The vehemence with which appeals to sentiment are rejected in public life is constantly surprising. Symbolic gestures that involve the heart, like the apology to the Stolen Generations, are often seen as a substitute for practical action.
Critics also criticise people whose advocacy presents vividly the human reality of those suffering as a result of government policy. Speakers, for example, who substantiate their appeal for change in Australia's refugee policy by describing the trauma of detainees, are often described as 'bleeding hearts'. If they are educated, they face the added opprobrium of belonging to the elites.
Proponents of drastic solutions to cultural or political crises also criticise harshly those who point out the human cost of their solutions. Reflections on the suffering caused by going to war in Iraq or on the costs to fraternity caused by cleaning out the Catholic Church or the ABC, for example, are deemed weak-minded hindrances to clear-sighted action.
If you are one of those who base their case on sentiment, it is tempting to attribute your opponents' vehemence to hard-heartedness. But there is more to it. Critics may fear their defences will be taken down by a moving story and that, as a result, they will be vulnerable to self-deceit or cheap consolation. For them, sentiment is a treacherous patina on the hard rock of reality.
I have some sympathy with this position. It resonates with my experience as a Catholic priest. Nothing discredits faith as much as to have its consolations too easily offered. To be assured, for example, that our dead child has gone to a better place, will be free from the troubles of adulthood or is privileged to die young, is intolerable. We feel that we are being led up a path by someone who has never walked it and hasn't a clue into which hell it might lead. Sentiment untested by experience is sentimentality.
After attending to the unfathomable hurt and horror we find in a person's grief, we are likely simply to listen and to offer few words. We naturally grow hostile to all symbols and words that offer sentiment without weighing the reality of human life. We hunt out sentimentality, nowhere more energetically than in hymns.
Take, for example, 'It is Well with my Soul', by Horatio G. Spafford, a Chicago businessman and a friend of the prolific hymnodists Moody and Sankey. The first verse reads:
When