Soft by Ferdinand Mount A History of Sentimentality
What's it about?
Soft (2025) traces how feelings have shaped Western civilization across a thousand years, from medieval poetry to contemporary reforms on divorce, gay marriage and abortion. Through vivid historical analysis, this exploration shows how sentimentality in art and culture, despite being dismissed as weak or manipulative, has quietly driven social and political progress.
History is made of facts, not feelings – or so we’re told.But what if our sentimentality is more than soppy nonsense? This eye-opening lesson reveals how feelings have been the hidden force behind every major political revolution, from the abolition of slavery to civil rights movements.Spanning a thousand years of Western culture, it takes you from medieval troubadours all the way through to Twitter outrage, showing how each era’s emotional conventions have profoundly influenced everything from art and literature to law and social reform.
You’ll discover how troubadours invented love, how tear-jerking novels actually changed legislation, and why today’s “woke” culture is just the latest chapter in humanity’s long struggle with feeling.Love is love, we say today.But was it always love?
It turns out that our modern conception of love is actually a fairly new invention. When ancient Greek and Roman writers told stories of love, they treated it as a dangerous affliction sent by capricious gods – something that destroyed heroes rather than ennobled them.Warriors sought glory in combat and loyalty among comrades.Romance?
That was barely worth mentioning. Then, around 1100 AD in southern France, a group of wandering poets called troubadours came up with a revolutionary idea that seems completely natural to us today: that falling in love could be the most meaningful thing a person ever experiences.These poets created an entirely new literary vocabulary.Their songs portrayed love as an all-consuming force that gave life its purpose.Author C.S.
Lewis called this “one of the real changes in human sentiment” in recorded history. Take the medieval tale of Lancelot and Guinevere.When Lancelot receives a comb still tangled with the queen’s hair, he repeatedly presses each strand to different parts of his face in an act of near-worship, then tucks them inside his clothing directly over his chest.This kind of obsessive physical devotion to a lover’s remnants would have baffled earlier generations.The emotional transformation extended also into religious life.Crucifixes from earlier centuries showed Jesus standing upright with open eyes, radiating divine power.
By the 13th century, artists depicted his suffering in unflinching detail – twisted limbs, visible wounds, faces contorted in agony.Europeans wept freely at masses, processions, and public events.Displaying intense emotion became a sign of spiritual depth rather than weakness.Perhaps most surprisingly, this sentimental turn produced tangible political benefits.King Henry III of England exemplified the new sensibility.While military leaders derided him as ineffectual, he personally cared for lepers, funded hospitals nationwide, and maintained a daily welfare program feeding hundreds.
While critics expected disaster, his compassion-driven approach achieved stability that eluded more aggressive rulers.His peaceful diplomacy secured lasting treaties, the nation’s economy flourished dramatically, and early forms of representative government emerged. The troubadours catalyzed a fundamental shift in how Western culture understood emotion – showing that openness and empathy could be sources of strength rather than vulnerability.
After the discovery of modern love, open sentimentality had a long run – but it couldn’t last forever.Under King Henry VIII of England, the Reformation era ushered in a new anti-emotional culture that condemned tears and compassion. Henry VIII’s administrative reform of monasteries involved brutal executions, property seizures, and systematic destruction of sacred sites that had stood for centuries.When his commissioners arrived at Walsingham Abbey in the 1530s, they executed the dissenting Sub-prior as a public warning and auctioned off the property for a mere ninety pounds.
Within months, a private mansion occupied the site.Reformers like Archbishop Matthew Parker insisted that grieving the departed was disgraceful, “womanish” and “beastly.” During this era, the word “maudlin” emerged as a contemptuous term for emotional excess – ironically drawn from Mary Magdalene’s weeping at Christ’s tomb in the Gospels.Funeral practices transformed accordingly: crying at burials became evidence of insufficient faith in resurrection. This severity permeated economic policy as well.Hundreds of monastic infirmaries disappeared practically overnight, abandoning vulnerable populations who had depended on them for shelter and medical care.
Authorities began treating destitution as moral failure rather than a circumstance worthy of assistance.Without proof of forty days’ residence in a parish, the poor received nothing, condemning families to endless displacement as they searched for survival. William Dowsing embodied this destructive zeal most vividly.Appointed as official Commissioner for the Destruction of Monuments, he kept detailed records of obliterating artwork and symbols across 250 churches during a fifteen-month rampage.His journal entries catalog the carnage: scores of demolished paintings in one location, dozens of shattered glass angels in another.He destroyed memorial inscriptions requesting prayers and even dug through burial grounds where founders had rested for centuries.
