1250 word essay about a scene from black mirror and 2 articles

Death by Treacle: SENTIMENT SURFACES FAST AND RUNS HOT IN PUBLIC LIFE, DUMBING IT DOWN AND CRIPPLING INTIMACY IN PRIVATE LIFE Author(s): PAMELA HAAG Source: The American Scholar, Vol. 81, No. 2 (Spring 2012), pp. 76-84 Published by: The Phi Beta Kappa Society Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41435189 Accessed: 06-06-2019 19:44 UTC

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide

range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and

facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at

https://about.jstor.org/terms

The Phi Beta Kappa Society is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The American Scholar

This content downloaded from 140.182.176.13 on Thu, 06 Jun 2019 19:44:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Death by Treacle SENTIMENT SURFACES FAST AND RUNS HOT IN PUBLIC LIFE,

DUMBING IT DOWN AND CRIPPLING INTIMACY IN PRIVATE LIFE

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 inven-

tory 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-work-

ing 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 lamp-

post. 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 thou-

Pamela Haag is the author of Marriage Confidential (2011). She writes a twice-weekly column at the Big Think online magazine and blogs atHuffington Post.

The American Scholar, Spring 2012

76

This content downloaded from 140.182.176.13 on Thu, 06 Jun 2019 19:44:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

77

sands 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 illus-

trious 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 delib-

eration 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.

Death by Treacle

This content downloaded from 140.182.176.13 on Thu, 06 Jun 2019 19:44:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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 Post article she

suggested that other Americans could tie

ribbons, too, and millions complied, and so

her personal code became a sentimental- _ , . m j the „ Today _ , the exclamation political icon. . Today m j the flagship yellow „ .

t . , point . is used nbbon raises awareness of at least t six . af- ,

a. .. . . . , j • j ventilating a. flictions .. and . events . including . , j • endome- j , . . ^ ,. , . . . , , , U1 ,, deployed , . . to ^ soften ,. under- , tnosis, . . . deployed , , , soldiers, U1 bladder ,, cancer, .. .

. . , , ... . . .. lying .. . hostilities suicide, . . , bone , cancer, and ... the Australian . . .. .M , . „nftn,r. . . , . , . excitement .M , where no true . 2009 „nftn,r. Victorian . . , bushnre victims. . , . , .

. , .. „ „ ... reason for , it suggests . itself. Around . , the time .. of „ yellow „ ribbons ...

Americans also got the exclamation-point typewriter key and victim impact state-

ments-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, enthu-

siasm, 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 exclama-

tion point is used with unprecedented, hyperventilating frequency in correspon- dence, 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 exclama-

tion 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

The American Scholar, Spring 2012

78

This content downloaded from 140.182.176.13 on Thu, 06 Jun 2019 19:44:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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 vic-

tims 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 envi-

sioned 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, sen-

timental, 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 politi-

cally 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 acci-

dentally, 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 sche-

matic, sociological view to the fine-grained personal. Mothers Against Drunk Driv-

ing (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.

Death by Treacle

79

This content downloaded from 140.182.176.13 on Thu, 06 Jun 2019 19:44:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

80

Ifs 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 Pet 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 pol-

icy. Indeed, victims seem to occupy a special tier of citizenship in public deliberation

according to a makeshift sentimental hierarchy; lef 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 pro-

pose 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 reli-

gious 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 vis- ible 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

The American Scholar, Spring 2012

This content downloaded from 140.182.176.13 on Thu, 06 Jun 2019 19:44:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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 stream on the Internet his roommate's sexual encounter with

another man, prompting the roommate's suicide. And yet, we still hear ethically bar-

barous 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 fraudu-

lent 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 metaphysi-

cal 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 fel-

low 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

Death by Treacle

81

This content downloaded from 140.182.176.13 on Thu, 06 Jun 2019 19:44:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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 emo-

tionally 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 shar-

ing 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 mem-

branous 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 ear- lier 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 if s such abad

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

The American Scholar, Spring 2012

82

This content downloaded from 140.182.176.13 on Thu, 06 Jun 2019 19:44:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

83

Strange when she was actually living through it as a young person. New forms of con-

nection 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 inher-

ently fake or objectionable, and if it were

rr™""™ - , . only a semantic problem, I wouldn't be The easier - it is to , be close . Jnf , x . . . . , . ... concerned. But there is danger, ® it seems , but x not . intimate . . . , . in public, ... „ . ® ,

_ . ^ . to me, of losing . our coordinates. There , s the easier _ it . is to ^ be close . , ,,, , ^ ^ . . a danger , ® that the lite intimacies of ,,, the , but ^ not intimate ^ . in private. . ® x

sentimental x 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 pornog-

raphy 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

Death by Treacle

This content downloaded from 140.182.176.13 on Thu, 06 Jun 2019 19:44:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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" in-

timacies-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. If s not accurately drivenbyagoal of dominating bymeans 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 capil-

laries 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.

Ifs 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 quali- ties 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 thou- sands of confessions, posts, and tweets. •

The American Scholar, Spring 2012

84

This content downloaded from 140.182.176.13 on Thu, 06 Jun 2019 19:44:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms