Spoilt Rotten: The Toxic Cult of Sentimentality

By Theodore Dalrymple

Not since Christopher Hitchens assault on Mother Theresa have so many sacred cows been slaughtered in such a short volume.' Spectator 'One of our most celebrated essayists.' Toby Young, Mail on Sunday '[A] cultural highlight.' Observer 'Surgical demolition.' Guardian In this perceptive and witty book, Theodore Dalrymple unmasks the hidden sentimentality that is suffocating public life. Under the multiple guises of raising children well, caring for the underprivileged, assisting the less able and doing good generally, we are achieving quite the opposite -for the single purpose of feeling good about ourselves. Dalrymple takes the reader on both an entertaining and at times shocking journey through social, political, popular and literary issues as diverse as child tantrums, aggression, educational reform, honour killings, sexual abuse, Che Guevara, Eric Segal, Romeo and Juliet, the McCanns, public emotions and the role of suffering, and shows the perverse results when we abandon logic in favour of the cult of feeling.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gibson Square
• Release date: Oct 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781908096821

Theodore Dalrymple

Theodore Dalrymple is a psychiatrist who acts as expert-witness in murder trials. After working as a doctor in Africa and the Gilbert Islands, he returned to Britain and has worked in prisons and hospitals in the East End of London, the Midlands, and Birmingham. He is a contributor to The Times, Telegraph, Wall Street Journal, Spectator, and the British Medical Journal. He is the author of several books, including the acclaimed Spoil Rotten, The Knife Went In, Litter, and the Pleasure of Thinking.

Reviews for Spoilt Rotten

[kittyjay · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Unlike his essays, which strike one more as the inner reflections of a widely read, intelligent man, Theodore Dalrymple uses Spoilt Rotten to show off his academic side, which is as refined as his less annotated musings.

Spoilt Rotten connects the fall of civilized behavior and the faults of the current legal system with the rise in sentimental behavior; in this case, not the sweet nostalgia of sentimentalism, but the rampant bad behavior and false outpourings of emotion so revered by reality television and misery literature we see today.

Beginning with the Romantics, he successfully builds a case against the current education system, which relies more on creativity and self-expression than correction and facts, the legal system, which has become so vague as to be useless or abused by those it should be prosecuting, and cultural attitudes to multiculturalism and tolerance (these, I should hasten to say, he does not decry, but points out the numerous problems with stopping at slogans and not thinking things through).

Though I don't always agree with him - though he does mention that there is an appropriate amount of emotion relative to a situation that we, as a society, seem to agree on to some extent, he seems to not outright contradict himself, but certainly skirt it occasionally.

What makes him bearable, however, is that even when disagreeing, his main point is not that sentimentality is bad, but that sentimentality should be matched with reason; he tellingly ends with the Pascal quote that good thinking begets good morals. It's refreshing to see this in an age when political pundits seem to believe that screaming at each other constitutes a "debate".

Dalrymple, who himself wryly acknowledges elsewhere his tendency to wander into "those damn kids" territory, still provides a wealth of evidence to back up his conclusions, as well as demonstrating that a lack of sentimentality does not ipso facto exclude compassion; in fact, it does quite the opposite.

Even if you do not agree, or think you would not agree, with him, do not avoid reading this book: that would be sentimentality interfering with rationality.

[jahn_27 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Dalrymple here attacks theatrical displays of grief, produced for various mercenary reasons. These illustrated by recent British newspaper headline stories, the death of Princess Di, the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, and various criminal cases where the media uproar did not carry that far outside the British media.A thought presented in the book is that that a lack of self defence can be seen as making one guilty in a crime perpetrated on oneself. A woman getting into a relationship with an obviously violent man, and becoming thereby a victim of violence, is guilty of forcing the society to aid her with resources that could have been used elsewhere (even though this does not make the man less guilty). I guess constant responsibility for ones own person is a core of Dalrymple’s thinking, at least here in this book.It’s a somewhat rambling reflection on recent news, combined with some of his experiences as a doctor, ending with some thoughts on African poverty and the fiasco of aid-supported president Nyerere in Tanzania in particular. (Shades of Peter Bauer, who is mentioned). It was an easy read to me, I finished the book in an afternoon. There are things in it worth considering I’ll say, but nothing necessary to have burned into ones skull. One thing I’ll probably remember though is a quotation from Oscar Wilde beginning the conclusion “… a sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.”