Sentiment
surfaces fast and runs hot in public life, dumbing it down and crippling
intimacy in private life
By Pamela Haag
When I was a
child, I knew national flags by the color and design alone; today I could know
diseases the same way. This occurs to me on my morning commute as I note the
abundance of magnetic awareness ribbons adhering to cars. A ribbon inventory on
the Internet turns up 84 solid colors, color combinations, and color patterns,
although there are certainly more. The most popular colors must multitask to
raise awareness of several afflictions and disasters at once. Blue is a
particularly hard-working color, the new black of misfortunes; 43 things jockey
to be the thing that the blue ribbon makes us aware of.
Awareness-raising
and fundraising 5K races augment the work of the ribbons. Maryland, where I
live, had 28 5K races in one recent two-month period. I think it might be
possible to chart a transcontinental route cobbled together entirely by annual
5K charity and awareness runs. Some memorialize a deceased loved one or raise
funds for an affliction in the family (“Miles for Megan,” for example, or
“Bita’s Run for Wellness”); others raise awareness of problems ranging from
world health to Haiti to brain injury. A friend of mine who works in
fundraising and development once observed, and lamented, that some medical
problems were more popular than others and easier to solicit money for. Conditions
with sentimental clout elicit more research donations, and cute endangered
animals such as the giant panda, the World Wildlife Fund’s mascot, lure more
donations than noncuddly ones.
On some days
you’ll see makeshift shrines for victims of car accidents or violence by the
side of the road, placed next to a mangled guardrail or wrapped around a
lamppost. As more people hear of the tragedy, teddy bears, flowers, and notes
accumulate. Princess Diana’s was the biggest of such shrines, a mountain of hundreds
of thousands of plastic-sheathed bouquets outside her residence. Queen
Elizabeth resisted the presumptuous momentum of all the grief but finally
relented and went to inspect the flower shrine and its handwritten messages, a
concession to sentiment depicted in the movie The Queen. Maybe I
was the only one in the theater who thought the Queen was right; I rooted for
her propriety over Tony Blair’s dubious advice that she drag the monarchy into
the modern age by publicly displaying a sentiment she probably didn’t feel. The
mourners didn’t even know Diana, the queen reasoned by an
obsolete logic of restrained stoicism, and the palace flag didn’t fly at
half-mast even for more illustrious figures. But she caved in the end. We most
always do.
Sentiment surfaces
fast and runs hot in public life, and it compels our attention. On good days I
dimly register this makeshift iconography of people’s sorrows, losses, and
challenges. Some of them have been my own, too, but I don’t have ribbons. On my
dark days I believe that pink ribbons and 5K runs and temporary shrines and
teddy bears and emails exclamation-pointed into a frenzy—the sentimental public
culture—is malicious to civil society and impedes in one elegant motion our
capacities for deliberation in public life and intimacy in private life. On the
days I’m feeling melodramatic I suspect that we are in the grips of death by
treacle.
The age of the
ribbon unofficially began in 1979 when Penne Laingen, the wife of a hostage in
Iran, tied a ribbon around a tree in her yard to memorialize her missing
husband. America was “seething with rage” over the hostage crisis, The
Washington Post reported. Psychologists proposed ways to
handle this “emotional distress.” Laingen, quoted in the article, had taken
inspiration from the 1973 popular song “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak
Tree,” about a boyfriend, soon to return from prison, who wondered whether his
girlfriend still loved him and proposed that she tie a ribbon to signal her
enduring love. Laingen tied her ribbon in the same spirit of a collusive vow,
intending to keep it there until her husband could take it down himself, which
he eventually did. In the Postarticle she suggested that other
Americans could tie ribbons, too, and millions complied, and so her personal code
became a sentimental-political icon. Today the flagship yellow ribbon raises
awareness of at least six afflictions and events including endometriosis,
deployed soldiers, bladder cancer, suicide, bone cancer, and the Australian
2009 Victorian bushfire victims.
Around the time of
yellow ribbons Americans also got the exclamation-point typewriter key and
victim impact statements—two other suggestive, modest cameos in the drift
toward a more sentimental public culture.
