Non, répond Theodore Dalrymple
Le correspondant londonien du Monde, Marc Roche, rapportant la manière dont l'affaire MC a été exploitée et sentimentalisée par les médias britanniques, a attiré l'attention de ses lecteurs lundi sur la domination que le sentiment, la spontanéité et l'imagerie exercent maintenant en Angleterre sur la vie publique, aux dépens de la raison, de la réalité et de la réserve traditionnelle. Il avait absolument raison de le faire.
Personne ne peut reprocher aux MC d’avoir utilisé toutes les moyens, y compris la prière papale, pour récupérer leur fille. Ils souffrent horriblement à la suite d'un acte d’inattention. Ils ne sont certainement pas à blâmer pour le spectacle que la Grande-Bretagne fait maintenant d'elle-même.
Nul doute que les médias soutiendraient qu'ils ne font que répondre à la demande du public, ou à ce qu'ils croient être la demande du public - et apparemment, ils l'ont correctement évaluée. Cependant, rien ne justifie que la BBC s’associe à cet étalage grotesque de Death-of-Little-Nellism: car si les gens peuvent libérer leurs sentiments, il n’y a aucune raison de leur facturer des frais pour cela.
Little Nell, is a fictional main character of The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens, portrayed as infallibly good and virginal. Her death has been described as "the apotheosis of Victorian sentimentality."
La question importante est celle-ci: pourquoi la Grande-Bretagne s'est-elle adonnée à un autre spectacle émotionnel de classe kitsch à échelle mondiale? Et je pense que la réponse est évidente. C'est parce que nous traitons si mal nos enfants.
La question importante est celle-ci: pourquoi la Grande-Bretagne s'est-elle adonnée à un autre spectacle émotionnel de classe kitsch à échelle mondiale? Et je pense que la réponse est évidente. C'est parce que nous traitons si mal nos enfants.
C’est un lieu commun psychologique que le sentimentalisme coexiste souvent avec la cruauté, et ce n’est pas par hasard que cette explosion de violence a lieu dans le pays où, selon un rapport récent de l’Unicef, la vie des enfants est pire que dans tout autre pays comparable.
Plus de parents britanniques que je n'en connais ne mangent pas avec leurs enfants, ne jouent pas avec eux ou ne passent pas de temps avec eux, ne prennent pas plaisir à leurs enfants, ne les soignent pas et ne portent aucun intérêt constant à leur éducation; beaucoup semblent penser que l'achat de kits de formation ou de gadgets électroniques coûteux est un excellent substitut pour toutes ces choses. Le sentimentalisme des tabloïds est le tribut que l'indifférence payée au sentiment réel.
L'effusion de sentimentalisme que l'enlèvement de Madeleine a stimulée témoigne également de la conviction répandue que l'expression de l'émotion ne peut pas et ne doit pas être disciplinée par la raison, et ne doit donc pas être, même en gros, proportionnelle à ce qui l'a motivée. Ainsi, une personne qui ne sanglote pas et ne se jette pas dans les bras d'autrui sur le moindre prétexte est réputée être insensible.
L'effusion de sentimentalisme que l'enlèvement de Madeleine a stimulée témoigne également de la conviction répandue que l'expression de l'émotion ne peut pas et ne doit pas être disciplinée par la raison, et ne doit donc pas être, même en gros, proportionnelle à ce qui l'a motivée. Ainsi, une personne qui ne sanglote pas et ne se jette pas dans les bras d'autrui sur le moindre prétexte est réputée être insensible.
La sentimentalisation de la vie publique britannique est destructrice de la pensée et même du sentiment. Il est désormais impossible de rapporter un meurtre sans qu'un policier de haut rang déclare devant un micro qu'il est insensé (comme s'il y avait des assassinats raisonnables) et que son cœur va à la famille, suivi par des membres de la famille affirmant que la victime était une personne charmante avec un sourire éclatant, un sens de l'humour et un brillant avenir devant elle, comme si le caractère odieux du meurtre dépendait des qualités de la personne assassinée. Le caractère odieux d'un meurtre est qu’il s’agit d’un meurtre, non pas que celui-ci nous prive d’un doux sourire et de propos spirituels.
Le cas de Madeleine est sans aucun doute tragique et quiconque a la moitié d'un cœur sympathise avec les MC : mais le monde est rempli de tragédies et nous ne pouvons pas les ressentir toutes comme nôtres. Il est vrai que certaines tragédies sont emblématiques de quelque chose de plus large, à l’instar de l’affaire Bulger; mais il faut de la raison et de l'intelligence, et non des bouffées d'émotion brute, pour déterminer en quoi de tels cas sont emblématiques. L’affaire MC semble être une tragédie du hasard qui ne signifie rien au-delà d'elle-même. L'intense concentration sur elle doit susciter des sentiments d'injustice chez ceux dont les tragédies n'ont pas été annoncées de la même manière et dont ils doivent supporter seuls les conséquences douloureuses.
Si toute la publicité de mauvais goût et rivalisant agressivement entourant l'enlèvement de Madeleine avait été utile pour la retrouver, cela pourrait, je suppose, être justifié; mais 99,99 pour cent de cela ne saurait en aucun cas y parvenir. En effet, cela sert probablement à brouiller les pistes pour les enquêteurs.
Cependant, la pire caractéristique du sentimentalisme auquel nous sommes devenus si enclins est qu’il est le moyen par lequel nous évitons la vérité. Il est intimidant par nature, car il exige que tout le monde exprime la même chose. Il exige à la fois que nous mentions et qu'on nous mente.
Le cas de Madeleine est sans aucun doute tragique et quiconque a la moitié d'un cœur sympathise avec les MC : mais le monde est rempli de tragédies et nous ne pouvons pas les ressentir toutes comme nôtres. Il est vrai que certaines tragédies sont emblématiques de quelque chose de plus large, à l’instar de l’affaire Bulger; mais il faut de la raison et de l'intelligence, et non des bouffées d'émotion brute, pour déterminer en quoi de tels cas sont emblématiques. L’affaire MC semble être une tragédie du hasard qui ne signifie rien au-delà d'elle-même. L'intense concentration sur elle doit susciter des sentiments d'injustice chez ceux dont les tragédies n'ont pas été annoncées de la même manière et dont ils doivent supporter seuls les conséquences douloureuses.
