Sentimentality, politics and BBC’s The Traitors
Oscar Wilde once scolded his friend Lord Alfred Douglas for his sentimentality, writing that: “A sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it. You think that one can have one’s emotions for nothing. One cannot. Even the finest and most self-sacrificing emotions have to be paid The post Sentimentality, politics and BBC’s The Traitors first appeared on Catholic Herald. The post Sentimentality, politics and BBC’s The Traitors appeared first on Catholic Herald.
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Oscar Wilde once scolded his friend Lord Alfred Douglas for his sentimentality, writing that:
“A sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it. You think that one can have one’s emotions for nothing. One cannot. Even the finest and most self-sacrificing emotions have to be paid for…As soon as you have to pay for an emotion you will know its quality, and be the better for such knowledge. And remember that the sentimentalist is always a cynic at heart. Indeed, sentimentality is merely the bank holiday of cynicism.”
A good illustration of the truth behind Wilde’s thoughts can be found in the wildly popular and entertaining BBC series The Traitors, the third season of which concluded last week. The idea of the programme is as follows. A group of contestants work together to build up a pot of prize money as the “faithfuls” seek to identify and banish those they believe to be “traitors” who in their turn are seeking to “kill” faithfuls and grab the prize money for themselves while remaining undetected. Contestants are constantly on the look-out for signs of betrayal, even as they collaborate on tasks to increase their potential rewards. Groupthink predominates and manipulators set out to confuse one another by spreading suspicion away from themselves as they maximise their chances of swallowing as much of the prize fund as they can.
As with Game of Thrones, viewers appear thrilled to observe what politics might look like in an utterly unredeemed world, where good motivations and honesty would be contemptible foolishness, according to the premise of the game. Yet what is striking in The Traitors is that those who enter this ruthless and cynical game are prone to gushing tears of real emotion over each “banishment”, hugging fellow-contestants and indulging in guilt feelings for, in effect, playing the game – which is their whole raison d’etre for being in a Scottish castle in the first place.
Whatever we think about the morality of a programme where, after all, this is supposed to be all a pastime, The Traitors nicely reflects a common human attitude to emotions which sees them as available “on the cheap”.
Emotions often have “intentionality”
The sentimentalist is one who finds certain feelings pleasurable to engage in provided they do not develop in a way that may demand inconvenient thought and action. In this he shares with the cynic an aversion to those deeper thoughts and feelings which put us in contact with morally important realities. A genuinely cynical view of other human beings simply does not allow that those others might possess depths and motivations not captured by the cynic. It is inconvenient for the cynic to allow that other people may have these deeper thoughts and emotions.
Of course, The Traitors is only a game and one should be wary of moralising certain forms of play. But in depicting a “community” that entirely lacks a conception of a “common good” this particular game rather nicely captures what might worry us in regard to our political life.
What we must beware of is the liberal individualist model of politics, which neglects reference to anything other than private interests – let alone a common good or its ultimate source from which all creatures have their being. On this view, each agent sees other people – or at least, those outside his circle of family and friends – largely as means to, or obstructions to, securing his private interests. Absent is any idea that, in the words of the Thomist thinker Urban Hannon, “society arises from the natural sociability of man expressed in civic friendship and ordered to his temporal common good, itself ordered to his spiritual common good attained in and through the Roman Church.”
This picture contrasts markedly with social contractarian political theories which begin with a story about a pre-political society as a hell-like “war of all against all”.
The Traitors may be just an entertaining game, but it mirrors a way of seeing politics on which there is no such thing as a common good. Instead, there are competing private interests which may, at best, be kept in check procedurally for no higher purpose than achieving some simulacrum of a substantive order – a disordered and suspicion-laden order that bears a negative relation to the divine order it should reflect.
The narcissistic politician often promises an expansion of “autonomy”, and that he/she can help increase our ability to achieve our dreams, understood in terms of private interests or collusions of them. Such politicians do not see how the common good is served by laws that form us so we can relate to our fellow-men in virtuous ways which order us to that Divine Common Good with which we are called to live in friendship. This is no mere aggregation of private interests.
The reduction of politics to aggregative private interest, achieved through compact rather than community, misses the point that that there is a rational order beyond ourselves which calls us not only to action but to the cultivation of desires, feelings and beliefs which reach beyond private interest. Neglect that model and the cynical politician will help to create a sentimental culture, where a spurious unity can be temporarily achieved by the management of feel-good reactions which temporarily help people imitate the kind of community to whom in fact such feelings are anathema. These feelings are ultimately indulged in for the pleasure of holding them and have no draw beyond themselves and the aims of a politics which is now a game.
In such a political atmosphere it is no surprise, then, that increasingly our senior politicians sound like bumptious refugees from The Apprentice – that other great reflection of our culture.
The post Sentimentality, politics and BBC’s The Traitors first appeared on Catholic Herald.
The post Sentimentality, politics and BBC’s The Traitors appeared first on Catholic Herald.