The exclamation
point is singular among all punctuation because it has no true grammatical
function in English except to amplify a feeling—excitement, enthusiasm, or
shock—presumably not adequately conveyed by the words selected. It wasn’t even
a standard feature on typewriters until the 1970s. Before then, you had to be
judicious about that exclamation point because assembling it required that you
type a period, backspace, and type an apostrophe above it. Today the
exclamation point is used with unprecedented, hyperventilating frequency in correspondence,
deployed to soften underlying hostilities or to gin up excitement where no true
reason for it suggests itself. As a default punctuation setting, occupying the
place in email and texting where the staid, neutral period once stood, the
exclamation point is the grammatical mascot of an age that values the public
projection of sunny emotions and feeling.
One of the first
victim impact statements made outside a civil courtroom was that of the mother
of actress Sharon Tate, who was murdered in 1969 by Charles Manson and his
family. At the time of Manson’s 1978 parole hearing in California no state
specifically allowed victim statements in criminal cases—those brought by
government and “We the People.” Today, however, they are a routine part of the
sentencing and parole process in every state. According to advocates, they
allow victims to personalize the crime and elevate the status of the victim by
describing the effect the crime has had on them or their families. Some laud
the courtroom ritual as an aid in the emotional recovery of the victim, with
the criminal proceeding envisioned as part of a larger therapeutic process. A
few legal scholars suggest that the well-intentioned personalization of a crime
can blur the line between public justice and private retribution. Conversely,
does a criminal deserve a more lenient sentence if his victim was someone of so
little charm or social worth that he had no one to testify movingly for him? Of
course, rape charges used to be mitigated on just such grounds, that the victim
had so little virtue or sexual morals that the crime against her didn’t mean as
much.
In the late 1970s
and 1980s, public discourse was becoming more personal, sentimental, and
emotive (!!). We were becoming victim conscious. Or more precisely,
consciousness of victimization was shifting away from poverty and inequality in
race, class, or sex and toward individual victims of, say, a hit-and-run
accident, a disease, bad luck, or circumstances indisputably not of the
victim’s or even society’s own making. The 1980s backlash against federal
welfare programs entailed becoming less politically obligated or sentimental
toward the poor, sometimes derided as welfare queens (a term attributed to
Ronald Reagan). This process coincided, and I do not think accidentally, with
the rise in a sentimental public culture for individuals who were victims of
unimpeachable, blameless things.
Victim awareness
zoomed in from the grand to the granular, from the schematic, sociological view
to the fine-grained personal. Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), founded in
1980, was a prototype of sentimental political culture and of its victim
advocacy in legislatures to protect citizens from misfortunes that were
devastating, random, and undeserved. The name of the organization draws on the
iconic status and moral authority of motherhood, and its acronym even spells an
emotional response.
MADD isn’t wrong
in its agenda. How could it be? No one favors drunk driving or supports the
heart-wrenching personal anguish of vehicular manslaughter. But any individual,
by the shifting sands of luck, could become this sort of victim and fall into
this category—even a law-abiding, responsible middle-class person—and that
makes the sentimental draw more personal. Not everyone is black or female, nor
could we all become so, and only a few will fall from prosperity into poverty.
But anyone could be vulnerable to cancer or a badly designed product. These
were the right and easy kinds of victims to contemplate
in public discourse during years of growing disillusionment and frustration
with the downtrodden beneficiaries of welfare.
It’s also my
suspicion that the sentimental wave paced, or perhaps helped cause, a decline
in American tolerance for risk. As we move from a culture that celebrated risk
to a more cautious culture of “risk factors” and “at-risk” people, victims of
random, tragic fate become more monstrous to our sense of fairness. This and
the corporate-class bogeyman of sentiment-drunk jurors who grant extravagant
personal injury awards must explain the growth of product warning labels such
as “Shin Pads Cannot Protect Any Part of the Body They Do Not Cover,”
“Wheelbarrow Is Not Intended for Highway Use,” “Do Not Use Hair Dryer While
Sleeping,” or “Eating Rocks May Lead to Broken Teeth.”