Si toute la publicité de mauvais goût et rivalisant agressivement entourant l'enlèvement de Madeleine avait été utile pour la retrouver, cela pourrait, je suppose, être justifié; mais 99,99 pour cent de cela ne saurait en aucun cas y parvenir. En effet, cela sert probablement à brouiller les pistes pour les enquêteurs.
Cependant, la pire caractéristique du sentimentalisme auquel nous sommes devenus si enclins est qu’il est le moyen par lequel nous évitons la vérité. Il est intimidant par nature, car il exige que tout le monde exprime la même chose. Il exige à la fois que nous mentions et qu'on nous mente.
Spoilt Rotten
The Toxic Cult of Sentimentality
Chapitre un: sentimentalité - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Dalrymple commence le chapitre en citant plusieurs exemples pour illustrer l'augmentation du sentimentalisme en tant que phénomène culturel au Royaume-Uni. Il analyse ensuite les normes éducatives en baisse dans le pays et associe ces tendances à de "puissants courants intellectuels" qui "alimentent la grande mer des Sargasses de la sentimentalité moderne à l'égard des enfants" et affirme à cet égard que les idées du philosophe Jean Jacques Rousseau et du psychologue Steven Pinker ont été particulièrement influentes.
Chapitre deux: Qu'est-ce que la sentimentalité?
Dalrymple avance que le type de sentimentalité sur lequel il souhaite attirer l'attention est "un excès d'émotion qui est faux, mawkish et surestimé par comparaison avec la raison" et qui est interprétée "à la vue du public". Il soutient que "la sentimentalité est l'expression de l'émotion sans jugement. C'est peut-être pire que cela: c'est l'expression de l'émotion sans reconnaître que le jugement devrait entrer dans la façon dont nous devrions réagir à ce que nous voyons et entendons. C'est la manifestation d'un désir d'abrogation d'une condition existentielle de la vie humaine, à savoir la nécessité d'exercer toujours et à jamais un jugement sans fin. La sentimentalité est donc enfantine et réductrice de notre humanité ".
Chapitre trois: La déclaration d'impact familial
Dalrymple critique l'introduction par Harriet Harman de la déclaration de l'impact sur la famille. Dalrymple écrit que de telles déclarations "ne sont pas autorisées à influencer l'issue d'une affaire. Elles sont faites uniquement après que le jury a rendu son verdict". [15] En conséquence, les démonstrations d'émotions kitsch sont encouragées devant les tribunaux, sans bénéfice pratique.
Chapitre quatre: La demande d'émotion publique
Dalrymple analyse l’attention et la réaction des médias face à la disparition de Madeleine McCann et explique comment certains médias ont interprété le manque d’émotion perçu de la part des parents de la fille comme une preuve de culpabilité. Dalrymple écrit que "l'exigence selon laquelle l'émotion doit être montrée en public, ou supposée ne pas exister et donc indiquer un esprit coupable, n'est désormais plus rare" et cite deux affaires similaires impliquant Joanne Lees et Lindy Chamberlain. Dalrymple analyse ensuite le tollé suscité par le public et les médias face au manque d’émotion manifesté par la reine après le décès de la princesse Diana.
Dalrymple avance que le type de sentimentalité sur lequel il souhaite attirer l'attention est "un excès d'émotion qui est faux, mawkish et surestimé par comparaison avec la raison" et qui est interprétée "à la vue du public". Il soutient que "la sentimentalité est l'expression de l'émotion sans jugement. C'est peut-être pire que cela: c'est l'expression de l'émotion sans reconnaître que le jugement devrait entrer dans la façon dont nous devrions réagir à ce que nous voyons et entendons. C'est la manifestation d'un désir d'abrogation d'une condition existentielle de la vie humaine, à savoir la nécessité d'exercer toujours et à jamais un jugement sans fin. La sentimentalité est donc enfantine et réductrice de notre humanité ".
Chapitre trois: La déclaration d'impact familial
Dalrymple critique l'introduction par Harriet Harman de la déclaration de l'impact sur la famille. Dalrymple écrit que de telles déclarations "ne sont pas autorisées à influencer l'issue d'une affaire. Elles sont faites uniquement après que le jury a rendu son verdict". [15] En conséquence, les démonstrations d'émotions kitsch sont encouragées devant les tribunaux, sans bénéfice pratique.
Chapitre quatre: La demande d'émotion publique
Dalrymple analyse l’attention et la réaction des médias face à la disparition de Madeleine McCann et explique comment certains médias ont interprété le manque d’émotion perçu de la part des parents de la fille comme une preuve de culpabilité. Dalrymple écrit que "l'exigence selon laquelle l'émotion doit être montrée en public, ou supposée ne pas exister et donc indiquer un esprit coupable, n'est désormais plus rare" et cite deux affaires similaires impliquant Joanne Lees et Lindy Chamberlain. Dalrymple analyse ensuite le tollé suscité par le public et les médias face au manque d’émotion manifesté par la reine après le décès de la princesse Diana.
The Demand for Public Emotion
On May 3, 2007, a little girl called Madeleine McCann went missing at the beach resort of Praia da Luz in the Algarve in Portugal. Her parents, both doctors, were dining about a hundred and fifty yards away, having left her and her younger twin siblings in their holiday flat, returning to check on them every half hour or so. At about ten o’clock, Madeleine disappeared, as yet no one knows how or with whom. The case caught the imagination, or at any rate the media attention, of the whole world, and before long Maddy’s face was as recognisable as that of any movie star or footballer.