This Protestant austerity resonated unexpectedly with Renaissance artistic philosophy emerging simultaneously in Italy.Michelangelo scorned Flemish painting specifically for provoking tears in viewers, celebrating instead Italian art’s emotional restraint and noble simplicity.These parallel movements – one religious, one aesthetic – both turned away from medieval intimacy and emotional richness toward something more austere, controlled, and fundamentally detached from messy human feeling.
When Samuel Richardson published his novel Pamela in 1740, readers across Europe wept.They were sympathizing with the trials of a servant girl defending her dignity against a predatory aristocrat.Critics mocked this new “cult of feeling” as dangerous nonsense.Yet something profound was happening.
Richardson’s epistolary technique – characters writing letters in real time, emotions raw and immediate – created unprecedented psychological intimacy.Readers didn’t just observe Pamela’s struggles – they lived them.But the Second Sentimental Revolution did more than change how people read books.It basically rebuilt society from the ground up.Alongside Richardson, philosophers like David Hume and Adam Smith were developing a parallel insight: human morality springs from feeling, not pure reason.We connect through sympathy and imagination, picturing ourselves in another’s situation.
Smith argued that we judge right and wrong by imagining what an impartial observer would think – a fundamentally emotional exercise and not a rational calculation.The Methodist movement, launched by the Wesley brothers in 1738, brought this emotional revolution into religion.Massive outdoor gatherings featured passionate preaching, visible tears, and hymns like “Amazing Grace” that treated Jesus as a personal friend rather than a distant judge.Establishment figures were horrified by such unseemly displays, but working-class audiences found liberation in this democratized spirituality.Here’s what critics then and now consistently missed: these tears led somewhere.Captain Thomas Coram, who witnessed babies dying on London streets, spent two decades building support for the Foundling Hospital, all in order to improve the lives of children.
And philanthropist John Howard revolutionized prisons through systematic inspections that treated even convicted felons as human beings deserving care.Even Quakers and evangelicals mobilized public sympathy through petitions, sermons, and pamphlets until Parliament finally abolished the slave trade in 1807.The gap between emerging sympathy and actual change often stretched across decades.But the direction became irreversible once ordinary people, gathering informally across the country, channeled their feelings into organized pressure.Sentiment without action remains hollow.Yet action fueled by sympathy can actually succeed in overturning established cruelty.
Eventually, the tears had to stop.By the 1790s, Britain was gearing up for war with Napoleon, crushing dissent at home, and building a global empire.Suddenly, all that weeping over sentimental novels seemed not just embarrassing but dangerous. When the French Revolution descended into the Terror, British intellectuals made a chilling connection.
They blamed the bloodshed on excessive emotion – the same tearful sensibility that revolutionary philosophers like Rousseau had championed.Robespierre himself spoke the language of tender feelings even as the guillotine fell.The message became clear: emotion without reason leads to chaos.English philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft’s dramatic shift captures this transformation perfectly.In 1788, she celebrated sensibility as the soul’s most exquisite feeling.Four years later, she’d completely reversed course, dismissing softness as mere weakness in her revolutionary work on women’s rights.
The new age of manliness demanded courage, stoicism, and above all, emotional restraint.Keep a stiff upper lip.Never show weakness.These credos became imperial policy.British colonial administrators deliberately used them to distance themselves from the people they subjugated.When Indian rulers wept during negotiations over losing their kingdoms, British officers felt nothing but scorn.
They interpreted every tear as proof of inferiority, justifying further domination.Yet there was another artistic current that emerged by the mid-1800s.Critics no longer dismissed sentimental fiction as merely weepy and self-indulgent.Now they feared it was dangerously effective.They were terrified of authors like Charles Dickens, whose moralizing tales of good and evil wielded alarming influence.One reviewer worried openly about the “pernicious political and social influence” Dickens had on younger readers.
Newly literate workers were getting ideas about reforming Parliament, the courts, and the workhouses. Across the pond, Harriet Beecher Stowe – the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin – faced even fiercer backlash.Southern writers produced an entire genre of “Anti-Tom” novels, claiming slavery was divinely ordained and that enslaved people lived contentedly.Eventually, history would validate Stowe.
Then, when the First World War started, the 19th-century ideal of manliness seemed to reach its ultimate test.Young men like Oscar Wilde’s son Cyril, desperate to prove themselves as men, were killed by the hundreds of thousands.The trenches exposed just how hollow and costly this ideal had become.The gripes critics had with Charles Dickens marked the birth of a cultural divide that still exists today – between art that moves hearts to inspire action, and art that prizes formal perfection above all else.
