Commenting on the hysterical reaction to the Covington student issue, Matthew Schmitz made some incredibly insightful points that also apply to the original hysteria surrounding the Jussie Smollett allegations:
Oscar Wilde defined the sentimentalist as one “who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.” A sentimental moralist is one who desires the luxury of a moral response—the undeniable pleasure of righteous indignation, the delectable horror at the evil of others—without paying the cost. He need not uphold a consistent morality in order to indulge in moral denunciation. He need not bother with ascertaining facts, because justice in any particular case is not the point. His censures exist to assure himself and others that he is a good and well-meaning person. Because he confuses feelings with morality, he invariably condemns others for their lack of feeling.
Sentimental moralist. I like that. Someone who desires the pleasure of righteous indignation without paying the cost of consistency, rationality, and intellectual honesty. Sentimental moralism is, in the end, an expression of selfishness and self-centeredness – the selfish quest for an emotional experience. The sentimental moralist is interested only in feeling good about himself/herself at the expense of others.
Schmitz continues:
The sentimental moralist deals in caricature, casting the victim as wholly innocent and the persecutor as unfathomably evil.
Indeed. By dealing in caricture, the sentimental moralist can more easily obtain the sought after pleasure of righteous indignation by convincing themselves of the delectable horror at the evil of others. A reality full of nuance and complexity robs them of the emotional high that comes from the self-righteous chest-thumping coupled with sneering at the complete depravity of those deemed inferior. Once you recognize this, you’ll notice that sentimental moralism is incompatible with critical thinking and intellectual honesty. This means that the sentimental moralists will never “learn” from their mistakes and resist the urge to join in the next witch hunt rooted in some hoax or lie. For them, the witch hunt is not a bug, it is a feature. It’s akin to an addict getting his/her fix.
Schmitz continues
What matters to the sentimental moralist is that he feel right, even if he happens to be wrong.
Yes, truth doesn’t matter. Feelings matter. We saw a splendid, concrete example of this with the young lady who insisted that emotions are the only thing that is real in this world. Yet here is the thing. Because sentimental moralists root everything in emotion, they are oh so easily manipulated by propagandists. The skill and expertise of a propagandist is that of using people’s emotions to carry out your objective – whether it be the sales of a product, the election of a candidate, or putting some new law on the books. Sentimental moralism is thus the putty of propaganda. And as I have argued before, today’s propagandists call themselves “activists.”
Finally Schmitz notes:
The individuals who declared their extreme distress after viewing the encounter between Sandmann and Phillips were indicating to themselves and others that they felt “strongly, healthily, and justly,” and were thereby advancing the “great interests of humanity.” They not only felt right; they felt righteous. Their passion justified their cruelty.
So it would seem that social justice advocates trend toward being sentimental moralists – people who need to feel right, such that their feelings align with their beliefs about “making the world a better place.” This irrational, emotion-based approach can then easily rationalize cruelty, and even violence, as the end justifies the means.
Shadow To Light 
WOW! Spot on, on so many levels.
Sentimental Moralists define truth as whatever falsehood makes them feel better about themselves. It is another form of religion in a post-Christian culture. I somewhat wondered how people who live reasonably rational lives outside of their SJWism, would be so illogical. They need to cling to something to give their existence meaning — no matter how stupid, because the alternative is some sort of nihilism. If there is a God, and humans were created to find meaning in Him, then when they reject Him, they will seek falsehoods to give them the emotion of meaning, not matter obvious and silly the falsehood is.
I understand the primacy of emotions in this worldview, as I think my recent comments bear out, but I still haven’t put my finger on what particular species of emotionalism is at work. I note that the polar opposite kind of racism is also emotionally based, but in feelings of physical and intellectual superiority, rather than the moral superiority of the Liberal mindset. As such, the reliance on emotions happens at both obvious extremes (hard-core racial supremacy and bleeding-heart liberalism), so there must be at least two species of emotionalism to consider, albeit that the “Liberal” variant is the far more common (and thus politically acceptable) one.
In trying to fathom why there might be an asymmetric division between polar opposite extremes of emotionalism like this, the first thing that springs to mind is C.S. Lewis’ discussion of “pride” as a particularly subversive temptation. As I recall, he characterised it as being the kind of sin which, when detected and consciously avoided, can lead to more of the same sin. That is, one might detect pride (or some other sin) in oneself, act against it, then feel pride for having done so. That being so, one might expect “pride” to be a more common sin than others, being a possible secondary sin one commits when avoiding others.
Assuming the accuracy of that diagnosis, is the emotionalism of Liberalism a manifestation of pride? Arguably the opposite is true: feelings of physical and intellectual superiority are obvious forms of pride. But surely feelings of moral superiority are all the more subversive, because moral goodness is ultimately the only true form of goodness. Strength and intellect are desirable qualities, to be sure, but of what value are they if employed to evil ends? Moral quality is the only quality which is good by definition. Perhaps this is another way of seeing the truth in Lewis’ observation.
It should also be noted that moral superiority is the easiest thing to be deluded about, particularly if one has subscribed to the idea that one’s feelings are an accurate indication of moral quality. There are obvious, objective tests of strength, and fairly clear tests of intellect, but morality? That depends very much on one’s ideas about what morality is, fundamentally, and that strikes me as being a fundamentally religious question.