It helped that she was an attractive child with a very winning smile. She was childhood innocence personified; her parents, educated and successful, were precisely the type to whom tragedies of this type did not normally occur, but who progress through life like a hot knife through butter, earning a lot of money and retiring without financial anxiety in their old age. For this reason, no doubt, they were able to mobilise the media of mass communication, which were as ever alert to the possibilities of the story. Sales of newspapers in Britain rose significantly in the first days of the drama, and in the subsequent months the case cast a lurid light upon the emotional life not just of Britain, but of many countries. The disappearance of Madeleine, and the attempts of her parents to find her, provoked displays of emotion that were astonishing, considering that the McCanns were completely unknown to them.
A single case, well chosen, can be emblematic or illustrative of a wider problem, of course. Seventy-seven thousand children went missing in Britain last year, and while the vast majority of them were found or returned within hours or days, a significant number of them became what the police call ‘long-term missing,’ the continued absence of each of whom presumably caused immense anguish to someone. But I have never seen the case described in the wider context of children who have disappeared. The particular in this instance has remained strictly particular. In all probability, the very attractiveness of the child herself, and the fact that the parents were themselves happy, attractive and successful professionals of the kind whose children do not generally go missing in murky circumstances, assisted in turning the disappearance into a cause célèbre, partaking equally of the characteristics of a murder mystery and a Hollywood premiere.
By no means all the emotions evoked by the case have been tender; indeed, sometimes they seem to be simultaneously tender and brutal, as when a black woman called Shona Adams, who runs a model agency specialising in finding the doubles of celebrities, received death threats and racial abuse after it became known that she had found a young girl who so resembled the missing Madeleine that she might be contracted for a huge sum of money to play the role of Madeleine in a film to be made of the whole episode, of which, of course, the agency would get a generous share. (Apparently, the agency had received approaches from a hundred would-be doubles, or rather, from the parents of such doubles.)
What can have been going through the minds of those who threatened Shona Adams with murder? By acting in this way they presumably thought of themselves as guardians of Madeleine’s flame, whatever that might be; perhaps they thought her memory as being too precious to be sullied and exploited in so crassly commercial a fashion. But if this was so, it is surely rather odd that the owner of the agency alone should have been selected to receive death threats, since she was not the only link in a chain of commerce. Moreover, and more fundamentally, it is difficult to see how threats of violence, whether sincerely meant or not, could serve to keep Madeleine’s memory unsullied by worldly considerations.
What kind of sentiment is it that impels a person to threaten to kill a complete stranger because of her involvement in the commercial exploitation of the disappearance of another complete stranger, albeit one not yet old enough to have yet committed the sins of the average human being? Almost certainly the sentiment is intense but shallow and fleeting, to be resurrected in the near future by another heart-rending, tear-jerking case. And once again sentimentality seems to be dialectically related to violence and brutality, in imagination if not in deed.
Another non-tender act elicited by the case was an electronic petition sent to 10 Downing Street. It read as follows:
We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to request that Leicestershire Social Services fulfil their statutory obligation to investigate the circumstances which led to 3 year old Madeleine McCann and her younger siblings being left unattended in an unlocked, ground floor hotel room. We ask that the Prime Minister do this to reflect an even-handed approach to the important issue of child protection. We also wish to ensure that no parent will ever be able to evade responsibility for the safety and welfare of their children by citing the example of Mr and Mrs McCann, whose negligence is unreasonably being discounted in the tidal wave of sympathy brought about as a consequence of their media campaign.
This beautiful document was one of 29,000 petitions received by 10 Downing Street since it started its electronic petition scheme about a year ago, though the petition was rejected, as thousands of others were, on the grounds of its offensive language. (The whole scheme is in any case suspect, another sop to a public increasingly aware that the government machine has escaped its control entirely. And, not surprisingly, it is an invitation to sentimentality. ‘We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to speak to the European Union or anyone in power to press about Bulgaria’s abandoned children.’ Why specifically Bulgaria’s abandoned children, one cannot but ask? And what is it to ‘press about’ something, as if showing one’s concern were an end and virtue in itself?)
Doubts about the wisdom of the manner in which the McCanns left their children while they dined at a restaurant a hundred and fifty yards away must have occurred to many people, above all to the McCanns themselves, but it surely takes a special kind of nastiness, a sadism masquerading as a sentimental concern for the safety of children, to start a petition asking for them to be punished further than by the loss of their child — unless, that is, you believed that they were directly responsible themselves for Madeleine’s disappearance.
But the McCanns appealed to the sentimentality of the world in a manner that might be called unscrupulous. On a website visited by 80 million people in the first three months after Madeleine’s disappearance, there was the opportunity to buy merchandise, including Look for Madeleine wristbands, described as ‘good quality… to keep reminding you about Madeleine,’ with poster included, and T-shirts with a picture of Madeleine on them, with the legend ‘Don’t You Forget Me’ inscribed on it.
I confess that a parallel with the sentimental merchandising of Che Guevara’s image came to my mind. I found the words ‘Don’t you forget me’ disturbing, and very different in meaning from ‘Don’t forget me.’ The latter is an appeal, the former is bullying or menacing in tone. Don’t you forget about me, it seems to say, or else. But what is this ‘or else’? A kind of curse? If you forget me, some terrible misfortune will befall you? More likely, if you forget me you will no right to consider yourself or be considered by others a decent, compassionate person: and this despite the fact that, however much you remember Madeleine, it is in the last degree improbable that you will in any way be able to assist in finding her. We are here in the realm of King Berenger I, the protagonist of Eugene Ionesco’s play, Le Roi se meurt (Exit the King), in which the king, utterly self-centred and egotistical, makes the following speech of existential despair when he learns that he is soon to die and cannot escape his death:
Let them remember me. Let them cry, let them despair. Let them perpetuate my memory in all the history textbooks. Let everyone know my life by heart. Let all the schoolchildren and all the scholars have no other subject of study but me, my kingdom, my exploits. Let them burn all other books, let them destroy all other statues, let them put mine in all public places. My picture in every ministry, in every town hall, in the tax offices, in the hospitals. Let them give my name to all the aeroplanes, all the ships. Let all the other kings, soldiers, poets, tenors, philosophers be forgotten and let there be nothing but me in everyone’s mind. One first name only, one surname for everyone. Let children learn to read in spelling my name: B – e – Be, Berenger. Let me be on the icons, on millions of crosses in all the churches. Let them say masses for me, let me be the Host. Let the rivers outline my profile in the plains. Let them call to me eternally, let them supplicate to me, let them implore me.
