm of the modern quest for self-­acceptance, self-­love, individual uniqueness and a personal experience of reality.

Rousseau begins his posthumously published Confessions of 1782 with this startling declaration: ‘I have resolved on an enterprise which has no precedent and which, once complete, will have no imitator. My purpose is to display to my kind a portrait in every way true to nature, and the man I shall portray will be myself.’ Rousseau here inaugurates authenticity as the modern meta-­virtue and celebrates a life built around an impassioned commitment to one’s own true self.

Confessions caused a sensation – and no wonder, given Rousseau’s shocking admission that he once framed a maid for a petty robbery he himself had committed and abandoned the five babies he had fathered to a foundling hospital. He was a master of self-­serving spin, blaming his actions on the unfair social system that sought to humiliate him and crush his genius. Rousseau’s particular triumph was to convert his misdeeds into evidence of his superior commitment to virtue and truth-­telling. Commentators have noted that Rousseau was, in fact, often rather loose with the truth, which was less important to him than his own version of reality.

In his political tract of 1762, The Social Contract, Rousseau describes a society devoted to personal authenticity, freedom and full equality but argues, in a surprising paradox, that such a society could only exist within a democratically elected totalitarian government. He imagines a social compact whereby citizens would consciously give themselves over to the state, with individual rights and liberties subsumed within what he calls ‘the general will’. It’s a term that presumes a coherent pre-­existing community, an idea perfectly ripe for exploitation by nationalist demagogues. And only through rule by ‘the general will’, Rousseau argues, could complete equality and therefore individual freedom be guaranteed.

Like Plato, Rousseau thought that children should effectively become properties of the state, which would take benign control over all citizens’ lives, from birth to death. The pay-­off, as Rousseau saw it, was that the fortunate citizen would be ‘forced to be free’: liberated from the burden of thinking about their future or taking responsibility for decision-­making.

In this unthinking, passive, caring society, Rousseau stipulated that the only crime would be intolerance. To eradicate this scourge, Rousseau advocated the creation of a warm, all-­embracing civic religion, one that every citizen would be required to adopt…or be put to death. I am reminded here of one of the totalitarian mantras in George Orwell’s classic novel 1984: ‘Freedom is slavery.’ It’s pure Rousseau, via the twentieth-­century Soviet model.

Maximilien Robespierre, the French Revolution’s Jacobin leader – instrumental in ice-­cold regicide and a role model for future dictators – was so enamoured of the ‘divine’ Rousseau’s theology that he made him the official patron saint of the French state’s new ‘tolerant’ civic religion…appropriately introduced under a dictatorship and Reign of Terror.

Right from the beginning, of course, there were those who saw through Rousseau, including eminent contemporaries such as Voltaire, Edmund Burke and even Rousseau’s one-­time friend Denis Diderot. They loathed his self-­serving version of what today we might call ‘My Truth’ or ‘My Lived Experience’ and railed against his vanity, his half-­truths, his anti-­democratic fantasies.

Twenty years later, Jane Austen, writing novels in England, nailed the ethical case against Rousseau and his ideology.

IT’S POSSIBLE, I suppose, that Rousseau might have become a mere curiosity in the history of philosophy were it not for the extraordinary events of the twentieth century. Rousseau’s ideas were brought to terrible fruition in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, totalitarian systems boosted by modern industrial methods of state surveillance, propaganda, social control and mass death.

In the early 1940s (at the same time as George Orwell was writing 1984), the philosopher and progressive political activist Bertrand Russell devoted a full chapter in his History of Western Philosophy to Rousseau. Russell deplored Rousseau’s cult of subjective feelings, defining sensibility dismissively as ‘proneness to emotion’ and adding, ‘to be thoroughly satisfactory, the emotion must be direct and violent and quite uninformed by thought’. Russell bluntly described Rousseau as ‘the inventor of the political philosophy of pseudo-­democratic dictatorships’ and concluded emphatically that Hitler was ‘an outcome of Rousseau’.

