Spoilt Rotten

The Toxic Cult of Sentimentality

Theodore Dalrymple

• Publisher: Gibson Square
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781908096821
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Not since Christopher Hitchens assault on Mother Theresa have so many sacred cows been slaughtered in such a short volume.' Spectator 'One of our most celebrated essayists.' Toby Young, Mail on Sunday '[A] cultural highlight.' Observer 'Surgical demolition.' Guardian In this perceptive and witty book, Theodore Dalrymple unmasks the hidden sentimentality that is suffocating public life. Under the multiple guises of raising children well, caring for the underprivileged, assisting the less able and doing good generally, we are achieving quite the opposite -for the single purpose of feeling good about ourselves. Dalrymple takes the reader on both an entertaining and at times shocking journey through social, political, popular and literary issues as diverse as child tantrums, aggression, educational reform, honour killings, sexual abuse, Che Guevara, Eric Segal, Romeo and Juliet, the McCanns, public emotions and the role of suffering, and shows the perverse results when we abandon logic in favour of the cult of feeling.

1

Sentimentality

Recently I went into a branch of WH Smith in a small market town in rural England. The choice of books was not large or impressive, to say the least; there was nothing that could remotely be called a classic for sale. The townsfolk were evidently not intellectual in their interests. On the other hand, there was a comparatively large section devoted to a literary genre of which I had previously overlooked: Tragic Life Stories.

I was aware of a new literary genre of writing about the experience of illness. An American magazine once sent me seven books in the genre for review all at once, including a middle-aged woman’s account of her colostomy. This book was not intended as practical advice for those unfortunate people who themselves were about to undergo a colostomy: it is easy enough to see the need for such a book. If I were myself about to have a colostomy, I should find the experience of others helpful in guiding me through what must be a difficult and painful transition. No; this book was intended for the general, that is to say the uncolostomised, public. Many folk nowadays, it seems, like nothing more than to read of the illnesses of others: for when the small change of other people’s lives is projected into the public sphere, in writing or on television, it reassures everyone of the significance of his own life. Importance has been democratised, or at least demoticised: we are all important now.

In America, this literary genre is called Life Writing, and it is possible to take entire university courses in it. In English departments the study of writing about colostomies and the like evidently takes its place as a worthy subject beside Restoration Comedy and the Nineteenth Century Novel. A friend of mine, who was the last person to see Sylvia Plath alive before she committed suicide, sent me the programme of a colloquium on the poet she was invited to attend in Oxford, and among the papers was one by an American professor who had ‘used postmodern theories of embodiment to examine contemporary literary representations of breast, uterine and ovarian cancer.’

But until my visit to WH Smith in the market town to which I have referred above, I was completely unaware of the existence of the literary genre of Tragic Life Stories. I was aware of such life stories themselves, of course; indeed, in my medical practice I had encountered very little else, even if people had contributed a great deal to their own tragedies. Without tragedy, moreover, literature would be much impoverished, perhaps even non-existent, since the need for it would vanish.

Yet I had never seen books classified in this way before, and the novelty of the arrangement surely tells us something about our present Zeitgeist, as does the classification of books by the race, sex or sexual practices of their authors.

The titles of the books in the Tragic Life Stories section also tells us something about what a substantial number of people, at least, are now seeking in their leisure moments. (I assume, of course, that WH Smith know what their customers want, which may not be the case. Large companies are bureaucracies, and bad decisions are hidden in the overall results.) Here, however, is a selection of the titles:

Please, Daddy, No

Twilight Children

Daddy’s Little Girl: A mother who didn’t love her enough, a father who loved her too much

Last Song of the Last Tram: A heart-warming, heartbreaking memoir of a mother’s love and a father’s abuse

Fragile

Someone to Watch Over: The true tale of a survivor haunted by the demons of abuse

Alone: the heartbreaking story of a neglected child

My Name Is Angel: A traumatic story of escaping the streets and building a new life

Heartland: How a lonely child came to fall in love with a monster

Running from the Devil: How I survived a stolen childhood

The Little Prisoner: How a childhood was stolen and a trust betrayed

The Step Child: A story of a broken childhood

Hidden: Betrayed, exploited and forgotten

Daddy’s Challenge: The true story of a father learning to love his son

Such a Pretty Girl: They promised Meredith nine years of safety but only gave her three

