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VANCOUVER SUN Sentimentality: The dark side
https://vancouversun.com/news/staff-blogs/the-dark-side-of-sentimentality
Sentimentality: The dark side
Douglas Todd
Updated: January 28, 2012
Can we go emotionally overboard even for apple pie? As well as moms and dogs and children?
Mom and apple pie. Dogs and cats. Weddings and babies. God and country.
These are just some of the things about which people become sentimental.
We call people “sentimental” when they express unusually strong emotional attachments to events, objects, places, eras and beliefs. Even if syrupy, we are used to viewing sentimentality as non-threatening.
But there can be a sharp downside to sentimentality. It is not always as tied with goodness and warmth as many think. Indeed, sentimentality can be dangerous to our health, well-being and collective future.
We normally associate super “nice” women and men with sentimentality. Their feelings have a way of seeming innocuous and pre-packaged. But sentimentality also arises in creepy people, including demagogues, oligarchs and murderers.
After all, the Second World War Italian dictator Benito Mussolini considered Adolf Hitler a “sentimentalist.” The Fuhrer would cry quite easily, including when greeting his savage Italian brother-in-arms.
And many of the Nazi commandants who ran concentration camps also became known for practicing horrendous torture and mass murder by day. Meanwhile, in the evening, they would cry at their child’s piano recital.
The acclaimed HBO series, The Sopranos, frequently captures the sentimentality of Mafia members. It portrays Tony Soprano and his cruel cronies weeping about their mothers, sniffling at old movies, idealizing their children, lamenting the loss of tradition and being fiercely protective of their wives (on whom they systematically cheat with their “goombahs,” ie. mistresses).
If mothers, apple pie, nostalgic movies and babies seem so benign, how can sentimentality be so dangerous?
Sentimentality can be a way of denying reality.
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It can be the root of irrational passions and misplaced idealism; the fuel of ideology and fundamentalism. Hitler, after all, thought the answer to Germany’s problem lay in his “sentimental” utopian vision of racial purity.
Before we go further, it is crucial to define sentimentality, because the meaning has changed.
Before the 1800s, “sentimental” was simply a synonym for “feeling.” Nothing wrong with emotion.
But, about 150 years ago, Britons began adding a twist to the word. They began using sentimental to describe excessive feeling, particularly emotions that don’t have a basis in actuality.
Oscar Wilde, the 19th-century British playwright and wit, summed up this edgier meaning when he wrote: “A sentimentalist is one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.”
Similarly, the Irish poet W.B. Yeats wrote, “Rhetoric is fooling others. Sentimentality is fooling yourself.”
Nowadays, critics will describe plays, movies, books or paintings as “sentimental,” or “maudlin,” if they believe they rely on over-familiar techniques – like romantic love or patriotism or revenge – to manipulate our emotions. Sentimentalism is often defined, helpfully, as over-simplification: of feelings and of existence itself.
Psychologists say that sentimentality, or excessive sweetness, is a defence reaction. It is a bulwark against acknowledging more painful emotions, particularly anger, shame or grief.
The need to over-simplify a person and the past, to make them feel safer, is explored by novelist Johanna Skibsrud in her
book, The Sentimentalist, which surprisingly won Canada’s 2010 Giller Prize.
The Sentimentalist is a grown daughter’s exploration of her father’s complex experience of the Vietnam War. When her father tells her to, “Remember me when I am dead, and simplify me when I am dead,” the daughter writes: “These are the words of a rank sentimentalist.”
Psychological researchers have discovered in recent years that such sentimental simplifications can have a darker underbelly than even Skibsrud suggests in her book.
Many therapists say sentimentality is one of the symptoms of narcissism, which in turn can be a characteristic of psychopathy, as it may well have been for Hitler, Mussolini and Tony Soprano.
The widely cited author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited, who admits to being a recovering narcissist himself, paints a devastating picture of how sentimentality can manifest itself in disordered people.
“The narcissist is a human pendulum hanging by the thread of the void that is his False Self. He swings between brutal and vicious abrasiveness – and mellifluous, saccharine sentimentality,” writes Sam Vaknin, who has a PhD in physics but now specializes in therapy.
Narcissists come bundled with overpowering negative emotions, Vaknin writes, notably anger and envy. “Rather than experience these {negative emotions}, narcissists prefer to imitate emotions and affect.”
In other words, Vaknin says narcissists fake their feelings. They frequently “act out” pre-packaged emotions, including devotion to ideals (such as the “family,” the “homeland,” “the environment” or “God”). That way they achieve their manipulative ends.
Noted British psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple recently made an even wider argument against sentimentality. He claims it is the root of virtually all of his country’s social sufferings.
“To make up for its lack of a moral compass, the British public is prey to sudden gusts of kitschy sentimentality followed by vehement outrage, encouraged by the cheap and cynical sensationalism of its press. Spasms of self-righteousness are its substitute for the moral life,” says Dalrymple, author of Spoilt Rotten: The Toxic Cult of Sentimentality.
Spoilt Rotten conjures up Britain’s falling standards in education, its aid policies for African development, the death of Diana, Princess of Wales and the work and life of Sylvia Plath to illustrate what Dalrymple maintains are the dangers of abandoning logic in favour of sentimentality, which he describes as “the progenitor, the god-parent, the midwife of brutality.”
Does Dalrymple go over the top in his warnings about sentimentalism?
Even though his 2010 book has been widely praised, others say it is extremist, self-righteous and cynical.
It is important to not be too quick to see sentimentality in others, whether they seem blandly nice or emotionally devious.
The philosopher I.A. Richards teaches that “a response is sentimental if it is too great for the occasion.” But we also have to check the facts. Richards cautions that “we cannot judge whether any response is sentimental unless we take careful account of the situation.”
It’s also worth pointing out that the opposite of sentimentality is not coldness, or lack of feeling. Nor is it harsh cynicism. Emotions are foundational for humans, animals and other living things.
Indeed, “sentimentalism,” in the old sense of the word as “feeling” or “sympathy,” is becoming key to a new school of philosophy. “Moral sentimentalism” is an emerging ethical system that goes beyond stringent logic to include empathy.
The focus here, however, is on the insidious aspects of over-simplified sentimentality, the kind of things that individuals, advertisers and politicians play on to manipulate us – to make us believe there are easy answers to complex situations.
A better antonym for the word, “sentimentality,” may be “mature realism.”
This kind of realism requires a balanced look at both the positives and negatives. It embraces emotions, but also calls us to look below the surface of our own motives and those of others.
Mature realism means avoiding cheap idealization. It requires a willingness to examine the good and bad of everything, whether of dogs or ideology.
Even of moms and apple pie.
Twitter: @douglastodd
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