Today, with the benefit of historical records and TV, film and radio, we don’t need to guess or suspect – we know there is a terrible price to be paid for emotions ungoverned by thought. And yet, in a spirit of blithe ignorance, we are awash, we are sodden, we are drenched in a tsunami of Rousseau-­style sensibility. Today we are all about self-­love, telling our truth, romancing our sins, elevating our uniqueness, and converting our passing complaints into unassailable evidence of victimhood. It’s self-asorption raised to the level of a social movement. The more we think about self, the less we have to bother about society.

THE GLOBAL GURU of the sensibility industry today is bestselling American author Brené Brown, with her totemic and ludicrous appeal to the ‘power of vulnerability’ and ‘the gifts of imperfection’. She is Rousseau’s mass-­market ideological daughter. There are endless numbers of trained-­up Brené Brown acolytes ready to help executives, academics and other would-­be leaders who haven’t sufficiently recognised their own vulnerability, explored their own shame or lovingly polished their biases and
imperfections.

We notice the downgraded commitment to objective facts and truth in the new way that people speak. We used to hear people commence or enter a discussion with a simple ‘I think that’ or ‘I suppose that’. These offer a verifiable position, invite reasoned debate and accept contradiction. But the newer formula, especially from younger people, is ‘I feel like’: unmitigated emotion, and therefore impossible to contradict. To challenge a ‘feeling’ is to invite hurt protests of feeling unsafe, bullied or triggered. And thus civil exchange and debate are quickly shut down.

Today, public discussion, governed by feelings, has devolved into impassioned shouting. The shared democratic search for solutions to problems has been replaced by a competition for the most deeply felt individual grievance and the hunt for targets who can be held responsible.

‘Who’s to blame?’ has been the loathsome theme of ultra-­right-­wing parties around the world. And it’s always the designated elites who are to blame, of course. Hitler targeted Jews, socialists and gay people. Mao targeted intellectuals, right down to teachers. Pol Pot killed millions for the crime of their literacy.

Today democracies around the world are being voted down by electorates looking for right-­wing authoritarian leaders who will fire up their grievances, insecurities and disappointments – who will gladly target the ‘elites’ and enact something like the ‘general will’ instead of prosecuting the greater good.

But it’s not only right-­wing extremists who have embraced the politics of feeling, sensibility and blame. Increasingly those who consider themselves left, progressive and tolerant spend a great deal of time assigning culpability to ‘the privileged’, a conveniently vague catch-­all category, when they would be better off considering pragmatic class issues and promoting practical reforms that will work for the whole of society. When the sensibility-­rich slogan of ‘who’s to blame?’ outguns ‘how do we fix this together?’, society is in big trouble.

I am reminded here of the moment in Saul Bellow’s novel Herzog when the eponymous hero, surveying the wreckage of twentieth-­century dictatorships, remarks: ‘Sentiment and brutality, never one without the other, like fossils and oil.’

It’s certainly hard work finding leaders who are prepared to lead by sense and not sensibility these days. In fact a quivering alertness to sensibility is very much in the minds and hearts of the men and women who run Australia. Politicians, business leaders, vice-­chancellors, political parties and publishers are all too eager not only to listen to the feelings of their most emotion-­led constituents but also to appease and placate whoever complains loudest.

When leaders under pressure agree to elevate feelings to the status of fact or truth, then we risk unleashing (indeed, we are unleashing) the very worst antisocial and politically dangerous forces.

The biggest casualty is free speech. At an institutional level, we hear almost daily, it seems, of universities, publishing houses, local councils, music and literary festivals officially or surreptitiously excluding academics, artists and intellectuals, and their works, merely because they are afraid that these individuals will put forward a ‘controversial’ view that attracts criticism or dissent. They give in to pressure before pressure is even applied.

I’ve heard chilling stories of office snoops eavesdropping and reporting on unacceptable remarks made by colleagues – it’s usually something quite banal – which leads to ‘counselling’ or ends up on their ‘file’. If you want to protect your job or career, it’s often advisable these days to hold your tongue.

