As we, college seniors, begin the process of alternately facing and cowering from the world after Cornell, the one question looming over me more than others is this: Do we have responsibilities to that world?

If there are other Americans who would accuse Cornell and its students of elitism and privilege, then questions of obligation become increasingly important. In large part, this is because most Americans need a lot of things that we as future leaders can provide. Yet, what we need to change, I think, is the way we talk about these needs.

Last week, I read Sun staff columnist Judah Bellin’s ’12 provocative exploration of the anti-evolution camp and Sun staff columnist Munier Salem’s ’10 advocacy for rationalism. It was an argument over whether scientific rationalism is all we truly have to explain the world around us, or in Bellin’s words, we must “recognize why others [‘religious freaks’] are drawn to those models we disfavor.”

I then read Sun staff columnist Navid Farnia’s ’09 criticisms of how pro-Palestinian voices get “marginalized” at Cornell. I couldn’t help but feel that Salem, Bellin and Farnia weren’t exactly arguing evolution versus religion or pro-Israel versus pro-Palestine; instead, they were arguing about how public debates should be structured, and who should have a right to speak in them. For Salem, one could surmise, only rational thinking should be public; for Bellin, religious sensibilities can offer public debates what they lack; and for Farnia, voices that acknowledge the “racialized” aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are being ignored or repressed.

All of these positions overlook the most important thing going on when we debate, but which no one who comments ever wants to acknowledge: The influence and complexity of emotion. Bellin argues that “the power of our language” is that it “allows us to express a wide range of responses to our experience of the world.” I share this kind of prescription, but I want to go farther. It may be language that we use to argue between one another, but it is emotions of disgust, excitement, rage and love that motivate us to come up with the words we use in those arguments. It is what makes Obama's speeches “work” and molds debates over health care, abortion and the death penalty.

It doesn’t matter, as many in letters to the editor have claimed, that Farnia got this or that fact about Palestine wrong. It doesn’t matter either that anti-evolutionists repudiate “reason.” The problem is the way in which we pretend we aren’t viscerally angry about these issues, and are only speaking or writing on the basis of rational dialogue, using our language to communicate with one another. It is the anger with which Farnia reacts to violence against Palestinians that shapes how his argument proceeds. For all these authors and much campus debate in general, it is the disgust (an emotion) at another’s perspective and the fear (another emotion) that others will be convinced by counter-viewpoints that leads us to write articles like this. On other occasions, it is what motivates us to bring speakers who agree with us to campus. Put simply, it is emotions that lead us to actions, of which writing opinion columns is one example.

This has played out for me in my experience leading United for Peace and Justice in Palestine, where my most interesting engagements have been personal. It was never big public lectures by politicians that I felt changed my mind or anyone else’s about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It was never polemical arguments like Farnia’s. It was never displays of flags on the Arts Quad.

Change came for me at brief moments sitting at the library and chatting with Jennifer Fishkin ’10, the president of CIPAC who shares this page in The Sun with me today, about her relationship to Israel. It came from lengthy e-mail conversations with Jacob Shapiro ’10, president of Hillel, during the Gaza conflict. Through these friendships, we never accused one another of “making up facts,” but rather recognized in each other a strong emotional connection to Israelis, Palestinians or both, that guided their thinking and their approach to those facts.

My own perspective was widened, as it was I hope for Jacob and Jen, when we dismissed the spectacle of the black flags and discussed personal reactions to violence and politics. It was widened again when Professor Ross Brann expressed on the first day of class in the “History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict” that he was guided by an “empathy and concern for both [parties] and a readiness to engage their respective narratives, aspirations and fears.”

Perhaps we need the spectacles of opinion pieces, black flags and public lectures to disrupt comfortable assumptions and spark those moments when we talk, but we need to do that talking with people who disagree and who do it viscerally. Discussions of our emotional connections to politics are imperative, but to get there, it is going to take fighting all of these pretensions of “rational” dialogue based on “facts.” It’s going to take losing major accusations that someone is misrepresenting facts and looking critically at the talking points we receive from national organizations. It’s going to take, to borrow a phrase from philosopher Edmund Burke, speaking about our “sympathies” in a candid, honest way, explaining to each other why we would want the facts to support our arguments. After all, it is emotions more often than “facts” that lead people to action.

To return to where I started, I think this is our responsibility to the world outside Cornell. 20 years from now, many of the dominant public voices in corporate boardrooms, courtrooms and newspapers will be ours. If we keep arguing on the level of “facts” and “rationality” and ignore emotions — the very “empathy and concern” that animate those arguments — we will be doing everyone a disservice: We will simply use “facts” to promote a status quo, in which pro-Israel, pro-Palestine, pro-evolution and pro-religious arguments will still exist, but won’t know how to engage with one another. Even worse, we will never influence others to act to make change. We will be stuck replicating the problems of the present.

Maurice Chammah is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He may be reached at mchammah@cornellsun.com. Guest Room appears periodically.