This is the language of subjective emotions, expressive individualism, and the therapeutic ideal that society has been cultivating. It also renders reason irrelevant—or irrelevant until people are attuned to the proper emotions. These Middlebury students might be described as channeling the spirits of Rousseau and Shelley but without their underlying belief in a normative human nature as the universal horizon of engagement. There is no metanarrative of human nature as a whole or a unity here, only that provided by the oppression of certain marginalized groups.