The strong timbre
of the victim in public life at this point has tangible and serious effects.
Among other things it distorts our sense of risk in foreign and domestic
policy. Indeed, victims seem to occupy a special tier of citizenship in public
deliberation according to a makeshift sentimental hierarchy; let’s call it
inequality. Publicly shared sorrow puts a thumb on the scales of public
discourse. The Ground Zero mosque debate of 2010 dramatized this most vividly,
as even stalwart defenders of First Amendment freedoms deferred to what the
Anti-Defamation League called the “sensitivities” of the 9/11 victims’
families. Before the noise finally abated, Ted Koppel hazarded to propose that
the voices of those who had been personally injured shouldn’t count more loudly
in public life than, say, the voices of those nonvictims who worried about
religious freedom and intolerance.
It’s not that
“sensitivities” and personal sentiments have no place in public life. To the
contrary, our civil society relies on the creation of affinity and obligation
to each other, across distance and difference. The sentimental story can help
forge that bond, and it can galvanize social justice. It was true with Uncle
Tom’s Cabin,and equally so in 1955, when Mamie Till Bradley displayed the
mutilated, lynched body of her son, Emmett Till, and insisted on a public,
open-casket funeral. The outrage and sympathy that her publicly shared,
personal tragedy inspired across the color line is widely credited with having
accelerated the civil rights movement. Likewise, and to pick just one
historical example among many, the first “Speakouts” by the feminist
Redstockings in the late 1960s publicly shared stories of rape and sexual
violation—but with the purpose of catalyzing action and making a hidden crime
visible for political redress.
Theirs was
transformational sentimentalism. For Mamie Till Bradley, and for the
Redstockings, the personal confession of grief was the raw material of a longer
political process. They told their stories not so that others would defer to
their sensitivities or hear their voices more loudly than those of other
citizens, but to change the status quo. It’s the difference between a
sentimental display that aspires to transform consciousness and one that
aspires to raise awareness. The two overlap, certainly, but the former
emphasizes I tell you this story so that you will change
something. The latter emphasizes I tell you this story so that
you will feel something.
If the expanded
uses of sentiment had demonstrably benefited our public life over the past
three decades—if they had made us more sensitive, kind, compassionate, and
gentle toward each other—they might be worth these downsides and perils. But
where is the evidence that this is so? Instead, the drift in public life, as
observed by P. M. Forni, Jedediah Purdy, Bill Bishop, and others, is
toward insensitivity, political incivility if not murderous rage, lack of
manners, ironic detachment, cynicism, mutual estrangement and cultural sorting
across creeds, and especially in schools, bullying and cyber-bullying. If
anything, we seem more brutal and calloused toward each other. True, most of us
no longer tolerate, in public, sexual harassment, racist slurs, or cruelty
toward those with disabilities. And Americans were outraged when a Rutgers
student used a hidden camera to watch his roommate’s sexual encounter with
another man, prompting the roommate’s suicide. And yet, we still hear ethically
barbarous and morally reprehensible stories of cruelty almost daily.
It may even be the
case, ironically, that the proliferation of a cloying, saccharine culture has
contributed to a less forgiving, meaner attitude in public life. After all, the
flip side of a sentimental public culture of weepy confession, fast if not
fraudulent empathy for victims, and the infusion of emotion into public
discourse is that it establishes precedent for the public, political currency
of all the darker emotions on the spectrum of sentiment: anger, fury, and
hatred. When emotions of one, gentle kind are privileged in public culture and
invited into political discourse, then emotions of another kind can slide in
just as easily and gain stature and political relevance, too.
