Emotions are well and good, everyone should have them, but we make a huge mistake when we let our feelings get in the way of cold, hard reason.
Emotional responses are immediate, visceral and impassioned. They're also irrational, usually exaggerated and occasionally wrong. And when we air our emotions we can trigger a whirlwind of emotional responses we don't expect, which is how a simple argument over leaving a toilet seat up can sometimes end in divorce
By comparison, reasoned responses are based in a calculated and typically based a logical interpretation of the facts and achieving a specific outcome. There is always an emotional component, but feelings are set aside in a rational debate because they tend to muddy the waters and ultimately solve nothing.
I bring this up because of the way emotions are creeping into the debate over issues like the asphalt plant, over the $96,000 post-Olympic Party, the community forest, the HST and... well, pretty much everything.
I'm not suggesting that people stop feeling things, just that they are doing themselves a disservice by expecting their emotions to win the day. When someone screams, "Somebody think of the children!" at a public meeting my limbic system tends to curl into the fetal position and my brain switches off - I've heard this argument too many times in too many contexts for it to ever be convincing. Ditto when people get their facts wrong, or spin the facts in such an obvious way that the devil's advocate hovering over my shoulder starts jabbing me in the ear with his flaming pitchfork and shouting at me to disregard everything a person just said.
After all, this is the age of hyper-individualism and inflated self-esteem, and these days most people don't give a rat's ass what most other people are feeling. When someone reaches out to grab you by your heart strings a rational response is to pull away, having had your emotions manipulated over and over by politicians, advertisers, media pundits and the like over and over again. These manipulators have created a massive trust gap, a credibility chasm, breeding a generation of hardened cynics that distrust both the message and the messenger - and aren't afraid to shoot.
In the absence of real trust, people now feel entitled to seek out their own facts, or even to make facts up wholesale based on the way they feel. Stephen Colbert described this phenomena well with a single word, "truthiness," which Wikipedia has translated to mean "a truth that a person claims to know intuitively 'from the gut' without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts." And as we've seen time and time again, a single distorted or incorrect fact can be used to discredit everything a person says.
In ancient Greece, more than 2,300 years ago, Aristotle realized the tendency of emotions to skew the debate and created some general rules for having an argument. Although it's a bad word these days, he called this process "rhetoric."
For the best explanation I recommend you Google an article called "How to Teach a Child to Argue" by Jay Heinrichs:
"Our culture has lost the ability to usefully disagree," wrote Heinrichs. "An argument is good; a fight is not. Whereas the goal of a fight is to dominate your opponent, in an argument you succeed when you bring your audience over to your side."
In that sense I sympathize with our elected officials and governments when they justify their positions. They tend to talk facts and realities while their audience tends to respond with raw, cringe-inducing emotions.
But in another sense I say our governments have brought this down on themselves through a lack of transparency and accountability, and by sometimes spinning facts to suit their own needs. While governments are supposed to be dispassionate and objective, the fact is that the people within government actually do care how the public feels about them and manage the message accordingly. There are no neutral observers in this debate.
If you're still awake, there are three parts to Aristotle's rhetoric - logos, which appeals to logic; ethos, which uses character and reputation to evoke trust; and pathos, which appeals to emotion.
Given that we no longer implicitly trust the character of anyone anymore and aren't particularly swayed by emotions, that leaves us with logic - which we really can't trust either unless all of the facts are made available and free of spin.
Not to beat the dead horse, but the fact that new documents are coming forward even now regarding the legality of the asphalt plant - more than eight months after the initial uproar - puts all the facts and even the legal opinion obtained by the municipality into dispute; a dispute that is already so emotionally charged that I've been reluctant to get involved in any way, shape or form. Personally, I'd rather inhale asphalt exhaust for three hours than sit through one of those meetings. Professionally, I'd like to stay neutral.
It's time to talk this out once and for all in a fair, safe and emotionally-free way, with both parties laying all of their cards on the table and letting the facts speak for themselves. Some questions must be asked and answered.
For example, is it really the RMOW's position that the asphalt plant was safe in its current location and will be even safer in the new one - and that once the plant is upgraded it will be of less risk than other forms of local air pollution? Have they obtained an expert opinion on this, and if not would they be willing to get one?
Do they also believe the legal opinion they obtained before canceling plans to move the plant on June 1 is still the correct opinion, and considered all the facts that are still coming to light? If so, will they share that legal opinion, which taxpayers paid for, with the public?
What precisely are the options going forward, aside from the recent agreement to move the plant 150 metres that residents are against? Could it be possible to move the plant in the future when their licence expires? Will granting the plant new zoning make the plant permanent as some have alleged?
And if the air quality monitoring shows a problem, what is the municipality prepared to do about it?
On the other side of the debate, is it really the anti-asphalt plant lobby's position that the RMOW is deliberately deflecting and downplaying their concerns, cozying up to an industrialist and lying to people in order to poison their children? What is the specific focus of this campaign - air quality? Odour? Zoning? Trucks? Revenge? All of the above?
If the RMOW demonstrates that the plant is operating legally, whatever the circumstances, and that the cost of moving the plant is prohibitively expensive, would any compromise be acceptable? If the answer is no and opponents will only accept relocation, is it your opinion that the taxpayers of Whistler should pay those costs as a whole if it can't be moved on legal grounds? And if the air quality monitoring shows that there isn't a problem, will the opponents continue to lobby for its removal?
In other words, it's time to have an argument. The kind Mr. Spock would have.