Again, it is difficult to see how the wearing of a wristband inscribed with Madeleine’s name could be of practical use in finding her. (I noticed that the small and large sizes had sold out, but I do not know how many were offered for sale in the first place. I assume it was many thousands.) Their main function was to raise money for the company that the McCanns set up in the aftermath of Madeleine’s disappearance, a company that was not a charity, as many people must carelessly if understandably have supposed, but a not-for-profit company among whose aims was the financial support of the McCann family (i.e. themselves) as they went round the world in search of — well, in search of what, exactly? Their daughter? Absolution? Publicity?
Their frenzy of activity, understandable in the circumstances though not necessarily laudable, would have had no effect if the world had not been prepared to pay attention to them. The media knows a story that will appeal to mass-sentimentality when it sees one, and thus created a market for Madeleine wrist-bands.
What could have been in the minds of those who purchased them? Perhaps they thought that they were performing an act of charity in doing so, but it is possible to contribute to charity without demonstrating that you have done so: indeed, the traditional religious teaching in the west is that we ought to perform our acts of charity away from the gaze of others.
Moreover, a moment’s thought is sufficient to establish that every person who had heard of the disappearance of Madeleine, except for those who were responsible for it and for a few people of malevolent disposition, would hope that she were soon returned safe and sound to her parents. They would not hope this very deeply, of course, because they would have many other things, much more important to them, to worry about; but in so far as the case entered their consciousness at all, they would hope that Madeleine had not been done to death.
For those who bought the armbands, or for that matter the T-shirts, this tepid reaction to the tragedy would not be sufficient. To be a virtuous person one must feel every tragedy as one’s own.
This could place rather a strain on people, there being so many tragedies in the world; but fortunately, only a few of them ever come fully to light. And when a tragedy such as Madeleine’s does come to light, one has the duty to react to it as if it affected one personally.
The purchaser of the armband is demonstrating to the world the strength of his compassion and therefore of his virtue; and furthermore, he is demonstrating the superiority of the strength of his compassion and therefore of his virtue, by comparison with those — always likely to remain in the majority — who did not buy an armband. He is thus of an elite, emotional and moral. Never was there better value for money (the armbands, high quality, were two pounds each).
The interest aroused by the case was worldwide: and there were soon more sightings of Madeleine, from Morocco to Belgium, than of the Loch Ness monster in all its history. When the McCanns went to Morocco to follow up on a sighting there, they visited a primary school, as if they were heads of state, whose children had produced a number of posters asking for the return of Madeleine. They had an audience with the Pope, who offered his prayers to the efforts to find their daughter, and Vanity Fair ran a long article about the case. A feature film was mooted, and American television stations were said to be fighting a bidding war to interview the McCanns.
If sentimentality comes, can nasty-mindedness be far behind? The chief feature writer of the Sun, Oliver Harvey, saw fit implicitly to accuse the McCanns of killing their own child, the evidence for which was that they had displayed insufficient emotion in the days following the disappearance. The newspaper had previously asked its readers to help find Madeleine by wearing a yellow ribbon, without of course explaining what the connection between the two might be (sentiment being so much more important than reason); but Mr Harvey, fighting back his natural inclination to sympathise with the grieving parents, had this to say:
My misgivings began with the lack of emotion shown by the McCanns in those first few days after Madeleine went missing. No streaming tears, no trembling lips, no sobs of despair. Now the unease has become an awful gnawing doubt. It hurts me to say this, but now I fear “something is amiss with Kate and Gerry’s [the McCanns’] story. So is it possible the McCanns could bury their own daughter in secret and concoct a big fiction to fool the world? One theory… is this: Madeleine is given too much sedative to help her sleep. She dies, by accident. The McCanns have to make a snap decision to save their careers and stop the twins being put in care or place themselves with a foreign judiciary.
In other words, because the McCanns did not cry or sob in front of the cameras, as the multitudes have a right to expect and demand, as if the world were a giant gladiatorial amphitheatre for their amusement, it follows that they accidentally killed their own child and buried her to save their careers. This monstrous inference, published for several millions to read, is based upon the assumption that those who do not weep do not feel, and that those who do not feel must be guilty of the most heinous crimes.
It is not as if the writer of these odious lines is wholly reliable as to the nature of his own feelings. When he tells us that the unease has become ‘an awful gnawing doubt’, you wonder. Awful gnawing doubts, indeed! If he really thought the doubts were awful, if they truly gnawed, he would keep them to himself, because a doubt by its very nature means that what is doubted is not certain. Not being sure that what the McCanns say is true entails not being sure that what they say is false. And if what they say is true, then to the pain of having lost a beloved child the writer of those lines has heaped upon them the pain of a public accusation of murder, a truly vile thing to do. Things that may permissibly be thought and said in private may not permissibly be thought and said in public; but of course, the dissolution of the distinction between the two realms, private and public, is one of the aims of the sentimentalist.
Oliver Harvey was not the only one to find evidence of guilt in the Mrs McCann’s self-control. Amanda Platell wrote that she hadn’t seen ‘such creepy control in a woman since Linda Chamberlain cried “My God, the dingo’s got my baby.”’ In other words, self-control equalled guilt; guilt by association could not be more clearly implied.33
Now of course it is perfectly true that people who have committed the most dreadful acts may sometimes show no emotion afterwards, either because they are, by character, without normal human feelings, or because they have, by some psychological method or other, obstructed the memory of what they have done from reaching their consciousness. About a third of murderers cannot remember what they have done, and some psychophysiologists have proposed a physiological explanation of why this should be so. According to these psychophysiologists, Tolstoy was wrong when he wrote that murderers who said that they did not remember their deeds were simply lying; be that as it may, it is not easy to express emotion about what you cannot remember, or even what you falsely claim not to be able to remember. For to display much emotion in the latter circumstances would be to give the game away.
