Spoilt Rotten: The Toxic Cult of 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 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". 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. 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. Dalrymple analyses the media attention and reaction to the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, and how certain media interpreted a perceived lack of emotion on the part of the girl’s parents as evidence of guilt. Dalrymple writes that the "demand that emotion should be shown in public, or be assumed not to exist and therefore indicate a guilty mind, is now not an uncommon one", and cites two similar cases involving Joanne Lees and Lindy Chamberlain. Dalrymple then analyses the outcry from the public and the media to the lack of emotion shown by the Queen after the death of Princess Diana, and contends that "the tabloid newspapers carried out what can only be called a campaign of bullying against the sovereign" and that those gathered outside Buckingham Palace were "bullying rather than expressing any genuine grief". He concludes by asserting that the sentimentality shown by both the media and the public “was inherently dishonest in a way that parallels the dishonesty that lies behind much sentimentality itself". Dalrymple analyses the poet Sylvia Plath, whom he describes as the "patron saint of self-dramatization", and interprets Margaret Drabble's descriptions of Plath as a "willing casualty" and "supremely vulnerable" to mean "virtues of a high order". He asserts that before Plath, self-pity "was regarded as a vice, even a disgusting one, that precluded sympathy", and that "the appropriation of the suffering of others to boost the scale and significance of one's own suffering is now a commonplace." and whose stories reveal perfectly "the dialectic between sentimentality and brutality". Dalrymple ends the chapter by analysing victimhood in the criminal justice system and concludes, "For the sentimentalist, of course, there is no such thing as a criminal, only an environment that has let him down". Dalrymple asserts that across the globe chronic poverty has decreased in the past twenty-five years, but mainly in China and India. As a result, "Africa is an exception and therefore is the current focus of sentimentality about poverty". In this context he examines Gordon Brown's desire as prime minister to ensure that every child in Africa receive a primary education. Dalrymple questions whether there is a link between improving educational standards and increasing economic growth in the continent, and cites the experience of Tanzania under Julius Nyerere, Equatorial Guinea under Macias Nguema, and Sierra Leone's fate after a "long history of historical effort and achievement" as evidence that this may not be so, and argues that Africa's priority is access to markets. which is "preposterous—psychologically, theoretically, and practically". In the book's Conclusion, Dalrymple contends that "in field after field, sentimentality has triumphed", and this has had a number of harmful consequences, including the lives of millions of children being blighted by overindulgence and neglect; the destruction of educational standards; and brutality wherever policies suggested by sentimentality have been advocated.