Today, it so
happens that rage is all the rage. Yet the problem is more metaphysical than a
matter of Americans having meaner emotions in 2011 than they did in the
hyper-self-congratulatory mood of the 2008 presidential election. Our civil
society’s syntax and logic are awry. The habit of thought that a pop culture of
treacle and a pop culture of anger hold in common is that we needn’t polish the
expression of our private feelings and sorrows into a form that’s relevant and
useful, even to strangers and fellow citizens in the commonweal. We can take
for granted that our treacle or our anger speaks for itself and presume the
relevance of private feelings to public discourse. If, in fact, we’re drowning
in a public culture of meanness, it is one that the public culture of cloying
sweetness unwittingly helped create.
It’s also likely
that our exposure to public displays of sentiment inoculates us just a bit and
leaves us requiring ever more dramatic displays of real, raw feeling. As with
any other discourse, we’ve learned to decode the genre: having watched a
stranger grieve and suffer or having been a stranger who grieves and suffers in
public, we know what to expect. This pushes us to find really and truly extreme
anger, or really and truly blameless victims who can stir an unmodified empathy
in our stonier hearts or sharpen our blunted sensibilities. For social
conservatives, the most blameless and absolutely inculpable victim today might
well be the unborn fetus. For liberals, the most unimpeachably blameless
creature on the margins might be the suffering lab animal or the endangered
whale. As for sentient humans, who most often suffer under a complex amalgam of
social circumstance, inequality, character, injustice, and bad luck, the
narrative standards of pure victimhood are higher, the skepticism sharper, and
sympathy now harder, not easier, to come by.
Public displays of
sentiment compete against critical acuity and skepticism bred of familiarity.
David Shields, in his 2010 book, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, posits
that our age is defined by an insatiable desire to get real and find more real
and emotionally true things. It’s a paradox of the tell-all age: how can it be
true that we have no fig leaf of private life remaining but we hunger for
yet more reality? Still, it makes quirky sense. In conditions of
sentimental overkill we restlessly sense, or hope, that somewhere else there is
a more real thing, a deeper intimacy to see vicariously, an even
more raw, unmediated feeling—and we want to find it. “Penetrating so many
secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable,” H. L. Mencken wrote. “But
there it sits, nevertheless … ” Real feeling and real emotion, like
coolness, have a way of staying one step ahead of us.
Social media and
reality tv shows increase the opportunities for the casual sharing in public of
feelings and secrets. But strictly speaking, they aren’t the culprits. The
online social media function as a superhighway for the perfusion of sentiment
into public life. The firewall around a private life of intimacy and emotions
is now membranous at best. We let it all hang out. Participants on reality TV
shows profess their love for each other after one episode.
I scan the friends
in my Facebook account. Many are acquaintances from earlier lives to whom I’ve
maintained an abstract loyalty and affection but no actual contact. Some are
friends-in-law that Facebook thought I should meet; I dutifully obliged, but
I’ve never met them. And yet I know minutiae of their daily domestic life. I
once friended a man by accident because he shared a name with a true friend of
mine. He accepted my misled offer, and now I read updates on his ups and downs
as a single dad.
Facebook has
created presumptive, default closeness among casual acquaintances where we once
had presumptive, default formality, and I don’t know that it’s such a bad
thing. I’m a social media agnostic. I’m also wary of sounding like, say, a
middle-aged crank, nostalgic for a prelapsarian face-to-face social life that
she most likely found strange when she was actually living through it as a
young person. New forms of connection get invented, and an Elegy for the
Private Man in the Privacy-Loathing Age told in dismayed rumblings doesn’t
preoccupy me.
But what do we call
this chimera of being closer—in each other’s business—yet not at all intimate?
On Facebook we call it being friends. It’s harmless enough. We all know that
there are gradations of intimacy and that there is a friendship deeper than a
Facebook friend. The lucky ones among us have people with whom we are genuinely
close: those who will help us in an emergency, whom we could call at midnight
with a problem, with whom we feel mutual obligations, who provide us with
social identity and place, and without whom our lives would be tangibly
compromised. Facebook and the like promote intimacy lite.
