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HOW WE BRITS LOST OUR SELF CONTROL

HOMEPAGE NEWS REPORTS INDEX

NEWS AUGUST 2010

Original Source: EXPRESS: SUNDAY 29 AUGUST 2010
Sunday August 29,2010 By Neil Hamilton
 

The McCanns’ stoic refusal to exhibit emotion in public caused much hostility

SPOILT ROTTEN: THE TOXIC GLUT OF SENTIMENTALITY Once upon a time, the British had a stiff upper lip. At Waterloo, Lord Uxbridge was hit by a cannon ball while on a horse next to the Duke of Wellington and merely exclaimed: “By God, sir, I’ve lost my leg!” to which Wellington replied: “By God, sir, so you have!”

The remains of said leg were then amputated without antiseptic or anaesthetic and Uxbridge’s only reaction was: “The knives seem rather blunt.” He later refused a huge pension of £1,200 a year on account of his injuries.

Adversity used to be something to be endured and, if possible, overcome without making a fuss. Children were seen and not heard. Respectability prohibited washing dirty linen in public and only foreigners (particularly volatile Latins) were given to embarrassing public histrionics.

What on earth has happened in the past half century to produce such unBritish excesses as Diana-mania, the Jeremy Kyle Show, political correctness, the compensation culture and public paranoia about everything from smoking to sunshine?

Theodore Dalrymple’s excellent Spoilt Rotten offers some thought‑provoking insights and explains how emotional constipation in our national psyche has become emotional diarrhoea.

It all started in school. On the old Jesuit principle “Give us a child at five and he is ours for life”,left-wing educational theorists systematically undermined traditional values and disciplines. Schools were not for imparting and storing knowledge but places of “activity and experience”.

Teaching spelling and grammar was boring; children should discover the rules for themselves. As Dalrymple tartly observes, that is like putting a child under an apple tree to discover Newton’s theory of gravity. Coupled with a collapse of discipline, the result was predictable. Nowadays, children from dysfunctional middle-class families are given too many liberties, the benefit of the doubt when it’s clear they’re in the wrong. Problems have been exacerbated by family breakdown as marriage has been officially emptied of moral, social, practical and contractual content. Frighteningly, 79 per cent of children have a TV in their bedrooms, far more than have their father at home. Not only do too many have no proper parental role model, what they see in films, TV and computers anaesthetises them to antisocial behaviour.

 

Children have to “have their own space” and “do their own thing”. It is anathema to demand they control themselves for decorum or the convenience of others. Public displays of drunkenness and other nuisance behaviour which would once have led to prosecution or social ostracism are now par for the course every weekend.

We have created an unprecedentedly egocentric generation, where giving in to your emotions is a human right. This childish and uncontrolled emotionalism is carried on into adulthood. Diana-mania would have been unthinkable in the Fifties. After Diana’s death, the air of menace towards the Royal Family for not grieving enough in public was very ugly. The Queen, ever a paragon of dignity and self-control, was almost dragged by tumbril to broadcast on TV and visit the mountains of flowers

When sentimentality becomes a mass public phenomenon, it becomes aggressively manipulative. The McCanns’ stoic refusal to exhibit emotion in public caused much hostility. The internet was awash with abuse: the Daily Mirror had to close its website devoted to the case. Some erroneously thought, as they didn’t “care” enough to beat their breasts publicly, they must have had a hand in their daughter’s disappearance.

Such mass emotionalism is also a powerful stimulus to insincerity as it often demands people express sentiments they cannot feel. Tony Blair is the prime exponent of bogus sentimentality.

This has adverse repercussions in many other areas. For example, the MacPherson report on the Stephen Lawrence case concluded the police were “institutionally racist” because if a member of an ethnic minority perceived their conduct as racist, it was racist. Full stop. No assessment necessary.

Such an attitude makes ordinary, unself-conscious human relations impossible and shows how enforced multi-culturalism tends to divide rather than unite. It also undermines the rule of law and creates a feeling of injustice.

Sentimentality does no harm if confined to private life. All normal people respond to emotional stimuli like cuddly animals or saccharine music but, in Dalrymple’s words: “As the well-spring of public policy it is as disastrous as it is prevalent.” 

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