Spoilt Rotten! by Theodore Dalrymple: review

'Theodore Dalrymple’ is the pseudonym of a former prison doctor who, for many years, transmuted his daily experience into journalistic gold. In his regular articles, he informed his middle-class readers about a world that may have seemed as distant to them as that of the Amazonian Indians: vicious criminals convinced of their own essential innocence, young women who willingly went straight back from the hospital treatment of their broken limbs to the abusive boyfriends who had broken them, and so on.

Yet that world was located not in a distant jungle but in the streets and housing estates of an English city. The snarlingly aggressive and painfully ignorant people he described were the recipients of many years of compulsory education, plus the attentions of social services of all kinds. And the harsh truths he told were all the more shocking because the media, in general, was unwilling to tell them.

Now retired from his prison work, Dr Dalrymple has turned to the diagnosis of our ailing society at large. In his new book, he argues that sentimentality is the virus that is eating away at modern life. It destroys the sense of responsibility; it undermines human relationships; and it has a close affinity with aggression and violence.

Those who think of sentimentality in terms of Valentine’s Day cards or three-hankie movies may find this a little surprising. How is sentimentality connected with, for example, what Dalrymple calls 'the general drunken and drug-fuelled sauve qui peut in the centres of British towns every Friday and Saturday night’?

The answer lies, he says, in the Romantic idea that feelings must be expressed, and that passions and desires are innocent – which means that they deserve instant gratification. Tact, consideration, self-control and fortitude are cast aside: they indicate 'repression’, which is bad for you. Good manners are thus reduced to an undesirable psychological condition. But the cult of feeling can have more dramatic consequences than that. As Dalrymple notes, the lynch-law of the media now dictates that anyone who fails to show sufficient feeling in public (the Queen after Diana’s death, Kate McCann after the disappearance of her daughter Madeleine) will be denounced and denigrated.

This is what makes sentimentality so much worse than a mere windy emotionalism: at its core is a special kind of self-righteousness. You do not just have a feeling, whatever it may be (caring passionately about 'kiddies’, for example, even if the children in question are completely unknown to you); you have a warm glow of superiority in expressing that feeling and hence a righteous hatred of those who do not show it too. 'There is’, Dalrymple observes, 'always something coercive or bullying about public displays of sentimentality.’

The range of topics here is wide, from tattooing ('the notion of tattooing oneself as a means of expressing one’s feeling for another is both savage and sentimental, a sign of an empty heart’s search for emotion’) to the 'Make Poverty History’ campaign.

Sometimes, indeed, one begins to think that Dalrymple is spreading his net too widely, so that 'sentimentality’ comes to stand for any moralising view that does not satisfy his own scrutiny; it’s not that these things should not be criticised, merely that sentimentalism may not be the key to what is wrong with them.

As for his general criticism of the assumptions of modern educational theory and social policy (that people are naturally good, discipline is bad, relationships are based on love and are naturally dissolved as soon as love fails): these ideas have long and complex histories, in which sentimentalism is only part of the story. The 'progressive’ attack on discipline, and on traditional institutions such as the family, was concerned as much with power-structures and class as it ever was with sentiment or human goodness.

Somewhere in the background there is indeed a Romantic world-view, at best over-optimistic and at worst disastrously naive. Dalrymple is right to connect this with Rousseau, but wrong to portray the Swiss-French philosopher as a sentimentalist about education.

Of an infant Rousseau wrote: 'if he once finds out how to gain your attention at will, he is your master, and his whole upbringing is spoilt’. If a child hits you in earnest, he said, you should immediately hit him back, harder. If he breaks the window in his bedroom, leave it unmended until the cold winds make him shiver; if he breaks it again, put him in a dark room with no windows at all.

It’s a sad confirmation of Dr Dalrymple’s thesis to think that Rousseau, today, would be taken away by the social services, prosecuted for child abuse and hounded as a monster by the tabloid press.

Spoilt Rotten! The Toxic Cult of Sentimentality

By Theodore Dalrymple

GIBSON SQUARE, £14.99, 260pp

Available from Telegraph Books 0844 871 1516