Against Sentimentality
5 Oct 2003
[789w]
There’s a thing going on in our heads this era, half risk-aversion, half mental laziness, half squeamishness. I want to lump these all together and call them sentimentality, a disease of our time.
Sentimentality for example is driving your kids to school because you fear a loony will molest them in the park. Say there is a one in a million chance of this catastrophe. Then from this fear you drive the kids to school and reduce the very unlikely terrible thing to impossibility. Phew. But now it is certain that your kids will get fat because they don't walk, and grow up fearful and incapable of finding their way about. These are bad things to happen to children. A hundred percent certainty of these bad events is much worse than a one in a million chance of abduction. But sentimentality prevents you from making a good choice.
Notice sentimentality is not about wanting the best for the kids. It’s about being unable to see beyond one's own horror at a dramatic, filmic, but very very unlikely horror, to the much smaller but certain bad results of not taking the risk. It's not kindness - on the contrary it's the inability to see what the kind thing is.
This filmic quality of the loony in the park (as opposed to the dull workaday business of getting fatter and weedier every day your mum drives you to school) is the heart of sentimentality. It's the same reason we worry about rail safety. Going on a train is ten times as safe as going in a car. Yet a train crash, even a trivial one, is much more worrying to everyone who hears of it, than any number of road death statistics.
Why? In a train crash several people die at once. Of course, in motorway pileups, several people die at once too. These make the front page, leading people to think motorways are not (as they are) the safest roads going. But we don't notice nine or ten people a day running into lampposts or knocking down children crossing the road or smashing each other up, because all die separately. It happens every day. Its very frequency makes it dull. It's not news. We are too mentally withered to think it a serious matter unless somebody puts it in a story with lots of pictures. Instead we fear rail crashes which are very very unlikely.
Moreover, if you really want to get our attention the pictures should be not just plentiful but pretty too. This is a big part of the foxhunting story (actually a large part of this is class hatred – another story). Do you seriously think there'd be a fuss if they hunted giant tarantulas? But foxes are gorgeous. The suffering of poultry, and of the people who make their living from poultry, is much less moving.
In the same way, a terribly injured boy flown from Baghdad to a London hospital is much more shocking than people we don't have photographs of being tortured to death on a daily basis for decades. No pictures, no sympathy. This is an essential element of sentimentality.
Then again another thing the fox and the injured boy have in common is that we did it. A small fraction of the cheque I wrote to the Inland Revenue last year paid for Tornados that blew up children in Baghdad. That quite rightly gives one pause. But if we hadn't done all the things of which blowing up these or other children was the inevitable though undesired consequence, then people would still be being tortured to death in basements.
Likewise, anyone silly enough to think a fox had rights would also have to think a rabbit had rights, which foxes infringe daily. But the sentimental English mind, hates cruelty to a fox far more than cruelty by a fox. And of course, there are moral difficulties in doing a small harm to avert a larger harm. But this is a reason to grapple seriously with the question: not a reason to resolve it by automatic inaction.
Sentimentality, then: a preoccupation with unlikely catastrophes at the expense of present harm; an inability to engage with any but the most filmic situations; a squeamish desire to have no blood on our hands even if that means a good deal more blood on the floor. A disreputable set of attitudes. But attitudes widely present in the mental apparatus of our country. Attitudes that will lead us wrong. Attitudes that are hard to confront because they look a good deal like their admirable cousins compassion and wisdom.
May I encourage you, where you meet with sentimentality, to say clearly that it is a bad thing?
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ellie again wrote on 30 Mar 2007
i want to know why people do it and i dissagree conpletely.
and it should not be done in this country.
ellie wrote on 30 Mar 2007
i think its wrong to hunt foxes they havent done anything to you so why we are loosing are foxes but i know its wrong.
Louisa wrote on 27 Jan 2006
I could not disagree more about foxes. Of course all animals hunt each other, but not to extiction. Without human interference do you really think giant pandas and white tigers would be nearly extinct?
Although the fox kills the rabbit it is in its nature to do so, to survive. Would we, humans, become extinct if foxes were not hunted? Don't think so.
To say that animals have no rights is appaling.
I guarantee that you would take your children's pet cat or dog to the vet when it gets sick rather than say, "sorry darling, it's only an animal, it has no rights".
Try telling the RSPCA that animals have no rights.
Well guess what, humans are animals too. We are even more destuctive to the earth and nature than a fox could ever dream of.