Lite intimacies in
social media create a background din of disclosure, confession, closeness, and
familiarity. It isn’t inherently fake or objectionable, and if it were only a
semantic problem, I wouldn’t be concerned. But there is danger, it seems to me,
of losing our coordinates. There’s a danger that the lite intimacies of the
sentimental culture might deplete the resources of our true intimacies. If the
intimate building blocks that once belonged mostly to a domestic partner or
family—the sharing of a million little details about our moods, and what we ate
for breakfast, and our daily rituals and secret gripes—now belong to everyone
on Facebook in the world of lite intimacy, then how much deeper do we need to
go to find the everyday material out of which to recognize, solidify, and build
that deeper intimacy? Do we have to scream emotions louder to be heard over the
cacophony of the lite intimacy? A mild hypothesis for the new social life of
our age: the easier it is to be close but not intimate in public, the easier it
is to be close but not intimate in private.
Psychologists and
researchers have noticed this intimacy confusion even in the closest of
relationships, finding that a predilection for virtual sex and online
pornography deters real sexual contact. Dagmar Herzog, a historian of
sexuality, writes that young men must be reminded to touch their actual
girlfriends’ breasts once in a while. This reminds me of birds who are disoriented
at night in their instinctive, migratory paths by the dazzle of millions of
artificial urban lights.
It’s hard to
imagine human sexual instinct undone or perturbed by the virtual—some would say
pretend—intimacies of social media, but sex researchers worry that it’s so.
Maybe the amplification of sentiment in public life is like an addiction to
high-fructose corn syrup sodas. Drink too many—consume too much fast food of
sentiment—and eventually you get diabetes of the soul. It’s harder for the soul
to process and use sentiment, even the healthy stuff, and it works sluggishly
and inefficiently. None of this happens suddenly; it occurs bit by bit but
momentously over the years.
Even if the
culture of treacle does no damage to our civil society or our “real”
intimacies—even if it is a benign or socially neutral phenomenon—at the very
least our notion of self is changing apace with social media and the
sentimental public life that social media have accelerated. And the changes
have come in ways that we’ve yet to recognize or fully appreciate.
Cultural historian
Warren Susman charted the shift from an American culture of character in the
19th century to a culture of personality in the 20th century. The culture of
character valued personal virtues like hard work, achievement, and duty; the
culture of personality revered those who were fascinating, stunning,
attractive, magnetic, and forceful. Charm was its currency. This character type
solved the social quandary of the new mass society because personality proposed
the means by which to emerge as “a somebody” amid the anonymous masses. Susman
theorized more broadly that changes in culture tend to change our “modal type”
of character like this. In other words, a culture finds (in fact creates) its
ideal person.
What, then, is
ours going to be? What modal type matches our culture as it has shifted in the
early years of this century? It doesn’t seem to resemble a culture of either
character or personality. It’s not accurately driven by a goal of dominating by
means of achievement or larger-than-life magnetism. Its dream may still be to command
attention, to emerge as a somebody from the primordial ooze of the social media
world but not through the projection of a monumental star celebrity, as was the
case in the 20th century’s culture of personality. Influence and charm in
social media travel through much smaller capillaries than that. “You must
Twitter,” it is often said. The amassing of influence happens through intimate
whispers to 20,000 followers en masse, but it feels personal.
It’s a
microbroadcasting of personality and personal emotions. Time magazine’s
2010 person of the year, Facebook CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, aspires
to connect every person on Earth—not as subjects or fans, but as “friends.”
Maybe this century’s culture is a culture of feeling in which the ideal citizen-feeler
has the qualities of soulful transparency, audacious disclosure, and candor,
who knows the skills of whispered confession, intimate revelation, and the
trade in secrets to make you think that you and you alone are hearing something
new and experiencing a new feeling; who emerges as somebody not through the
achievements of character or the mesmeric charm of personality but by the
emotional spontaneity of personal impressions and stances. From these, the
citizen-feeler will build an empire on the ephemera of thousands of
confessions, posts, and tweets.
No comments:
Post a Comment