The Art of Creating Pseudo-responses

In his own inimitable style, Foamier has been pointing out the phoniness of much of the local populace’s response to the horrifying death of eight Hong Kongers in Manila. In a world where so much smacks of pretension and insincerity, such sentimentalising was well described by Roger Scruton as "a way of enjoying the luxury of warm emotions without the usual cost of feeling them".

Professional mourners provided a similar service in the Near East in Biblical days and still do today in various places including the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of China, cultures that not coincidentally provide a refuge – or perhaps that should be "welcome" – for the overactor and the talentless and self-deluded karaoke singer. Watching the likes of William Hung "perform", one is reminded of Charles Dickens, who wrote in Great Expectations that "all other swindlers on earth are nothing to the self-swindlers".

The growing trend towards dissimulation may be seen as one result of the 65 years of peace that much of the Western world has enjoyed, which has brought with it increasing prosperity and greatly increased leisure time. It is the other side of the coin that finds wealthy, semi-educated middle-class people with a lot of time on their hands only to willing to embrace scares and have a jolly good panic every now and then, a trait that was ably documented by Christopher Booker and Richard North in their book Sacred to Death. Here in Hong Kong, of course, we have to look no further than the SARS "pandemic" to see how scares can, on the one hand, mislead a gullible public and, on the other, propel those who promote them into the top post at the World Health Organisation.

Those who take an interest in such matters may wish to take a look at Faking It: The Sentimentalisation of Modern Society, a book that came out in the wake of Diana's death and which devotes one of its best chapters to the bemusing outpouring of "grief" on the part of millions of people who had never met her but who jumped at the newspaper-fuelled opportunity to play a vicarious role in the massive mourning business.

As one of the book's contributors, Bruce Charlton, writes in his chapter on the sentimentalising of medicine:

"When ... people find themselves in the role of passive spectator in a frightening media spectacle, then striking a sentimental pose may be the most natural response ... To fail to express sympathy for the victims of a disaster, or condemnation for the perpetrator of an atrocity ... is taken as evidence of some peculiar moral deficit."

With all their insecurities and irrationality, human beings are easy prey to any "encouragement to indulge in sentimentality untrammelled by social consequences", the upshot of which is "a habit of generating pseudo-responses".

For many people, Diana had assumed the role usually reserved for their pet. And any such sentimentalising of pets, as Scruton observes, "is a way of enjoying the luxury of warm emotions without the usual cost of feeling them, a way of targeting an innocent victim with simulated love which it lacks the understanding to reject or criticise, and of confirming thereby a habit of heartlessness". (from the essay "Animals rights and wrongs")