Hate

I Hate "Sentimentuals"

What is a sentimentual, you ask?

Many people claiming to be students also claim to be intellectuals. These student-intellectuals, similar to a high school junior varsity football team, generally portray themselves as greater than they are. Their "greatness" comes from what the varsity - the professoriate - tells them. These students are great because someday they will replace the professors as the junior varsity replaces the varsity. In the meantime, the junior varsity will imitate the varsity in every way possible.

We all know the scene. Sophomores flexing their muscles in the mirror and making enough noise to annoy the deaf. Here, the setting for the inflation of ego is not the weight room but the lecture hall. We see students "becoming" intellectuals by being sentimental. By sentimental I mean the affirmation of values, desires, and emotion at the expense of reason, common sense, and detachment. While I admit there is always some kind of interaction between the subjective and objective, there seems to be a point where over-subjectivity becomes sappy.

I hate this sappy sentimentality so I came up with a new name for these knuckle-draggers, "sentimentuals." That is, a person who uses sentiments rather than their intellect. I began to figure this out about two years ago.

A GTF in a Philosophy 101 class was discussing Heidegger. She reviewed his merits for a moment and then exclaimed, "and he was a goddamned Nazi!" So much for philosophical detachment. This GTF was good, so I don't mean this as an insult. Yet, this incident opened my eyes to the uses and abuses of emotion among those yearning to be "intellectual." Now, we can move on to abusive philosophical detachment.

About three months later I found myself in a Philosophy of Law class. One day, in the course of a debate, a group concluded that Nazi marches through hostile areas may be allowed so long as the heel-clicking hicks don't incite violence, a reasonable conclusion. Immediately a girl in the front row began to wail that nobody apparently knew how horrible the Nazis were. In the course of her speech we learned that a group of Germans and Austrians, known as Nazis, were led by a man named Adolf Hitler. Apparently, he almost exterminated the Jewish people and those who don't like to shack up with their niece. This convinced me that this girl had no real argument. She relied on sheer emotion to communicate her point that could have been reasonable. In so doing she basically accused half the class of being immoral. My hate for the sentimentuals began to grow.

This hate began to acquire more of a shape last spring. I was walking down 13th street and I saw a creature with a furry face standing in a cage. On closer inspection this creature turned out to be a human being. He was protesting man's abuse of the animals by hopelessly abusing himself. This seemed rather odd to me. His grounds for belief in his cause seemed stranger. Basically, this guy believed that animals are entitled to a concern and respect equal to that given to humans. Why? Because! That seemed to be his entire argument as he claimed that animals might have moral ideas that can compete with those of human beings. For example, a rattlesnake may be justified to drive its venomous fangs into your heel and the person who blows it away with a shotgun could be indicted for murder. Amazing.

Of course, the moral prerogatives of animals can never be proved. All the better reason to stand in a cage and associate yourself with the dubious animal rights movement then to impress people with your love and pity for the animals. Truly, it is better to be dead than fed. Most of all, it is better to be sentimental and demand animal emancipation rather than do something practical to help the animals. By this time I began to catalogue different events according to a sentimentual-intellectual dialectic. Let me demonstrate:

Cuba: One constant in ever-stagnant left-wing thought is the constant glorification of the accomplishments of Cuba. This glorification relies on the sentimental celebration of Castro's egalitarian regime that provides free health care to all its subjects. These Castro-loving sentimentuals believe that only if our country lifts its trade embargo on Cuba all will be well there. Of course, this is sentimentualism at its worst. Everyone, emotionally at least, loves to see an old rebel affirm his fading relevance. Yet, the facts state that Castro has done more harm than good in Cuba. Besides, why praise a police state that engaged in its own colonial warfare in Angola?

Defazio Bike Bridge: Over the years the traffic on Ferry Street Bridge has gotten worse and worse. As a solution, the City Council built a bike bridge. Naturally, bike bridges are environmentally friendly. Those are the magic words in Eugene that cause half the town to smile and relate their concern for the environment. Naturally, this ignored the fact that most people in Eugene don't ride a bike. Yet, what the city did was environmentally friendly. Therefore, the people of Eugene get to sit in the same traffic jams. This is super-charged sentimentality fueled by zeal and fantasy. I'm sure everyone will come to have the same level of compassion toward the environment necessary to sacrifice their cars. Economics: I use this term loosely. Over the past year I have heard a number of speeches to the effect of "work is so terrible for most people, they only have time to vegetate when they get home." This is typical sentimentual talk as it plays on pity to make a benign situation malignant. Sure, a certain percentage of the population works in mind-numbing jobs. Yet, the facts state the country, as a whole, engages in less mind and muscle numbing work than 50 years ago. By this time I have become an individual warped with hate and bent on revenge. My honor has become my hate. People who use emotion devoid of reason to persuade continually arouse my ire. Most recently, a whale saved by those sappy fools at Greenpeace took my leg after I tried to harpoon it. That's right, I hate Moby Dick too.

Yet, as I reflect I come to an interesting conclusion. Most people tend to think of the sentimental as gentle, emotional, and weak. Yet, I tend to see a lot of people, otherwise classified as sentimental, who instead of being gentle are actually quite angry. This is readily observable today in the form of anarchist street violence. I find this curious between of the strong strain of pacifism that is contained within the political ideals of sentimentuals. So, does this all really mean the sentimentuals are aspiring to intellectual-professor status? Of course. Just look at the typical texts handed around like so much liquor; Rousseau, Marx, Chomsky, and McKinnon, just to name a few. All these authors have one thing in common, the use of emotion to justify their unverifiable ideas. While many of these authors have historical significance, this is oftentimes not stated by the instructor. Instead we are to believe they are significant in the here and now because of the validity of what they wrote; when in fact the times they describe lie buried.

Here is something to think about. Culture, tradition, and custom cause groups to act in generally predictable and consistent ways. Universities for the past 40 years have been the breeding grounds of zealotry and emotionalism. If this is so, what is it in university culture that causes this? My guess relies on the emphasis sentimentuals put on authority for many of them thought the Southworth ruling "proved" students should be politically active. I surmise certain sentimentual ideas, communicated by Professors and others are accepted as given by a number of otherwise emotional students on account of their authority. This creates a self-perpetuating sentimentual culture as what amounts to sentimentality is elevated by the experts and accordingly enshrined as wisdom.

All the same, my hate for the sentimentuals is implacable. My hate for them is so strong I wish I could see them outside the University. They'd be lost and have no place to go in a world they do not recognize. Remember that reality can have a disorienting effect if a person is not exposed to it.