But if it is true that some people who are guilty display no emotion, it does not by any means follow that all people who display no emotion are guilty, or that all those who do display emotion are innocent. In my career as a prison doctor, I soon learnt what in any case should have been obvious from mere reflection on human nature, which is to say that I should not take the emotional expression of those on remand and who were awaiting trial as “evidence in itself of either guilt or innocence. There is, perhaps, a natural propensity to do so, but it should be resisted. Though by no means especially naïve, I recall one man whose protestations of innocence over a brutal murder with which he was charged were so consistent and so convincing that I thought he must indeed be innocent. As soon as he was found guilty, however, and returned to the prison from court, he described his actions in the most horrifying and graphic detail. And surely it is by now a commonplace that the relatives of murder victims, who appeal tearfully on television for witnesses to the crime, sometimes turn out themselves to be the murderers.
It emerged that the McCanns had been advised not to display emotion in public, because (it was said) Madeleine’s abductor might derive pleasure from seeing their distress. But this did not prevent either the newspapers or the bloggers from referring to their lack of emotion, which in their opinion should have been simply too strong to control. One blogger wrote:
I’m not saying that she [Mrs McCann] is responsible for her [Madeleine’s] disappearance or death, but one thing has “struck me from the very beginning when Madeleine first disappeared, was the total lack of emotion by both the McCanns. In my recollection over the years of seeing mothers on TV whose child has just gone missing is extreme emotion! distraught!… to say the least! Mrs McCann in particular has always struck me as being ‘poker faced’ or ‘steely faced’ for a mother that cannot find her child… completely the opposite to what I have seen in the past, or what I would have expected.
The disclaimer at the beginning of this entry is simply not credible; for if Mrs McCann’s alleged poker-face is not evidence of her guilt, or at least collusion, what could be the point of mentioning it? It seems that the refusal of the McCanns to exhibit their emotions in public caused so much hostility towards them, and so much abuse, that the Daily Mirror felt constrained to close down its website devoted to the case.
One or two newspapers tried to salvage the public reputation of the McCanns by reporting that they did sometimes show their emotions publicly. The Times, for example, reported that Mrs McCann had cried in the aeroplane on her way back from Portugal to England, while the Daily Mirror reported that she cried when she returned, alone, to Madeleine’s pink-painted bedroom. (How alone could she have been for it to have been reported, unless, of course, the whole thing was made up?) If you want public sympathy, it seems, you must cry in public; grieving is like justice, it must not only be done, but be seen to be done. And God help those who do not cry.
The demand that emotion should be shown in public, or be assumed not to exist and therefore indicate a guilty mind, is now not an uncommon one.
A young British woman called Joanne Lees was driving through the centre of Australia with her boyfriend, Peter Falconio, in 2001, when they were stopped by a man on the pretext that there was something wrong with the vehicle in which they were driving. The man shot Peter Falconio, and then tied up Joanne Lees, almost certainly preparatory to raping and killing her. However, she managed to escape and run into the bush, where the assailant could not find her.
She told her story when “she reached safety, but since the body of her boyfriend was never found, it met with some scepticism. What is more, her lack of emotion in front of the reporters and television cameras led many to suspect, and even to accuse, her of either making the whole story up, or, even worse, of being herself a murderess. For a time, the police seemed to suspect her. Emotional restraint was once again taken as evidence of lack of emotion and therefore of a guilty mind.
More than four years later, a man called Bradley John Murdoch, a man with a long history of criminality, was found guilty of the murder and attempted abduction. He was sentenced to serve twenty-eight years in prison, and his appeal against conviction was dismissed. Joanne Lees had been entirely vindicated, at least officially.
However, even after Murdoch’s conviction, an Australian broadcasting station, Network Nine, saw fit to hold a poll to discover if Australians thought that the convicted man was guilty. The cruelty of this to the victim of so horrible a crime hardly needs pointing out (and even if Murdoch were innocent, even if, against the odds, there had been a miscarriage of justice, a poll in his favour would not have constituted worthwhile evidence).
Almost the only reason that the poll could be carried out was that public sympathy for the victim was never very great. And The Australian made the reason for this clear:
Joanne Lees has never enjoyed great sympathy from the public, both here and in the UK, perhaps because of the lack of emotion she showed in public after the 2001 abduction and murder.
The Daily Mail in Britain made a similar point:
Miss Lees’ apparent lack of emotion after Mr Falconio’s death led many to question her story…
A few days after Peter Falconio’s disappearance, an article in the Guardian pointed out, though not with approval, that if Joanne Lees had burst into tears in public, or made emotional appeals in front of the cameras for witnesses, then (notwithstanding the fact that those who make such appeals do indeed sometimes turn out to be the culprit in the case) she would have been more readily believed.
After Murdoch’s conviction, Joanne Lees was criticised for ‘cashing in’ on her experiences, for having given interviews for which she was paid a great deal of money, for having accepted a large advance for a book, and for considering a film version of her story. One might have supposed from this reaction that we lived in an ascetic society of anchorites utterly indifferent to “material wealth. Her book, that of a very ordinary young woman without literary talent (or pretensions), was in its own way symptomatic of modern emotional shallowness, for it is filled with every possible cliché of psychobabble, from people always being there for her to the need just to be herself. Psychobabble is, of course, the means by which people talk about themselves without revealing anything, and certainly without having undergone the painful process of genuine self-examination. It is, in effect, the public manifestation of self-obsession without any commitment to truth. But still her refusal to bow to pressure to be emotional in public did her a great deal of credit.
What does this pressure signify? In the first place, the abandonment of a cardinal virtue, fortitude, as a cultural ideal. To control the expression of one’s emotions in order not to inconvenience or embarrass others, and for the sake of one’s own self-respect, is now seen as being far from admirable. On the contrary, it is seen as psychologically damaging to oneself and as treachery to others.
