Feelings, and Feelings, and Feelings. The Free Thinking Festival Lecture
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 1 April 2019
⏱️ 60 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The idea of ‘emotions’ did not exist until the nineteenth century but now they are the subject of study and Professor Thomas Dixon was the first director of Queen Mary University of London's Centre for the History of the Emotions. He is currently researching anger and has explored the histories of friendship, tears, and the British stiff upper lip in books Weeping Britannia: Portrait of a Nation in Tears and The Invention of Altruism: Making Moral Meanings in Victorian Britain.
Ranging from revolutionary feelings and the sentimental tales of Charles Dickens to the poetic rage of Audre Lorde, in his 2019 BBC Free Thinking Festival Lecture, Thomas Dixon paints a historical panorama of emotions and ends by asking what we can learn from our ancestors about the value of stoical restraint.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps |
| 0:21.2 | it. It's a long time ago, right? It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream |
| 0:26.1 | van plays music when it's out of ice cream. Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:33.3 | BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. I'm Matthew Sweet and in a moment we'll be bringing you one of the discussions recorded at our Freethinking Festival. |
| 0:43.2 | For this year's theme, we set out to explore the emotions. |
| 0:46.5 | So, be ready with your happy or sad or enraged face just after this short message. |
| 0:54.0 | Hello, just butting in. |
| 0:55.9 | I'm Eleanor Rosamond Baraklough, and I'm here to tell you about time travellers, |
| 1:00.7 | the BBC Radio 3 podcast that's packed full of quirky stories from the corners of history. |
| 1:06.8 | If you'd like to know how a polar bear ended up catching its dinner in the Thames, |
| 1:11.5 | why Poldark was much loved in post-fascist Spain, |
| 1:15.3 | what happens if you give a spider too much caffeine, |
| 1:18.4 | how the suffragettes weaponised roller skating, |
| 1:20.9 | and what any of this has to do with anything, |
| 1:24.2 | then you'll have to subscribe to the Time Travelers podcast. |
| 1:29.7 | Find us on BBC Sounds. |
| 1:43.3 | Imagine a map of the world. Imagine that the act of weeping could be measured from the air, like light pollution or the progress of the clouds. |
| 1:47.2 | Imagine tracking the flow of those tears over time, watching them gather, drain and evaporate. |
| 1:54.2 | On the flood map of history, pools of salt water would accumulate at the funerals of Gandhi, Dr. King, Rudolph Valentino. The |
| 2:04.3 | cenotaph, the Lincoln Memorial and the tomb of Kim Il-sung would register as marble reservoirs |
| 2:11.2 | of official tiers. Some countries would become archipelagos, others would be high and dry. That image is the best way I |
| 2:20.0 | have of describing the work of the 2019 Freethinking Lecturer. He is Thomas Dixon, founding director |
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