In the 1980s, pop psychology promoted the shibboleth that “you can’t argue with what people feel.” Since then, that line has brought many a contentious conversation to an impasse. The consequences of anointing emotion as beyond interrogation are vividly illustrated in Mark Lawson’s biting novel The Allegations: when an aggrieved party feels bullied it means, ipso facto, that he or she has been bullied, and employment tribunals are mere formalities. Sacked by the BBC for the same offence, but never allowed to confront his anonymous accusers whom the Corporation trusted, Lawson should know.

But you can argue with what people feel. Emotions range from the justifiable—grief that a brother just died—to the irrational, unreasonable and disproportionate: spitting fury that you’re not allowed a chocolate cream, but only a caramel. That was me, throwing a tantrum aged 10. Pity I wasn’t born 20 years later. I might have screamed at my mother when she sent me to my room: “But you can’t argue with what people feel!”

Worse, in English “I feel” and “I think” are roughly synonymous. If we enshrine as a truism that “you can’t argue with what people think,” we can throw in the towel on intellectual debate in perpetuity. Which, the way things are going, maybe we should do.

One emotion has grown so sacrosanct that an astonishingly large segment of Europeans now thinks that provoking it should be illegal: umbrage. According to a 2015 Pew Research Centre poll, only the barest majority of Britons—54 per cent—and a scant 27 per cent of Germans any longer believe government should allow people to make statements offensive to minorities. (Why only minorities? Wouldn’t equality under the law argue for banning speech offensive to anyone?)

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