It is psychologically damaging to oneself because repression inevitably results in harmful effects later on: for emotion is a fluid that, like all fluids, cannot be compressed, and therefore will make itself manifest in one way or another. For example, those who do not grieve properly for a lost loved one, which is to say who do not express themselves by sobs and tears and wailing, will become seriously depressed a little later in their lives; while those who do not express their anger are more likely to suffer heart attacks or contract cancer. Unexpressed aggression towards others inevitably turns into aggression towards oneself.
Concealing one’s emotions is treachery towards others because it implies mistrust of them, and lack of confidence in their capacity for compassion. Concealment is furtive, secretive, dishonest and guilty; while the good man has nothing to hide and lives his life completely in the open. Indeed, the better he is, the more open he is: ideally, we should live in a completely stream of consciousness world in which we say unreservedly all that we think. And since, when we are abducted and threatened with murder in the Australian outback, it is only natural that we should be very distressed, it follows that someone who claims that she has had such an experience but shows little emotion about it must either be lying or be a bad, secretive, furtive, dishonest, mistrustful person unworthy of our sympathy.
The demand that life be lived openly in this fashion is an impossible one. Most of us would probably be lynched within minutes if we decided to express in public every thought that came into our minds. But just because a demand or an ideal is impossible to put into practice, it does not mean that it has no influence or importance. The expectation that people express their emotions, on pain of being believed to have none, actually inhibits the exercise of imagination, and a faculty that is not used soon withers. Why make an effort to imagine if everything is supposed to be explicit? But since life cannot be lived with everything made explicit, it means that our sympathy for and empathy with other people declines rather than increases with the expression of emotion, at least when it becomes too routine and extravagant. A man who exclaims ‘Damn!’ once in his life conveys more by it that a man who employs far more vulgar expressions continually. Like all currencies, that of emotional expression can be inflated and debased; and again, as with currency, the bad drives out the good.
The expectation, rising to the shrill demand, that people express their emotions in public after a traumatic experience is essentially tyrannical. It fails to recognise that people are by nature different from one another; according to the demand, everyone must conform to a single standard of conduct or risk being thought inhuman, stuck-up or hoity-toity (an expression frequently used of Jeffrey Archer’s wife because of her stoical and undemonstrative support of him throughout his various disreputable exploits).
The case of Joanne Lees was not the first in Australia in which lack of emotion was taken as evidence of the guilt of the person who showed it. In 1980, a baby called Azaria Chamberlain disappeared in the bush of the Northern Territory, near Ayer’s Rock. The mother, Linda Chamberlain, reported the disappearance to the police, saying that she thought a dingo must have taken the baby. There was considerable controversy as to whether dingoes could or ever did behave in this fashion; it has now been as conclusively proved as any fact of animal behaviour can ever be proved that they can and do.
Not surprisingly, the case aroused a great deal of interest (to put it mildly) in the press and on television. At first, Linda Chamberlain’s story was believed; but public opinion turned decisively against her when she appeared cold and unemotional. She did not break down in public and weep, as the occasion seemed to demand, and as many people assumed she would have done had her loss not been self-inflicted. In this atmosphere, she was convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.
A few years later, evidence was found that exonerated her, and corroborated her original account of the disappearance. It is now generally accepted that a dingo did take Azaria Chamberlain. The mother’s lack of emotion at the time, therefore, was caused by conscious self-restraint and a desire to uphold her dignity rather than guilt; but self-restraint and dignity are now themselves a form of treachery, that is to say a treachery towards the emotions.
In the wake of the death of Princess Diana, the Queen did not openly display any grief at the loss of her former daughter-in-law. The fact that this absence of display of emotion was universally taken as a public relations disaster for the Royal Family was itself highly significant, for it suggested that it is the public nature of the expression of emotion that is most important. Emotions are now like justice: they must not only be felt, but seen to be felt.
The tabloid newspapers carried out what can only be called a campaign of bullying against the sovereign. They demanded that, against custom and usage, the Union flag be flown at half-mast over Buckingham Palace, for what is a mere tradition to be set against a gust of popular emotion? To argue that a tradition should take precedence over such a gust in determining such a matter as whether or not a flag be flown is akin to heresy: for it suggests that the wishes of we, the people, should not be sovereign at all times and at all moments, that vox populi is not necessarily and in all circumstances vox dei. And this is anathema to the political philosophy that, consciously or not, has now taken possession of most men’s minds. It does not worry them that, if they feel no obligation to their customs, traditions and achievements. Now, this very instant is the only moment in history that counts.
‘Where is our flag?’ asked a newspaper headline, and ‘Show us you care’ shouted the crowd outside Buckingham Palace (perhaps by laying a teddy bear on one of the piles of stuffed toys that had already accumulated in impromptu shrines around the country). To this pressure, the Queen eventually gave in, though with a subtlety that outwitted the emotional bullies and blackmailers.
The bullies knowingly or unknowingly overlooked several aspects of their own behaviour, leaving to one side the fact that in a constitutional monarchy the relationship of the monarch to the people is not that of elected representative, let alone that of provider to customer. The fact that the monarch was by then quite advanced in years was of no account to them; for in a society in whose culture youth is not only the fount of all wisdom and the touchstone of worth, but is treated both as an aspiration and an achievement, no respect is due to age, nor any effort made to enter into the worldview of someone born in a different age.
Indeed, the bullying of the monarch was symptomatic of an intolerance of any reaction to “the death of the princess other than their own. At a time when diversity of culture was supposedly valued for its own sake, certain cultural differences were not to be tolerated or even permitted. The Prime Minister of the time, a man who made much of his own youthfulness, which he appeared to suppose, and certainly wished, to last forever, Mr Blair, caught the mood of the emotional bullies perfectly: the deceased was ‘the People’s Princess.’ Thereafter, even to express mild doubts as to the conduct or achievements of the Princess required a certain courage, for to do so was to be, by implication, an enemy of the people. The judgement of the majority, or at least of those people who made the most fuss, must be right: forty million teddy bears can’t be wrong.