Food for thought. Share yours, if you have any.
It’s OK to a point, but we must never forget – nor cease to point out – that these were both based on modern racism. That the Left has effectively taken the same attitude once applied to Jews or Blacks and now applied it to Whites shows how easy bigotry can be. Had the Convington kids not been white, or the accused of Smollett been Arabic or Asian, there would have been no corresponding level of hysteria and belief. This is plain and simple racism, and the speed with which Christians, Christian leaders and even Bishops embrace it shows how quickly it’s become socially acceptable racism.
> By dealing in caricature, the sentimental moralist can more easily obtain the sought after pleasure of righteous indignation by convincing themselves of the delectable horror at the evil of others. A reality full of nuance and complexity robs them of the emotional high that comes from the self-righteous chest-thumping coupled with sneering at the complete depravity of those deemed inferior. Once you recognize this, you’ll notice that sentimental moralism is incompatible with critical thinking and intellectual honesty.
It’s a standing joke – half-truth, half-caricature – that to an engineer a cow can be considered to be a sphere. It’s a severely reductionist approach, it ignores all the complexity of actual cows, and it takes no account whatsoever of context unless and until knowing that context is essential. But it’s an approach that works when it works and insofar as it works.
https://www.wired.com/2011/02/what-is-up-with-the-spherical-cow/
Science, too, simplifies ruthlessly. For example, according to Quantum Physics there are exactly two causes of the First World War:
http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-03-26
It doesn’t get better in Neuroscience. Suppose you want to find out what are the ‘Neural correlates of [that’s what the brain looks like when] maintaining one’s political beliefs in the face of counterevidence’: you use the usual suspects, WEIRD young university students, unusually highly educated, elite, highly trained in taking tests, probably they are Psychology students rather than Political Science students or students in general, they’re from one university in one corner of the USA which has it’s distinctive and separate social and political culture – Black Alabaman single mothers with three kids and on the poverty line also have the vote yet are excluded from the experiment despite possibly far outnumbering the political beliefs experimentees; the experimentees are (on current practice) guaranteed to be very different from the typical American political believer, and very, very different from Saudi Arabian political believers of either sex. Having narrowed the selection pool drastically (because your choices are circumscribed by having in practice to recruit from a Californian university campus), so drastically as to be to be unrepresentative of people in general, the researchers then actively choose to recruit just one end of the political spectrum – with Republicans probably in short supply in the pool, they’ll probably have to be Democrats. So what applicability can the experiment have to all WEIRD people in the USA, let alone to a Homo Sapiens chosen at random?
‘Science and Reason’ sounds wonderful … until you consider how complicated everything science examines usually is; and that if scientific experiments are possible only by studying drastically simplified and drastically limited experimental set-ups, the results – even if with accuracy to four significant figures and with a <0.05 p-value – the predictions drawable from them are going to be valid in rare circumstances that are so radically simple they are similar to the experimental set-up rather than in a reality full of nuance and complexity.
As regards the Social Sciences the glaring problem is that (in a memorable quote, the source of which I’m having trouble tracking down) ‘every damn thing is correlated with every other damn thing’: isolating causes, then determining experimentally what particular effects follow in what measures from those causes, is generally near-impossible; good luck trying to find a formula to tie those variables together to make a useful general law with genuine predictive (qualitative and quantitative) power in a reality full of nuance and complexity. Social Science is a joke, especially for Physicists.
But that’s only fair: for Social Historians looking for the causes of the First World War, it’s that hardest of hard sciences, Physics, which is a joke.
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With this in mind, let’s re-cast the opening quote, changes in italics:
By dealing in caricature, the people loudly calling for the primacy of ‘Science and Reason’ can more easily obtain the sought after pleasure of righteous indignation by convincing themselves of delectable horror at the ignorance and stupidity of others. A reality full of nuance and complexity robs them of the emotional high that comes from self-righteous chest-thumping coupled with sneering at the complete intellectual depravity of those deemed inferior. Once you recognize this, you’ll notice that ‘Science and Reason’ is incompatible with critical thinking and intellectual honesty.
Further to my response above regarding the spurious or misleading certainty of the sciences, with neuroscience chosen as an example, I find there is yet more to add to those charges. Dan Dennett’s 2014 book review “Are we free? Neuroscience gives the wrong answer” of philosopher Alfred Mele’s Free: Why Science Hasn’t Disproved Free Will points out the serious flaws in widely cited neuroscience research:
https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/are-we-free
And a book of more general criticism of bad neuroscience, or rather of bad conclusions drawn therefrom; here’s the Amazon Books blurb:
Weird: charges against Jussie Smollett have been dropped, and his two
employeesattackers won’t be charged either. Smollett’s got off scot-free without a jail sentence, or a criminal record, and without a stain on his character.https://edition.cnn.com/2019/03/26/entertainment/jussie-smollett-charges-dropped
He didn’t get a fine, either. Except … he’s agreed to forfeit his $10,000 bail. Yep, definitely not a $10,000 fine, eh?
I would be curious to see how other false crime reports are treated in Chicago.