Theodore Dalrymple has most certainly become one of my favourite sages. This latest brief extract is out of his book
'Spoilt Rotten: the toxic cult of sentimentality', a corker of a book if I may say.
“Sentimentality has triumphed in field after field. It has
blighted the lives of millions of children, creating a dialectic of
overindulgence and neglect. It has destroyed educational standards and caused
untold emotional instability because of the theories of human relations it has
espoused. Sentimentality has been the forerunner and accomplice of brutality
wherever the policies suggested by it have been put into place. The cult of
feeling destroys the ability to think, or even the awareness that is necessary to
think. Pascal was absolutely right when he said:
Travaillons done a’ bien penser. Voila la principe de la morale.
Let us labour, therefore, to think well. That is the principle
of morality.”
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