‘Show us you care,’ shouted the crowds outside the palace, without the self-knowledge that they were bullying rather than expressing any genuine grief. Now, either the Queen felt grief at the death of her former daughter-in-law, or she did not; if she did, she was surely within her rights to grieve privately. She was brought up at a time when it was considered a matter of decency for people not to expose their emotions very strongly in public, rather than culturally absurd and psychologically damaging; moreover, as constitutional monarch, it was her duty to swallow her emotions whenever she appeared in public, often with people whom she must have detested or despised. Such self-control, dutifully exercised over more than half a century, must have become second nature to her. For very good reasons, she was not the kind of person given to emotional self-display.
Of course, it is perfectly possible that she felt no, or very little, grief. Not even the most ferocious critics of the Princess, however, would have considered it right for the Queen at that moment to rehearse in public her reasons for not feeling any grief, even if they were very good and sufficient ones. Indeed, it would have been very wrong for her to have done so. But if, in fact, she did not grieve for her ex-daughter-in-law, then the demand by the mob that she display grief was in effect a demand that she lie to it, that she play-act for its delectation .
Besides, there is something distinctly peculiar about the demand that she should show that she cared. It was a curiously open-ended demand. Cared about what or for whom? It was not specified. That she cared for her ex-daughter-in-law? For the causes the dead Princess promoted? For the mob itself? It really did not matter much, so long as she expressed emotion of some sort, at the behest of the multitude. It was a demand that she conform.
The public expression of deep emotion, or supposedly deep emotion, is intrinsically coercive. This is not to say that it is never appropriate, only to say that the question of appropriateness arises. When someone expresses a powerful emotion, or when a rather less powerful emotion is expressed en masse, some kind of participation or reaction by an on-looker is expected. This is only to be expected. We normally attempt to console someone whom we judge to have good reason for his manifest grief; we congratulate someone who is joyful on the reception of excellent news. The closer our relation to or with the person who expresses the strong emotion, the closer to his emotion our own reaction generally is, though there are exceptional circumstances in which this might not be so, for example in the immediate aftermath of disasters. If we stand stonily by a person in a state of high emotion that we properly judge to be genuine, and evince absolutely no sign of having been moved by it, we are suspected of heartlessness.
Moreover, we all accept that there are outward forms with which we should comply. If you see a funeral procession go by, you do not indulge in hilarity at that moment, even if you are feeling unusually joyful, at that precise moment, though the person whose funeral it is may be completely unknown to you. It is not that you feel particular sorrow for the deceased — how could you, not knowing who he was? — but there ought to be in our comportment in the circumstances a decent recognition of the ultimate fate of us all, in our common humanity, and a respect for the feelings of the mourners. But while you might stand still for a moment, be silent and even hang your head slightly, to shed tears would be grossly histrionic.
So the appropriate response to the emotions of others depends upon a number of factors. What is clear, however, is that the proper ordering of responses depends for its possibility upon the general honesty of emotional expression, that is to say on the absence of hysteria or a desire to express more than what is felt. We would be compassionate with a man who remained for years inconsolable over the loss of a bottle top, not as a man who was grieving, but as a lunatic.
The demand that the Queen show the crowd that she cared, as the crowd claimed itself to care, whether in fact she did or didn’t share their supposed emotion, subverts the whole notion of honesty and proportion of expression. A demand to show respect in outward form is one thing; a demand to express an inward state another. The crowd was in effect demanding that the Queen lie to it, or at any rate be prepared to do so; and the question arises as to what kind of people demand to be lied to in this fashion. The answer, bullies and tyrants. It wasn’t so much what she said in response to their bullying that counted as a triumph, therefore, but that she was forced to say anything at all, and thereby abandon her own code and accept the crowd’s.
She was not the only one to experience the venom of the sentimentalists after the death of the princess. When Professor Anthony O’Hear published a relatively mild article, suggesting that the princess had displayed ‘childlike self-centredness’ throughout her adult life, and that the public mourning after her death was symptomatic of ‘a culture of sentimentality,’ some of the tabloids reacted with fury, one of them calling him a ‘poisonous professor, a rat-faced, little loser,’ not exactly a powerful argument, but a powerful illustration how quickly sentimentality turns to menacing vituperation or worse. It served as a warning to others of like mind not to express their views in public.
It was this tendency to vituperation, with its undercurrent of incitement to violence, that prevented the many people who did not regard the death as an important national tragedy from expressing their views for quite a long time. They laid low until it was safe to speak, until the storm of sentimentality had safely passed. When finally those voices were raised in public, they received more support than insult.
Those critics who say that the episode of the princess’s death and its aftermath was not of cultural significance because the majority of the population did not take part in the histrionic public scenes (strangely enough, no surveys of attitudes or reactions to the death were taken immediately after it) are missing the point. Even if it was only a small minority that went in for extravagant demonstrations of grief-like behaviour, it was a minority that was able to impose its tone, at least for a time, on the whole country. To dissent was to be an enemy of the people.
Of course, the struggle between the explicit and the implicit expression of emotion, between the crude and the refined, between the false and the true, the hysterical and the honest, is not entirely new, at least if we can take Shakespeare’s word for it. Coriolanus sought the people’s vote in order to be tribune, and was advised to show his war wounds to the crowd (or rather mob, for all crowds in Shakespeare are mobs) in order to gain its favour. Coriolanus is too proud to do so; he thinks his signal services to the state should speak for themselves, without any such vulgar display.
What must I say?‘I pray, sir?’ — Plague upon it, I cannot bringMy tongue to such a place. ‘Look, sir — my wounds.I got them in my country’s service whenSome certain of your brethren roar’d and ranFrom the noise of our own drums.’
Of Coriolanus’s refusal to show his wounds to the crowd (to show that he cared), the Second Citizen says:
Not one amongst us… but saysHe us’d us scornfully; he should have show’d usHis marks of merit, show’d us wounds received for’s country.
It is Coriolanus’s tragedy that, through his excessive pride of caste which he mistakes for honour, he actively provokes the hostility of the mob (there would be no tragedy at all if he were an immaculate hero with no blemishes in his character). But if Coriolanus contributes very largely to his own downfall, there can be no doubt what Shakespeare thinks of the mob and its demands — indeed, Shakespeare’s depiction of mobs in general is a rare clue to his own personal views.