And as I write this the federal government is looking to strengthen hate-­speech laws, further consolidating a culture in which free thought and free speech are regarded with suspicion.

There’s no point looking to private enterprise to make a positive difference. Sensibility has been co-opted quite brilliantly by our corporations to serve the interests of modern commerce. It’s now a well-thumbed chapter in the neoliberal playbook – sensibility for profit – and it pays off beautifully for its purveyors, who distract us with their impassioned commitment to good causes as we foolish consumers spend more than ever on our own self-­care, self-­acceptance, self-­development and self-­love.

A psychiatrist told me the other day that many of his colleagues are making fortunes out of pandering to this modern self-­absorption rather than encouraging patients out of it, thus ensuring that the money rolls in while the mental health of those patients continues to decline.

THE MODERN TURN away from sense and towards feelings, though a deeply unsteady state of affairs, is, in many respects, quite understandable. In the twenty-­first century facts and data have lost their cultural legitimacy. Big data equals surveillance, and social media is fake news. The algorithms and artificial intelligence are taking over our jobs, our online reality, perhaps even our minds. Meanwhile the old Enlightenment institutions – the parliaments and corporations and banks and courts – have not only failed to safeguard our community, or protect us from the harder edges of neoliberalism, but also failed to deliver much real action on the existential matter of climate change.

Feelings, by contrast, can still be trusted. Or so it is blindly hoped. At least they are presumed to be genuine – more genuine than modern facts, even if they aren’t permanent or reliable. The longing for authenticity and sincerity in our society is so profound that modern CEOs, vice-­chancellors and politicians, looking to promote any new idea or policy or product or service, know better these days than to offer a mere reasoned argument. Producing a heartwarming leader’s story of lived experience – with a touch of vulnerability thrown in – has the merit of a rough vitality and unchallengeable validity. A ‘relatable’ leader is a more plausible one, better able to connect with staff or customers or voters who are disillusioned by old-­fashioned appeals to cold statistics or empirical forecasts.

My scepticism about so many conscious displays of sensibility is not the same as saying or believing that feelings don’t matter. They do. Our feelings and emotions are important to us all, and they can be important guides to what is working and not working in our lives and in our society.

When Aristotle wrote the first (arguably, the best) guide to the Greek democratic art form of rhetoric, he concluded that every would-­be leader has three ways to make their case: via reasoned argument (logos), via their own credibility and character (ethos), and via an appeal to the emotions (pathos). The best speeches utilise all three.

But we must also accept that our feelings may need to be tempered, tested and often replaced by facts, reason and common sense. That is the lesson of Sense and Sensibility. Our sincere intuitions can be deeply misguided. Feelings alone, or even primarily, cannot form the basis of any successful society.

Hannah Arendt, who had to run for her life from Nazi Germany, certainly knew this. In her 1963 essay On Revolution, she revelled in the genius of the American founding fathers, who constructed a nation based on reason and pragmatism and sought to design a functional community of free citizens with reciprocal rights and duties, based clearly on rule of law: ‘the passion of compassion was singularly absent from the minds and hearts of the men who made the American Revolution.’

Democracy is by definition adversarial, as the great contrarian Christopher Hitchens never failed to remind us. It’s imperfect. There is no getting around the gritty, uncomfortable nature of democratic debate. But democracy’s biggest achievement is that no one individual or group wins all the time. Occasionally in a particular democratic dispute one side wins outright, but more often concessions are made and no one is perfectly happy. And so our system rolls on.

Jane Austen showed us very clearly that while emotions will always have a role, they can’t be allowed to run the show. When the goal is to make and keep sustainable and functional democratic societies, life governed by sense is by no means ideal, but one of pure sensibility is inevitably disastrous.

Thoughtful and committed advocates of freedom and democracy will refuse to succumb to this latest wave of sensibility and stand up against all the intolerance it brings with it.

Image credit: Claudio Schwarz, courtesy of Unsplash