April 2025
Dr. Robert Issenman

For the past few years, North American culture has been obsessed with feeling bad. Decades of cultivating a feeling culture came to a head with the collective trauma of watching the police choke George Floyd to death. Since then, we have tried to expiate our collective guilt while endorsing both real and imagined trauma experienced by anyone over the last 400 years. 

The cultural opinionators dictate that anyone who has been reasonably successful in their life should feel bad because they clearly have gotten where they are by stepping on someone else. (As an aside, this is probably true—in a productive society individuals achieve success by “beating out the competition.”)

Ruminating on the origin of the term “feelings,” it gradually dawned on me that “feelings” play an essential role in the universe of life. Take the lowly paramecium, a lovely one-celled organism that glides through its (gender-neutral) universe by “feeling” its way about with tiny hairs called “cilia.” When it encounters something sharp or too warm or too acidic, it gets its feelings hurt, it retreats and moves in the opposite direction. Now, I don’t know if a paramecium learns from these encounters, but almost every organism higher on the evolutionary scale (sorry) learns from painful experiences. In the rat, this is termed aversive conditioning, one of the few truly reliable behavioural experiments. 
Not only do mammals learn from experience, but they also get unpleasant sensations if they are reminded about the negative occurrence. We have come to call this post traumatic stress as if learning the lessons that bad times have to teach us is a negative.

Last year, I experienced my own traumatic episode when I was reprimanded by the associate chief. The cause of the reprimand was my lack of sensitivity during our team Halloween celebration. Attempting to “get with the times” in a tribute to Ryan Gosling’s role as Ken in the Ken and Barbie movie, I had the affront to wear a headband that someone (anonymous of course) “felt” looked like a turban. This issue of “cultural appropriation” (from Ryan Gosling?) was sufficient to warrant a phone call and several email messages. 

This came mere weeks after the murder, rape and kidnapping of Israeli civilians which had not been sufficiently concerning to elicit a comment from the leadership during the meetings that followed the event.

In trying to better understand the origins of my lack of sensitivity, I have cast my mind back to my family history. Like most everyone in Canada, my grandparents emigrated to this continent because someone had made them feel bad about where they lived before.

The family emigrated because a great-grandmother had “a bad feeling” about what was coming for the Jewish population of eastern Europe. Grandfather Ruben swam a river to escape being drafted (for 40 years with no prospect of promotion) into the Russian army. Grandmother Clara, as a child, watched a woman in her refugee group bleed to death after having been shot for hurting the feelings of a border officer insulted by a challenge to his authority. My paternal grandfather, John, who worked in steel construction, chased a co-worker with a blow torch. At the end of a steel beam overlooking the job site, his co-worker apologized for hurting my grandfather’s feelings. His aged father, who, with his beard and long black robe, looked like an easy mark, banged the two young toughs’ heads together to express his feelings about the way they were taunting him.

My father was forced to go to an out-of-town university because of prejudicial religious bias represented in the Jewish student quota typical of university admissions committees at the time. I never heard Bernie express that this act of prejudice had hurt his feelings. His response to this prejudice was, “I guess I had to work harder.”

The consequence of this philosophy was that my parents bought into the admittedly post-colonial Anglo philosophy of exposing kids to challenging experiences. At 10, I was sent to a summer camp to “toughen me up.” My counsellor greeted me with the news that he was studying “Jew engineering” (accounting), no doubt in an attempt to make me feel more welcome. Later that summer, I was chased through the night woods after a campfire by a gang of cabin mates yelling “Get the Jew.” 

All of this did more to strengthen my cultural identity than attending a Jewish parochial school for six years. What did I learn from this experience? Life’s not always fair. It’s a fact of life that some people will hate you before they meet you but you can survive that too. As has been said; “It’s a question of “mind over matter—if you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.”

All of this is to say that I too have experienced post-traumatic stress. I am very sensitive when I observe group think, especially when combined with a dose of righteous conviction. From my perspective, largely based on collective memory, the worst atrocities in human history have been committed by individuals and groups who believe they have an exclusive claim to ownership of the “right way to think.” Their beginnings can usually be recognized by the establishment of a “my truth and your consequence” apparatus epitomized by the US Senate’s “Unamerican Activities Committee.” 

This approach, adopted by universities everywhere under the rubric of “Equity, Diversity and Inclusion” is now being re-evaluated. It’s worth remembering that the appealing slogan “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity” was quickly followed by the invention of the guillotine, a clever device designed to efficiently separate individuals from thoughts judged to be out of tune with prevailing sensibilities.