The point is not that foxes should or should not be killed, they should not be pursued and tortured in the name of spot and fun. Who cares if the fox kills rabbits or chickens? It's totally natural.
How is it natural for a human to kill for no reason, not for survival? If the chicken farmers are worried tell them to think about bird flu.
wrote on 25 Jun 2005
wrote on 18 May 2005
wrote on 18 May 2005
Joshua Rey wrote on 20 Oct 2003
No, no, thankyou for taking the trouble to comment.
I quite agree about grey squirrels and rabbits. Free range and tasty.. And really, hunting foxes is totally not about controlling them. It is quite a good way to do that, and certainly no more cruel than gassing or shooting - and unlike those methods, it doesn't take up the farmer or the gamekeeper's time. But hunts used to make (and would still make if it didn't harm their case I doubt not) great efforts to *preserve* foxes to insure the sport continued. So it's not primarily about pest control. The point of hunting is that it's great fun. I don't hunt, but I know people who do and they enjoy it a lot - both the sport itself, and the community.
And that seems fair enough. We do cruel things to animals for our pleasure all the time. Cows die at half their natural life expectancy, all their male calves are castrated and then killed, and they are bred and medicated so that they cna't walk unless they're milked twice a day. If that's not a form of cruelty I'd like to know what is. But it's fair enough - because we want milk. Fine. The trade-off in the life of a fox seems in fact to produce a very great deal of happiness for remarkably little animal suffering. I'd far rather be a fox than a cow - live free, and a fighting chance of dying in my bed with my family about me, versus live in a concentration camp (and be killed at puberty if male).
What I really don't like is privileging the dramatic death of the fox over the lifelong suffering of farm animals... and don't get me started on chickens.
The most important thing, though, is what you say: if I think somebody's way of life is absurd or repugnant, that doesn't mean there should be a law against it. Individuals may be bad judges of what they ought to be doing... but the State is a good deal worse.
Elaine wrote on 19 Oct 2003
Hi,
thanks for taking the time to reply to my comments. There are two animals that are more of a pest to agriculture etc than foxes, they are grey squirrels and rabbits. I have often thought it would make more sense for us to stop eating chickens, leave the foxes alone and eat rabbits and squirrels instead.
Of course it probably isn't feasible because of the huge demand for factory farmed meat..although I'm not sure as there are a heck of a lot of rabbits out there. I don't think hunting is a very efficient way of controlling fox populations anyway. If there are too many foxes why are we overun with rabbits? Rabbits a are much more readily available food to a fox.
I don't like foxhunting, I think it's inefficient, tears up the countryside, causes unecessary suffering and is bad for horses. I don't want to see it outlawed though as I'm against the current trend of paternalism and more law making and constraints on personal freedom. Just because someone doesn't like something does not mean it should be banned. If that were the case then pretty soon we would all have our freedom abruptly curtailed.
BWs Elaine
Ah, yes, thankyou, this is the useful thing about putting what one writes on the internet: it helps me find out when I am not expressing myself clearly. The paragraph about foxes and chickens was originally longer - but I'm trying to keep it under 800 words.
In fact I quite agree with what I take to be your point, that calling foxes cruel is absurd - in the same way as taking them to enjoy rights is absurd. My point was meant to be that
if you take the view (which I don't) that foxes shouldn't be killed, then it will often be on grounds that also ought to lead you to think hens shouldn't be killed. A bit of a loop the loop as arguments go, perhaps more clever than useful. And evidently not clearly expressed.
You're quite right about my paying to keep Saddam Hussein in power. Of course our governments do wicked and stupid things every week. I think the British and American governments do fewer than many, but not none. But our having been in the wrong for so long shouldn't be a reason for not doing the right thing at last, and I do think it was a good thing to boot out the Baathists. If only we'd done it years ago.
Thanks again for your comments.
Elaine wrote on 5 Oct 2003
Sentimental? Hmm? Aren't the poultry breeders (and yourself) also being sentimental If you find foxes guilty of cruelty by killing and eating poultry?
Anthropomorphising animals is a very sentimental act. Cruelty is a human trait. Humans have a conscience, animals do not. Foxes are not consciously cruel. They do a lot of damage if they get into hen houses because of their instinct. Their instincts are not able to 'cope' with such an unatural phenomena as a large quantity of birds which cannot escape. Hence they kill more than they can eat in an instinct driven frenzy.
Btw it was your taxes that also kept saddam hussein in power as well as defeated him. American taxes paid for training for osama bin laden when he was fighting against Russia even though he was known to be a dangerous man. Bws Elaine