I have struggled over the years to define with reasonable clarity in my own mind what is “wrong” with sentimentality.
I have felt it and expressed it often enough when drinking. That is one of the perils of drinking; you become maudlin.
At the same time, one of the problems with the world is its, to use Weber’s term, “rationalization”. Most of us move around robotically, and seem to feel if anything much too little. That is why “passion” became a virtue, rather than a sin, as it was for most of history, until perhaps the 19th century.
Passion, we are told, is life. Life, therefore, consists in feeling a lot of it. But this is only half right. Yes, emotional health will lead to a healthy emotional connection to the world, and contentment and even joy, but feelings in and of themselves are not and should not be to the goal. The goal is connection. It is reacting the right ways to the right things, to the right extent. How can you know if you are doing that? It feels right, if you are healthy. That is the point and purpose of feeling: nuance, judgement, balance.
Contrast Sean Penn with whatever image you have of the Buddha or Christ. Who do you think is healthier?
[And I will repeat a joke told about Larry Ellison: the difference between God and Sean Penn is that God doesn’t think he is Sean Penn.]
Here is what I want to say today: the issue with sentimentality is it is emotion which clouds our judgement, and which arises from within reactions we have to ideas within our own minds, rather than in reaction to the world itself.
There is a closed loop, in other words, making this a fundamentally narcissistic way of feeling. And to be sure, narcissists CAN and often ARE sentimental. AOC, to take one obvious example, is no doubt honestly often emotional. But she is stupid and self absorbed, so what she is reacting to, by and large, exists only in her mind.
She is not seeing, to be clear, actual suffering “out there” and feeling compassion, so much as seeing the world and feeling what a pity it is that the world has so little of her. If only the world would bow at her feet, what a grand thing that would be. She would set all alright: and she wouldn’t even have to TRY. She is that good. Just ask her.
Healthy emotionality is organic. It is soft and subtle, most of the time. Most of our rages and depressions and great terrors spring out of trauma, when they are not healthy reactions to horrific situations. If you feel horror in the face of war, that is one thing. If you feel the need to kill outside of a war, though, that is another. That is an unhealthy passion, springing from trauma, itself the product of trauma, going “all the way back”.
But people who feel SATISFIED, who are getting a steady current of emotional nourishment–which is the aim of healthy spirituality in my view, and certainly in my own Kum Nye practice–are not going to go on wild mood swings, and they are not going to project their own unmet emotional needs onto the world.
Actually, maybe that is it: sentimentality is projecting our own emotional needs onto the world. If you need love, you cry because so many other people lack love. If you hurt inside, you cry because so many other people hurt out there.
Oh, that may be close. Have to think and feel on it.
And by the way, no thinking happens without feeling. This is certainly now mainstream biology (tltafdnr: too little time and focus; did not read), but also something easily observable. All of my thoughts have feelings tones for me, and I have often noted how feelings lead easily to certain sorts of thoughts. If you are wondering why a certain sort of thought–fearful images for example, or sad ones–keeps occurring, look more carefully at how you are feeling.
Our vision becomes clearer by subtraction. We have to identify and remove all the filters that prevent true clarity. Merely being “intelligent”–particularly as measured by tests of various sorts–is not even remotely close enough. There were plenty (dozens, in any event) of people as smart as Einstein. What he brought was focus, imagination, and most of all a spirit of play and curiosity. Those are all emotional characteristics.
And as I “heart” on this–what is the emotional equivalent to thinking, since “feeling” is so imprecise (we need a better word)?–this issue can be further simplified: honest emotion is accurate. It reflects what is out there, or at least what you can perceive at a given moment. Sentimentality is not.
Emotions become sentimentality, in other words, the moment they become delusional. I’m not sure if I agree with the following statement, but I’m going to play with it nonetheless. Discuss: Affection often becomes affectation.
Oh: and is affectation not often mistaken for affection? I was listening to some teenage girl talking on the phone at the mall yesterday. The snippet: “you know I love you and all. . .”
Life is a tragedy for those who think, and a comedy for those who feel. Wait, flip that. No move it back. Shit. Figure it out yourself.
Now, THAT I think is funny. Judge me if you must.