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Spring 2000 cover

National Observer Home > No. 46 - Spring 2000 > Book Reviews

Faking It : The Sentimentalisation of Modern Society

by Digby Anderson and Peter Mullen (editors)

London: The Social Affairs Unit, 1998, pp. 217.

This interesting collection of essays is published by the Social Affairs Unit. The various contributors are all concerned by what they describe as "sentimentalisation" in the various aspects of society. By this term they refer to the systematic misrepresentation of fact in order to accommodate social or political purposes.

For example, Mark Steyn (the well-known columnist for "The Spectator") deals in his customary effulgent style with sentimentality in the media, in a chapter headed "All Venusians Now". This reference is to the popular work by John Gray, "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus", and Mr. Steyn comments that presently the media

"inevitably ends up adapting life to the teary plot structures it understands: the welfare mom who doesn't know what she's going to do once her benefits end; the lesbian couple doing a sterling job of raising their baby despite the wilful refusal of the town clerk and the local minister to give legal or religious sanction to their relationship; the black community leader for whom affirmative action at an American college provided a ticket out of the ghetto and who fears that the abolition of racial preferences will condemn an entire generation to guns, crack and gangsta rap . . ."

Mr. Steyn takes as an example television:

"According to a study by Professor David Fabranic at the University of Central Florida, 90 per cent of the

murders on television are committed by whites, whereas off-screen only 40 per cent are. Blacks often complain about the lack of 'positive role models', whereas, actually, they benefit from the informal yet ubiquitous affirmative-action programme: in cop shows and detective dramas, when a black man becomes a murder suspect, it usually turns out that he is the victim of a complex, if unlikely, conspiracy by racist white establishment figures . . .

We all know these plots backwards: the urbane property developer whose determination to build a nuclear reprocessing plant on a designated wetlands area leads him to murder; the corporate raider prepared to kill in order to get his factory take-over past the planning board . . .

Anyone in a motion picture or television drama who quotes Scripture invariably proves to be a serial killer or child molester. Two-parent households fare little better. Hollywood has no interest in 'family values' except in promoting 'alternative' households as their true repository: the only nuptials on America's cutest sitcom, 'Friends', have been between two lesbians; the 'issue' dramas prefer scenarios like that on 'Picket Fences', where the crusty judge rules against the reactionary gran'ma and gives custody of her grandchild to the gay father and his lover."

Mr. Steyn comments likewise of the sanitisation of homosexuality and A.I.D.S. in the media: "What you didn't see were dramas about gay men going in to bathhouses and other pick-up joints night after night - which is how the majority of British, American and other Western victims of this plague contracted it."

Other essays include "The Corruption of Religion", in which Dr. Lucy Sullivan discusses the problems which arise when religious doctrines that represent private morality are supplanted by official moralities prescribed by the state, "The Pity of Self-Pity", by Professor Balint Vazsonyi, on sentiment-alisation and decline in music composition, and "Sweetness and Light in Schools", by Professor Bruce Cooper and Dr. Dennis O'Keeffe, where the displacement of intellectual rigour by sentimentality in schools is discussed. This latter essay is of particular interest in Australia, where educational criteria have been placing ever less emphasis on such factual matters as grammar and disciplined learning but increasing emphasis upon the indoctrination of students through environmentism, "anti-racism" (which however furthers pro-Aboriginal racism) and revisionist views of history. Also of note are Professor Nicholas Capaldi's discussion of sentimentalisation of social policy and Dr. Bruce Charlton's discussion of the growth of natural medicine and fringe medicine and of the counselling professions. Mr. Peter Mullen's essay, "All Feelings and No Doctrine", analyses perceptively many of the difficulties which arise though fashionable changes in religion, where matters of belief and of absolute morality are displaced by social welfare practices and by relativism.

"Faking It: The Sentimentalisation of Modern Society" is a stimulating collection of essays which can be recommended. It concentrates upon a number of important aspects of modern society that need to be assessed critically in the interests of accuracy and integrity.

I.C.F. Spry

 

National Observer No. 46 - Spring 2000