The Deceit of Sentimentality

The Victorians were not big fans of sentimentality. This has been misrepresented in the popular stereotype of the aloof, stodgy, and unemotional Victorians. One thing I find amazing when reading many Victorian writers is how well they understood human psychology, the works of Samuel Smiles comes immediately to mind. His book Self Help (1855) began the self-improvement movement of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.

In 1972, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman introduced the idea of a cognitive bias, defined as “a pattern of deviation in judgment that occurs in particular situations, leading to perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, illogical interpretation, or what is broadly called irrationality.”

Since then, about a hundred cognitive biases have been identified by psychologists. The Victorians may not have had such a fancy word as “cognitive bias” but perhaps they had a greater understanding for the human capacity for self-deceit. This concept was widely understood as sentimentality and discouraged in Victorian society as a vice.

Sentimentalism describes an orientation to reality where a person believes that how they feel about reality takes precedent over what is actually true. Sounds silly, doesn’t it, but it is an easy trap to fall into when a person confuses their subjective feelings of reality with reality itself.

I wonder how many people define good and evil according to their feelings. The good is that which makes me feel good and evil is that which makes me feel bad. So, liberals are good because their idea of free school lunches makes me feel good and conservatives are evil because their idea of taking away school lunch programs makes me feel bad. In such a situation, it does not matter if the conservatives, for the sake of this example, can make rational and supported arguments as to why school lunches create more harm than good. Nothing said would change the fact that the idea of not having school lunches makes me feel bad. This is sentimentality in action.

Oscar Wilde wrote, "Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live." This is the path of sentimentality. When a person believes that their feelings take precedent not only over reality but also over the feelings of others, then we are dealing with a person with a severe ego problem, or what philosophy calls solipsism, simply defined as person who believes that they are the centre of the universe and other people are nothing more than animated scenery.

I do not believe that anyone would consciously subscribe to solipsism, but their actions imply this to be their unconscious driving belief. We find this in people who decry the speck in the eye of another, but fail to see the mote in their own eye. A phrase found on the internet, “Your rights end where my feelings begin” also illustrates this perspective.

Words like sentimentality, ego, selfishness, feelings, solipsism, and even arrogance are all part of the same conceptual package. Most of these are considered negative traits with the exception of sentimentality and feelings which in themselves are not bad things. The problem comes when they are put into positions of cognitive power within the psyche; when feelings about reality take authority over the rational thoughts about reality.

Think of it this way. Reason is the king on his throne. Feelings are the advisor whispering in the king’s ear. These suggestions are considered by the king and either acted upon or not according to his judgement. Sentimentality is the court jester who makes us laugh or weep at a movie or indulges fond thoughts of nostalgia, but ultimately the emotions inspired by him are not derived from reality. The advisor is a great advisor. The jester is a great jester. However, neither is qualified to be king.

While the Romantic Era denounced sentimentality the current era has embraced it. People are socially conditioned to it. People are encouraged to follow their hearts, to just believe, and express their emotions. In films, all the guy has to do is express his feelings and the girl comes running. It does not work that way in real life, but we have been socially conditioned to believe it does.

In politics, evidence has shown that more people vote for or against someone according to how they feel about a candidate rather than according to policies. This was never as apparent as in the 2008 US Presidential election where Barack Obama was granted almost divine status because of how he made people feel. He was even given the Nobel Peace Prize less than a month after he took office. In the three years since, his interventionist military policies have been no different than those of his predecessor, George W. Bush who was universally reviled for his use of the military. In the same vein, the global anti-war movement was a powerful force during the Bush presidency, but vanished under Obama despite the fact that he increased troops in Afghanistan. Why? Because people felt bad about Bush, but they feel good about Obama. It’s all about sentimentality.

Another feature of modern sentimentality in society and politics is the use of emotional human shields to defend or promote a political position. These are people that society has good feelings about that a political group associates themselves with so that it is impossible to challenge their politics without looking like you are attacking the people that society loves.

So you cannot be against the welfare state without appearing like you hate the poor. You cannot be against state regulation of the internet when its proponents are doing it “for the children”. You cannot be in favour of English in California without looking like you hate immigrants or that you are a racist. In Britain, you cannot be in favour of cuts to the National Health Service without looking like you want to get rid of nurses. You cannot be against government waste without looking like you hate teachers. You cannot be against political correctness without appearing like you have no consideration for others.

