Ruth was one of those people about whom C.S.Lewis quipped “She was always living for others—and you could tell the “others” by their hunted look. “Just as nice as could be”, Ruth was often as nasty as could be.
Ruth was a little tyrant because she believed her mission in life was to be nice and helpful. She chose her victims, I mean her “charity cases”, based on her subjective feelings. Old Mr. Livealone must be a lonely person who needed cheering up so it was Ruth’s mission to “bring him out of himself.” The single mother with a gaggle of kids and questionable other bed occupants must be miserable and in need of moral and social reform, so Ruth was the person to bring hope and change. The people at the local soup kitchen were clearly in need of not only a good hot meal, but a good hot bath, a job, and some stern advice from Ruth.
“Ruth or ruthless?” someone asked. At which point another neighbor joked, “On the whole, I’d rather be Ruth-less.”
Sentimentalism is the tyrannical tendency in both personal and social life to decide one’s position and determine one’s actions based on subjective sentiments alone. Without any other anchor, individual sentiments are unpredictable, inconsistent, and ultimately tyrannical masters.
Sentiment is based in human feelings and the most base level of human feelings we might call “emotion” for want of a better term. “Emotion” is the raw product.
It is the animal instinct—the wordless gut feeling—the surge of rage or the lift of love. It is the nameless chthonic feeling itself—the low of loneliness and the exhilaration of ecstasy. It is the instantaneous instinct of fight or flight. Emotion is completely irrational, nameless, and inarticulate. It simply is. The person who lives in constant reaction to basic emotion is immature, unstable, unpredictable, and dangerous.
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Read more: www.theimaginativeconservative.org
BOOKS:
Faking it:
Sentimentalization of Modern Society
by Digby C. Anderson and Peter Mullen
Faking It - The Sentimentalisation of Modern Society
Ed. Digby Anderson & Peter Mullen .
Published by the Social Affairs Unit 1998
"Faking It" claims to chart what it calls "the march of the fraudulent through modern society":
- Government policies " obsessed with spin, image and gesture rather than substance"
- "Sentimental environmental obsessions"
- "Narcissistic, Godless religion"
- "A school system with no education in it, a welfare system which actually promoted dependency not welfare...elevation of fake feeling in novels and music"
With particular reference to Princess Diana's funeral "in which sentimentality - mob grief - was personified an canonised and feeling exalted above reason, reality and restraint".
The Study sees the "woes of society - crime, broken families, failing school standards, confusion about morality and manners" as less attributable to "bad ideas or perverted interests" but through the rise of sentimentality in modern society.
People are living in "denial" eg. of man's natural capacity for evil, of the awesome reality of God, ageing, suffering, death, the need for discipline, the achievements of the modern world, self-denial...
The book is prophetic even if over-stated. It is a shot across the bows of a self-indulgent society. It's political premise is rather unsympathetic to community eg. the need to care for the underprivileged. The attack on environmentalists serves then interest of big business.
However there are many powerful challenges:
"The remedy for s is in Xy itself which is a most us, fleshly & rooted faith. The Xian faith does not shrink from looking at the world as it is, and not as we might like it to be" 117
cf. Eliot's s always "dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good".
"The new emphasis (in worship) is all on the needs of the gathered community of worshippers, and so the traditional proclamation of an encounter with a transcendent and terrifying God has been played down...in religious observances we want the cosy experiences of togetherness and cuddling up to the kindly God, but without any of the old disciplines crucial to traditional faith, Bethlehem without Calvary"
Confronting reality with hope and fortitude is a lost art:
"So large part of human life passes in a state contrary to our natural desires that one of the principal topics of moral instruction is the art of bearing calamities. And such is the certainty of evil that it is the duty of every man to furnish his mind with those principles that may enable him to act under it with decency and propriety.
Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, No. 32 quoted p38
On facing the reality of sin and self-assertion:
"From a social point of view, sa is destructive since it leads inevitably to a clash of wills. These self-destructive impulses can only be overcome by conscious self-discipline." 44
"The rhetoric of victimisation...seeks to explain what happens to African Americans totally in terms of larger social forces without due consideration to the moral response of individuals. This rhetoric has become the great alibi." 49
"Real life moral dilemmas consist of choices not between good and evil (that's too easy to resolve) but between two evils. The existence of that kind of world is precisely what advocates of s cannot face" 51
"Faith has been replaced...not by a tough all round scepticism, but by a sentimental credulity. Lots of seemingly sensible people, for example, now believe in ideas like the innate goodness of children, a notion our grandparents would have thought absurd." 59
"No one thinking of (children's) good could possibly suggest a light disciplinary regime" 64
"As idle as you may be, self-esteem is reckoned your due portion" 66
"Environmental comments are brimming with "factoids" - bits and pieces of information, which, upon constant repetition, take on a semblance of truth." 89
Contrast some such propaganda with the late Dixy Lee Ray's description of the "natural" world of her childhood in the early 1900's:
"The world in which I spent my early years was a very smelly place. The prevailing odours were of horse manure, human sweat, and unwashed bodies. A daily shower was unknown; at most there was the Saturday night bath.
