In the 18th century, “sentimental” still meant “having to do with the human feelings.” It was an almost neutral adjective. But as the 19th century progressed, “sentimentality” took on an increasingly pejorative meaning that could be paraphrased as “inclined toward emotional sloppiness and shallow artifacts.” Those who pressed flowers between the leaves of their books, or bought a ceramic kitten at a seaside resort, were, according to the tastemakers of their time, not only “lower” in terms of their thinking but probably in terms of their class status as well.
In the 20th century, this negative attitude toward sentimentality grew ever stronger. Modern art heaped contempt on the kinds of people who hung “realistic” paintings – of roses, or puppies, or a mother and child – over their mantelpieces. Poems like T.S. Eliot’s “Waste Land” told us over and over again that life was often cruel and bracingly ugly rather than sweet and soporific.
Higher education, as it embraced more and more American people, seemed to confirm this rejection of “mere sentiment.” As college students learned to think about themselves and their world, a common assumption ran, they would inevitably “see through” the political, moral, and religious credos of their parents. Mom and Dad went to church every Sunday, these students would inevitably realize, because that was a habit they acquired from their own forebears. Or the students would learn to see not going to church on Sundays as a taboo just as senseless, ultimately, as the taboos maintained by primitive tribes on other continents.
Now our anti-sentimental century draws toward its close, and we are obviously having our doubts. Surely the horrors summarized by the Holocaust can be seen as one of the consequences of not venerating older visions that proclaimed the sacred quality of human experience, including parenthood and family life. The casual murder of those who could be defined as “dependents” – engaged in by Communist as well as Fascist dictatorships – was the end result, it now seems, of a reversal of what were once called “Judaeo-Christian values.”
Today, when crumbling families compete for our attention with historical examples of how indifferent our species has often been to the suffering of its fellow humans, “mere sentimentality” has taken on the flavor of vigorous rebellion against the prevailing order. “I care so much about it because I care so much about it – period.” Less and less often, these days, do we hear people apologizing for the drift of their emotions – or the fact that they are still practicing the “sacred” traditions within which they grew up.
For those of us who serve as university teachers and administrators, our current turn in the direction of human feeling poses a complicated task. In courses on history and political science, we must help our students to understand the nature of human brutality and the safeguards against is laboriously worked into our present political arrangements, national and international.
Meanwhile, we explicitly aid our students as they engage in their individual quests for “meaning,” which often involve “sentimental” attachments. We urge them to feel good about their schools and their campuses. We encourage them to organize groups that share an ethnic or religious background. We use the language of human emotion when we meet them as the academic year begins. We suggest, in all kinds of ways, that a certain interpersonal “glow” is preferable to a sense of mutual alienation – even when the latter masquerades as detached and therefore “objective” analysis.
Where all this will take us in the new century and new millennium remains, of course, to be demonstrated. What has vanished, however, is a certain reflexive admiration for anything that can be characterized as “tough” or “spare” or “uncompromising.” The funeral ended long ago. Sentiment, even when it takes the form of sentimentality, has come back to life.
-Stephen Joel Trachtenberg is president of The George Washington University and professor of public administration.
