Spoilt Rotten: The Toxic Cult of Sentimentality (subtitle in US editions: How Britain is Ruined by Its Children) is a non-fiction book by the British writer and retired doctor and psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple, originally published in 2010. Polemical in nature, the book contends that sentimentality has become culturally entrenched in British society, with harmful consequences. The author uses a range of cultural, educational, political, media and literary issues—including falling standards in education, UK aid policies for African development, the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, and the work and life of Sylvia Plath—to illustrate what he sees as the danger of abandoning logic in favour of sentimentality, which he describes as "the progenitor, the godparent, the midwife of brutality". Much of Dalrymple's analysis is underpinned by his experience of working with criminals and the mentally ill. Spoilt Rotten received a mostly favourable reception in the media. Dalrymple was praised for carrying out a thought-provoking and convincing analysis of a newly emerged cultural phenomenon which sees emotion substituted for reason. Some critics, however, accused the author of cynicism and misanthropic pessimism in his approach, and the historian Noel Malcolm claimed that Dalrymple had overreached in his analysis.
Background Before the book's publication, Dalrymple had alluded on a number of occasions in his writing to the issue of sentimentality in contemporary society. In an essay in 1999, he identified what he saw as the harmful role played by sentimentality in a case involving Stephen Lawrence. Lawrence, a young black British man, was murdered and the subsequent case was mired in accusations of racism among the investigating police. Dalrymple wrote that "the response to the Stephen Lawrence case is another example of how the rule of law is to be supplanted by the rule of sentiment—and it is yet one more instance of what one might call the Dianafication of British public life, in which transitory popular enthusiasm trumps venerable tradition". In a 2004 essay, he analysed how sentimentality towards children was closely linked with violence and neglect, particularly in the poorest sections of British society: "The upbringing of children in much of Britain is a witches' brew of sentimentality, brutality, and neglect, in which overindulgence in the latest fashions, toys, or clothes, and a television in the bedroom are regarded as the highest—indeed only—manifestations of tender concern for a child's welfare". Before the book's publication, Dalrymple analysed two high-profile cases in the British media involving Raoul Moat and Jon Venables.
Dalrymple described Moat as "a brutal sentimentalist. He used the extremity of his behaviour to persuade himself that he felt something—supposedly love—very deeply, and that this was the motive and justification of his behaviour". Referring to Venables, Dalrymple wrote, "Probation officers persistently refused to see the writing on Venables's wall. They explained away the obvious signs of his continuing bad character. Just a little more kindness, understanding. What contempt he must have felt! Thus sentimentality, a refusal to face unpleasant realities, causes crime".
Synopsis
Chapter One: Sentimentality Dalrymple begins the chapter by citing several examples to illustrate how sentimentality is increasing as a cultural phenomenon in the United Kingdom. He then analyses falling education standards in the country, and links these trends to "powerful intellectual currents" that "feed into the great Sargasso Sea of modern sentimentality about children", and asserts that in this regard the ideas of the philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau and the psychologist Steven Pinker have been particularly influential. He then examines a newspaper article which advocates reform of the British prison system. Dalrymple states that the article aroused an emotion "whose effect, if not its intention, was to convince the person experiencing it that he was a person of superior sensibility and compassion", and that such emotionality "often attaches to the question of crime and punishment in contemporary Britain". Dalrymple also cites a modern tendency for criminals under the influence of drugs or alcohol not to be held morally responsible for their crimes. Dalrymple takes issue with this, and agrees with Aristotle that a man is doubly culpable: first for the offence committed, and second for having intoxicated himself. Dalrymple also maintains that it is "the sheerest sentimentality to see drug addicts as the victims of an illness" and that, "sentimentality is now a mass phenomenon almost beyond criticism or even comment".
Chapter Two: What is Sentimentality? Dalrymple advances that the kind of sentimentality that he wishes to draw attention to is "an excess of emotion that is false, mawkish, and over-valued by comparison with reason" and which is performed "in full public view". Dalrymple contends that "Sentimentality is the expression of emotion without judgment. Perhaps it is worse than that: it is the expression of emotion without an acknowledgement that judgment should enter into how we should react to what we see and hear. It is the manifestation of a desire for the abrogation of an existential condition of human life, namely the need to always and never unendingly to exercise judgment. Sentimentality is therefore childish and reductive of our humanity". In this chapter he also takes issue with a number of assertions made by the philosopher Robert C. Solomon, including that sentimentality does not manipulate emotions, cause false emotions to be shown, or distort perception and interfere with rational thought.
Chapter Three: The Family Impact Statement Dalrymple criticises the introduction by Harriet Harman of the Family Impact Statement. Dalrymple writes that such statements "are not permitted to influence the outcome of a case. They are made only after a jury has made its verdict". As a result, kitsch displays of emotion are encouraged in court, of no practical benefit.
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