Abandoned: A little girl desperate for love

Behind Closed Doors: A true story of neglect and survival against the odds

Don’t Tell Mummy: A true story of the ultimate betrayal

Our Little Secret: A father’s abuse, a son’s life destroyed

Little Girl Lost: A powerful true story of surviving the unimaginable

Not entirely by coincidence, I suspect, the Tragic Life Stories section was immediately next to the section devoted to True Crime. Here, if anywhere, was an elective affinity. After all, having tragic life stories to weep over depends, is parasitic, upon the brutality of those who make the life stories tragic in the first place. Whereas the covers of the Tragic Life Stories (many of which, incidentally, were in their nth printing) were predominantly of boudoir-pastel shades, with pictures of a little child on them covering his or her tearful or imploring face, the covers of the True Crime were in lurid and diabolic red and black, and had pictures staring out of them of brutal shaven-headed men of the type produced in larger numbers in Britain than anywhere else in the world, and indistinguishable incidentally (as a Swedish visitor recently pointed out to me) from the faces that adorn the covers of many a footballer’s autobiography. Anyhow, one title will be sufficient, I hope, to give the flavour of the genre:

Chopper 6: A bullet in time saves nine (luckily there is a never-ending supply of evil).

I walked away from WH Smith feeling as if I had immersed myself in a mixture of syrup and blood, and as if I needed a good shower to wash it off. But before I did so, I bought a couple of newspapers, the first local and the second national.

The lead story of the first concerned a father who was angrily demanding an apology from a local supermarket:

A dad is raging against the town’s supermarket after his daughter found a chicken foot in her roast dinner.

His daughter wiped some gravy to the side of her plate and discovered the claw… and burst into tears.

‘It got cooked and managed to get on to my daughter’s plate. It scared her to death. She won’t eat meat at all now.’

‘All our dinners were totally wasted.’

‘All we used of it was the breast meat so we don’t understand how it came to be there.’

‘My daughter is 11, she burst out crying, and that was it and everybody’s dinners went out the window.’

‘We had to throw it all away because there was a bit of an upheaval.’

This little incident is instructive in a number of ways, not least in the extremity of the emotion, or at least in the extremity of the expression of emotion, occasioned by what was at most a very minor unpleasantness (chicken feet, after all, are a delicacy in some cuisines, including those which are vastly more refined than any of which this young girl is likely to have had experience).

But the most significant aspect of the story, assuming it to be true, is that the girl controlled the parents and not the parents the girl. It was she, not they, who determined what happened in the household. Instead of trying to calm her hysteria, either by consolation or by discipline, her parents participated in it and in doing so probably increased it yet further.

In effect, they were transferring the locus of moral, intellectual and emotional authority from themselves to their daughter. Locus, they conceded that it was she who was the proper judge of how to react to a trivial shock, and that the only way in which they could show their love for her was by reacting in precisely the same way. There was no question of guidance, let alone correction.

Why not? Although a family that collectively throws its dinner out of the window, either metaphorically or literally (and one cannot altogether exclude the latter, to judge by the state of Britain’s streets and gardens), at the instigation of some hysterical screaming on the part of an eleven year-old child, is unlikely to reflect deeply or even at all on the way that life should be lived, this does not mean that it escapes the influence of abstract ideas altogether, which it absorbs in inchoate fashion. And among those ideas is likely to be the supposed inherent, spontaneous goodness of children when they have not yet been deformed and corrupted by social training, as well as the vital necessity of the outward, visible and audible, expression of emotion. To have demanded of the child that she should control herself, that she try to see the situation in some kind of proportion and behave accordingly for the sake of decorum and the convenience of others, would therefore have been to inhibit her, to turn her emotion dangerously inwards. Since children are inherently and by nature good, they and not adults are the ultimate moral authorities, though on one very important condition: that they have not been taught artificially to control themselves. Furthermore, the only way in which one can demonstrate true sympathy with another person, including one’s own child, is by seeing things from exactly his or her point of view, in so far as seeing it from any other point of view is, potentially at least, a criticism. And only monsters of intolerance judge other people, whatever their age.

Needless to say, consistency of world outlook is not to be looked for in even the most studious and logically scrupulous of intellectuals, let alone in the defenestrators of dinners, and it is possible that there were other strands in the reaction of the parents to the supposed distress of their child. Why, for example, did the father have no difficulty in passing severe moral judgement on the supermarket that sold the chicken with the chicken foot, but make no comment on the carelessness of his wife who, apparently, was responsible for the far grosser and more simply-averted error of serving the said avian extremity up to her daughter? I hope I shall not be accused of cynicism when I suggest that the possibility of reimbursement and even compensation by the supermarket had something to do with the difference in reaction. The father could hardly demand compensation on behalf of his daughter from his wife; but the supermarket, with its immense economic resources, was an easy target for what amounted to moral blackmail.

Every doctor who has prepared reports on people who allege that they have been wrongly or negligently injured by a person or organisation worth suing will have heard the phrase, ‘It’s ruined my life, doctor.’ Of course, lives sometimes genuinely are ruined by the negligence or outright wickedness of others, though in such cases plaintiffs rarely exaggerate for the obvious reason that they don’t have to do so. Their lives are genuinely ruined. However, it is a lamentable fact of human nature that, when people have a financial incentive to magnify the distress that they feel, they will magnify it; sometimes for so long, indeed (given the law’s delay), that what started out as bogus or at least grossly exaggerated suffering will eventually become real and genuine suffering. Unfortunately, our deeply corrupt — or is it merely sentimental? — system of tort law makes no distinction whatever between these two kinds of suffering, and attributes both to the original injury. Lawyers, after all, need clients, both plaintiffs and defendants, with large sums of money at stake.

In short, the response of the parents to the reaction of their daughter to a very trivial shock (assuming that they were not making the story up from whole cloth) was probably provoked, at least in part, by the hope of ‘compo,’ that is to say compensation, the modern form of alchemy that transmutes not base metal, but distress, into gold. And motivated exaggeration soon becomes a habit, a whole way of life.

Nor should we underestimate the role of boredom in the production of exaggerated emotion: for what is human life without drama? The scale of a life in which the finding of a chicken foot in a roast chicken (perhaps one day the geneticists will engineer a chicken without feet, thus obviating the problem for supermarkets) may readily be imagined; in such an existence, the throwing of tantrums must stand guarantor of life’s significance and meaning.

The article in the local newspaper depended for its effect on readers upon another unspoken, widely-accepted but deeply sentimental notion: namely, that in any conflict between a large organisation and an individual, the organisation must be to blame and the individual must have been maltreated. Now of course we should not fall prey to precisely the opposite, equally sentimental notion, namely that large commercial organisations serve only the public and can do no wrong because they operate in a market place. There are, perhaps, some people who believe this, but they may be swiftly excluded from the kingdom of the sane.

But given that we all have had experience in our daily lives of how cruelly, shabbily and dishonestly human beings, including ourselves, sometimes treat each other as individuals, it is surely stretching credibility to suppose that those same human beings, with all their capacity for greed and mendacity, should suddenly become as pure as the driven snow and as truthful as George Washington in their dealings with large organisations. Yet this is precisely the preposterous premise that the writer of the story assumed that his readers would accept without question.

It is not possible to conclude from the bookshelves of one shop in one small town, or from one story in one minor local newspaper, that an entire country of 60,000,000 inhabitants such as Great Britain is now sunk, or at least is now sinking, in a foetid swamp of sentimentality whose aesthetic, intellectual and moral correlates are dishonesty, vulgarity and barbarity; but if such were the case, as I contend that it is, observation of the fact would have to start somewhere. And it is easier to find confirmatory evidence than to find disconfirmatory evidence. No social phenomenon, however well-attested, is uniform: if I say that the Dutch are now the tallest people in the world, I do not mean that every one of them is well over six feet tall. The response to the bombings in London by Moslem fanatics in July, 2005, was admirably restrained and stoical, in keeping with an earlier tradition; but this does not mean that childish and uncontrolled emotionality is not a growing feature of our national life and character.

Certainly, the transfer of moral authority from adult to child is not confined to impulsive defenestrators of dinners. A semantic shift illustrates this very well. The word ‘pupil’ is now hardly ever used of children in school; every child is a ‘student’ from the moment he enters kindergarten. It used to be that the transition from pupil to student was an important one, almost a metamorphosis in fact, or at least a rite of passage. A pupil was highly dependent upon a teacher for what he learnt, who decided what it was necessary for a pupil to learn; by contrast, a student, having mastered certain basic skills and acquired, to an extent by rote, a framework of knowledge laid down for him by his elders and betters, was more self-directed in his learning. He did not acquire independent authority over what he learnt by virtue merely of drawing breath; he acquired it by virtue of certified accomplishment.

A friend of mine was once a teacher of severely mentally handicapped children. His worthy task was to train them to become as independent as possible. He taught them such skills as buttoning up their shirts and putting on their shoes. One day a directive emerged from the local government body that employed him: henceforth, the severely handicapped children were to be known as ‘students.’

The directive was simultaneously absurd, grandiose, sentimental, linguistically impoverishing and insulting: not an easy combination to achieve in so short a compass. It was absurd, grandiose and sentimental because it supposed that hard realities — in this case, the profound handicaps of some unfortunate children — could be altered fundamentally and in desirable ways by simple bureaucratic fiat.

The decree was linguistically impoverishing because it made the distinctions between different categories of people slightly more difficult to express. If a fifteen year-old who is laboriously learning to do up his buttons is a student, what are we to call a young man learning physics or classics at university? If he, too, is a student, what will the word student actually convey? Thus a word com...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise
• About the Author
• Title Page
• Contents
• Epigraph
• Introduction: Children
• 1: Sentimentality
• 2: What is Sentimentality?
• 3: The Family Impact Statement
• 4: The Demand for Public
• 5: The Cult of the Victim
• 6: Make Poverty History!
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Also by TheoDore Dalrymple
• Copyright