At any rate, Coriolanus’s position was very different from that of the Queen, even if the mob’s was very similar. He was soliciting their vote; she was not. He actively provoked the mob; she did not. His wounds were real; hers, if any, were unknowable.
What is new in our present situation is that the elite, or an important part of it, has gone over, or has pretended to go over, to the mob’s way of feeling. When Mr Blair called Diana ‘the People’s Princess,’ he was performing a subtle and clever political manoeuvre, though perhaps he was unaware of its implications himself, just as a good footballer does not know the physics of curving a free kick.
Nothing could be clearer than that Mr Blair has himself no desire to live either among, or like, the majority of his countrymen. For this one cannot entirely blame him: for who would not rather be rich than have the average or median income, or dispose of more than the average or median assets? Who would not rather live luxuriously than in cramped, or in beautiful rather than ugly, surroundings? Who would not rather holiday in the Caribbean than in Clacton-on-Sea? There are, no doubt, nature’s self-sacrificers, who are indifferent to their own comfort and welfare, but Mr Blair is not one of them, nor can he or anyone else be criticised for not being one of them. His ambition in respect of wealth and luxury is not dissimilar from that of millions of other people, inglorious though such ambition may be from an elevated philosophical point of view.
However, his means of lifting himself above the common herd has been to espouse, for political purposes, an especial concern for and empathy with the common herd, what he once called ‘the many, not the few.’ He has been careful to avoid any hint that he has cultural tastes that differ in any way from theirs. When he tells us that he is a supporter of Newcastle United football team, his real message is that ‘I am not a snob or an intellectual, I am just like you, I like the same things as you, which is why I understand and feel for you.’ It does not matter for his purposes whether or not he really is interested in Newcastle United, though his fantasies or lies about memories of having watched the famous player, Jackie Milburn, suggest that his protestations of deep interest are authentically bogus.
Certainly, no taint of high culture, as against high living, has ever attached to him. He has been careful to be photographed wearing jeans as well as suits, and holding a guitar, not a violin. Early in his premiership, he consorted with minor celebrities of popular culture as if fulfilling the dream of someone who had long (and longingly) read people magazines. Whether any of this represented his true interests, or was only part of a campaign of public relations, is unimportant; it was clearly of importance to him and his career.
Nor was he alone: the members of his first cabinet admitted to no interests outside politics other than football. This in itself was a significant shift: many of the old Labour politicians, however misguided one might consider their economic and social policies to have been, were men of culture.
The death of the princess served Mr Blair’s turn extremely well, and he seized the opportunity with skilful alacrity. She had precisely the combination of glamour and banality, with no threatening intelligence or refinement of taste, that was required by the new dispensation of populist elitism. Under cover of cultural similarity to the masses and democratic sentiment, the new elite would live a life as remote from that of the great majority of people as that of the aristocracy had ever been: indeed, more remote, in so far as the aristocracy had had to deal with the ordinary people on their estates. It was not a coincidence that Mr Blair was simultaneously the most populist and the most remote and inaccessible of modern Prime Ministers.“media, that was necessary to turn the death of the princess into an event of such magnitude thus served a political purpose, one that was inherently dishonest in a way that parallels the dishonesty that lies behind much sentimentality itself.
A populist elitist such as Mr Blair cannot admit in public, and perhaps not even to himself, that he wishes above all to live the high life, as different from ordinary people as possible, among the rich and famous, preferably being rich and famous himself. This means that he has to give to his ambition a veneer of social purpose, in the process denying its very essence, its fons et origo. Overheated rhetoric, intellectual contortions and many forms of dishonesty are the inevitable result.
Mass sentimentality plays into the hands of demotic elitists, who are an elite only in their superior willingness to resort to the black arts of manipulation and bureaucratic in-fighting.
Chapitre cinq: Le culte de la victime
Dalrymple analyse la poète Sylvia Plath, qu'il décrit comme "le saint patron de l'autodramatisation", et interprète les descriptions de Plath par Margaret Drabble comme des "victimes volontaires" et "extrêmement vulnérables" comme des "vertus de un ordre élevé". Il examine ensuite comment Plath a blâmé son père pour ses souffrances et l'identifie dans son poème "Daddy" avec le nazisme et fait des allusions à l'Holocauste. Dalrymple écrit que "Plath a jugé bon de faire allusion à l'une des inflictions pires et les plus délibérées de souffrances de masse de toute l'histoire de l'humanité, au seul motif que son père, décédé quand elle était jeune, était allemand… la métaphorique utilisation de l’Holocauste ne mesure pas l’ampleur de ses souffrances mais son apitoiement sur elle-même ". Il affirme qu'avant Plath, l'apitoiement sur soi-même "était considéré comme un vice, même dégoûtant, qui excluait toute sympathie" [23], et que "l'appropriation de la souffrance d'autrui pour renforcer l'ampleur et la portée de sa propre conscience".
Dalrymple analyse la poète Sylvia Plath, qu'il décrit comme "le saint patron de l'autodramatisation", et interprète les descriptions de Plath par Margaret Drabble comme des "victimes volontaires" et "extrêmement vulnérables" comme des "vertus de un ordre élevé". Il examine ensuite comment Plath a blâmé son père pour ses souffrances et l'identifie dans son poème "Daddy" avec le nazisme et fait des allusions à l'Holocauste. Dalrymple écrit que "Plath a jugé bon de faire allusion à l'une des inflictions pires et les plus délibérées de souffrances de masse de toute l'histoire de l'humanité, au seul motif que son père, décédé quand elle était jeune, était allemand… la métaphorique utilisation de l’Holocauste ne mesure pas l’ampleur de ses souffrances mais son apitoiement sur elle-même ". Il affirme qu'avant Plath, l'apitoiement sur soi-même "était considéré comme un vice, même dégoûtant, qui excluait toute sympathie" [23], et que "l'appropriation de la souffrance d'autrui pour renforcer l'ampleur et la portée de sa propre conscience".