If we define the moral as that which makes us feel good, and we associate ourselves with members of society that make people feel good, then we are on the side of the angels; and anyone who stands against us is evil, and evil must be destroyed so we can all live happy lives together.

In America this largely describes the liberal-type, but the conservative equivalent is not immune to sentimentality. The difference is that the Right is largely Christian and their ideas of morality come not from feelings but from religious doctrine. That is not to say that they do not have strong feelings about that or that they do not use it justify pre-existing feelings. Sentimentality is indeed present among conservatives, however unlike with liberals it is at least counter-balanced with a fixed traditional religious doctrine rather than whim-based emotionalism and social conditioning.

The libertarians tend to draw their moral foundations from secular philosophy. Many of those philosophers were Christians, but others were Atheists or Deists. Religion does not play a major role as the focus is primarily on immediate practicalities. Theirs is the belief that the moral is the rational, whether the rules of reality were of a divine source or not is largely irrelevant to the fact that they are true. This lack of sentimentality makes libertarians easy targets for the sentimental who paint them as uncaring because they do not subscribe to the same emotional motivations that they do.

The archetypal sentimentalist is a creature of ego who cannot perceive the world beyond their own feelings, which they feel very deeply and sometimes to the extreme. They exist trapped within a cage of limited perception where they cannot see reality beyond their feelings. In practice, they treat their feelings as a sort of seventh sense [the sixth sense is balance btw] that gives them insight into the world rather than recognising that how they feel is just how they feel and nothing more. They confuse the internal world and the external world, the subjective and the objective, fantasy and reality.

This creature is the Twentieth Century norm and manifests itself to varying degrees in a huge number of variants in all political, social, and religious orientations. The Victorians were right to perceive this level of self-delusion to be a vice. The question is how does one fight a plague that is so wide-spread? I accept that it is not easy. Who wants to tell the crying person to shut-up. She and all her friends might think she is crying for the poor trees destroyed by evil loggers, but you know that she is actually being sentimental and only crying for herself. Who wants to be the cold, cruel voice of reality and be the bad guy for what is right?

So what can you do to save society from this virus? Nothing. Society can mean one of two things. It’s either a word used to describe the interactions between a number of individuals or it’s a collection of individuals on which we impose our unique beliefs about it, just like I’ve done in this essay. According to both definitions, very few people have the means to even try to affect it. But what you do have power over is yourself.

This is where the Church of the Romantic comes into play. The whole point of a philosophy or religion is to make yourself better. In this instance this means learning to recognise sentimentality in yourself and others and not be ruled by it. Learn to recognise the difference between real and fake emotions.

When your girl says she loves you and you feel all gooey inside, that’s real. After she has dumped you and you sit alone in your room mourning what you think what coulda, shoulda, woulda been if only, that’s fake. Real emotional responses are to real things. Fake emotions are responses to your idea of things and therefore have more to do with what is going on in your head than anything real world. Real emotions are sudden reactions to your perception of external stimuli and usually seem to hit you from nowhere.

Here’s another example. When you are watching TV and the commercial comes on with the starving kids in Africa and you get all choked-up, that’s fake. You are getting emotional over your idea of starving kids in general and not the reality of a specific kid you know and have a relationship with starving to death. Yes, there are children starving in Africa. That is real and something can and should be done about it. This action can be accomplished without sentimentality; the kind that makes you reach for your wallet for any aid organisation that comes along without thinking things through.

Edward Bernays, the father of modern marketing and propaganda, understood that people are motivated by their feelings.   If you can control how people feel about a concept, and by concept I mean their idea of a person, place, or thing, then you can control them. These are the strings that control the puppet.  This also works if you know how they feel already and match whatever you are selling to those feelings. If successful, then people will think that this manipulated concept of reality in their minds is in fact reality itself. You see this at work most often in advertising, media, politics, and the cult of personality.

The goal of the Romantic is to condition yourself to see and passionately feel what is and not be led astray by feelings of what is imagined. Yes, we can indulge our sentimentality and it can even help to fuel these passions. Just don’t let the jester sit on the throne lest the kingdom come to ruin.