"Indoors the air was generally musty and permeated by the sweetly acrid stench of kerosene lamps and coal fires. It was the era of the horse and buggy, the outhouse and dirt. Depending upon the weather, it was either dirty or muddy."
She goes on to say that through progress in food production and medicine human life is no longer dependent on the whims of uncaring nature. "We have been privileged to live through the most extraordinary five decades of expanding knowledge and its use for bettering life that the world has ever known. Little wonder that some people cannot cope." 91 D.L.Ray Trashing the Planet 1990
i.e. s ignores the drawbacks and inconveniences of the past.
On Xy Peter Mullen writes with less than objectivity of "The New Deformation" by which "two fashionable tendencies: the liberal theology of demythologising and the so-called "happy-clappy" revivalism of the Charismatic Movement" have squeezed traditional belief and practice almost into suffocation. 103 "This is right" has become "This feels right" under the influence of s 105
On the Peace: "All the body-language is over-inflected in a style which would seem insincere even on the theatrical stage." 106
On Charismatic worship: "Nothing is being communicated except a sentimental-paranoiac proclamation of the superior, privileged status of the Charismatic in-group. Bonding ceremonies for the like-minded" 108
On language in worship "There is no such thing as a noble truth communicated in ignoble words." C.H. Sisson 108
On changes to the Prayer Book: "Traditional Xy is robust and us. It has no illusions about human dep-ravity The glory of it all is that God loves us, bad as we are. The new s in religion glosses over our dark side, and therefore it is not only a doctrinal failure; it is psychologically inaccurate and finally incoherent". 112
Talk of "contemplative therapy" i.e. customer care replacing awe before the divine mystery. 113
Terribly un-politically correct on homosexuality:
"Most gay men have more sexual partners in a year than most heterosexuals have in a lifetime" 172
"It might be worth comparing the numbers of closeted young gay men who have committed suicide in the last 15 years with the hundreds of thousands who have died because they've celebrated their sexuality even unto death" 174
"The distraught aborter agonising publicly over her agonising personal decision sits so much better between the soaps and talk shows. Without a culture of s, it would not be possible for a civilised society to tolerate abortion. We would understand all too well what it really is." 177
On Diana: "The fact that the majority of people in Britain think that Diana was right to put self before role and to think of the Queen as a domineering mother-in-law is indicative of the s of our time" 186
"In the therapeutic world in which D increasingly moved, one's only duty is to one's own feelings, their expression and fulfillment.. You scream, you give vent to your anger, you throw yourself downstairs. This is literally infantilism, but it is part of what was be in celebrated in Westminster Abbey on September 6th" 185
"D was in fact aligning herself with non-judgmentalism about the whole gamut of private activities, and subscribing to the view that in private matters all that really matters is that we are nice to each other, and that we live and let live, no matter that some private activities do incalculable harm, not least to children." 188
"What we had in that week was a potent mixture of popular culture and undogmatic religiosity, as the sacrificial victim was canonised...The culture of caring, of niceness, of the people, was triumphant." 190
(from Ch 11 "Diana, queen of hearts" - s personified & canonised by Professor Anthony O'Hear - Philosophy, Bradford)
On how s has blinded us to disapproval of crime, a re-telling of the Parable of the Good Samaritan is going the rounds with two social workers taking the place of the priest and Levite. They observe the man "who fell among thieves" lying by the roadside, and ads they pass on one says to the other, "The person who did that certainly needs help." 194
The 19th Century Xian response to the Romantics was to stressed duty as an imperative beyond feeling, a response such that s was scorned for the first half of this century.
Is a new Xian response beginning?
A very thought provoking book, overstated but near the mark in a number of aspects. I cannot shrug it of as right wing polemic altogether, it touches on some deep errors around today.
J.F.Twisleton
25 May 1998
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