In the early 20th century, a seismic shift occurred in the art world.It would redefine what counted as legitimate art – and human emotion became the enemy.Let’s meet a young Pablo Picasso, aged sixteen, as he poured his heart into a massive canvas called “Science and Charity.” It depicted a devoted doctor attending a desperately ill patient, capturing the physician’s compassion with remarkable sensitivity.
Picasso remained proud of this work throughout his life.Yet later critics dismissed it as “sanctimonious,” using its sincerity against it. Modernist critics like Clive Bell launched a full-scale attack on emotional connection in art, using the example of a realist Luke Fildes’ painting called “The Doctor”.True art, he argued, exists in a world entirely separate from human experience.It should concern itself only with form, color, and spatial relationships.Compassion, devotion, love – these were all contaminations that dragged art down from its proper realm of cold, intellectual purity.
The irony cuts deep when you learn that many great modern artists like Vincent van Gogh treasured sentimentalists like Luke Fildes. Van Gogh kept a woodcut of Fildes drawing for a decade, so moved by its poignant emotion that it inspired his own iconic “Yellow Chair.” What one generation of artists found genuinely powerful, the next generation of critics condemned as sentimental fakery.But this aesthetic revolution masked something uglier: raw class prejudice.Writer Arnold Bennett produced deeply sensitive novels and championed modern artists from Chekhov to Picasso.Yet Bloomsbury intellectuals savaged him relentlessly for his supposed vulgarity.
Virginia Woolf and her circle believed that popularity with ordinary readers automatically signaled inferior work.This worship of emotional coldness had dark political consequences, too.The same intellectuals celebrating art’s coldness often embraced fascism, eugenics, and contempt for democracy.Italian poet’s Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto glorified war as “the world’s only hygiene” and revealed where the rejection of human feeling ultimately led: toward violence, hardness, and a dangerous contempt for ordinary human life.In pushing away sentiment, the modernist project pushed away humanity itself.
In 1967, three remarkable shifts happened within months: England decriminalized homosexuality, legalized abortion, and abolished capital punishment.Add divorce liberalization two years later, and you have perhaps the most dramatic moral transformation in British history.What drove this sudden change?Not philosophical arguments, but something simpler: people began feeling sympathy for those suffering under harsh laws.
The 1954 Montagu case exemplified this shift.When Lord Montagu and two others were imprisoned for consensual activity, public opinion began changing.Support for decriminalization climbed from 18 percent in 1957 to 65 percent by the early 1990s as people saw the human cost of these laws.This pattern repeated across issues.Capital punishment ended when wrongful executions like Timothy Evans’s made injustice undeniable.Divorce reform passed when people recognized friends trapped in loveless marriages.
Society gradually learned to extend sympathy beyond traditional boundaries.Conservatives predicted disaster, warning that loosened morals would unleash chaos.Yet over thirty years, homicide rates fell sharply.Burglary, robbery, and violent crime declined.The prophesied moral collapse never materialized.When Princess Diana died in 1997, her funeral exposed the ideological fault line: millions wept openly in what they saw as natural grief, while others recoiled at what they called a “carnival of sentiment.
” The nation split between those who believed public emotion showed humanity and those who saw it as a dangerous weakness.That same divide prevails today. The author interprets the “anti-woke” movement as coming about as a reaction to what it perceives as excessive sensitivity – the renaming of offensive terms, accommodation of transgender rights, trigger warnings and safe spaces.Critics champion the classical virtues of toughness, discipline, and stoicism over what they see as coddling and weakness.
Yet the evidence suggests societies capable of sentimentality don’t weaken – they expand their capacity for human flourishing.Our ability to feel for others, to let emotion guide policy, to cry when circumstances warrant tears are markers of a civilization learning, however imperfectly, to treat more people as fully human.The main takeaway of this lesson to Soft by Ferdinand Mount is that emotions are a key driver of human progress.
Western culture has oscillated between embracing and rejecting emotion for over a millennium.Medieval troubadours revolutionized society by inventing romantic love, while the Reformation brutally suppressed sentiment as weakness.The 18th century’s sentimental novels sparked genuine social reforms – abolishing slavery, improving prisons, founding hospitals. But by the 1790s, fears of revolutionary chaos triggered another backlash, championing stoic masculinity and imperial detachment.
Modernist art then rejected emotion entirely, dismissing sentiment as unsophisticated.The 1960s brought a third emotional revolution, extending compassion to marginalized groups through legal reforms on homosexuality, divorce, and capital punishment. Today’s "anti-woke" backlash mirrors historical patterns, but evidence shows societies that embrace sympathy expand human flourishing rather than collapse into weakness.
Soft (2025) traces how feelings have shaped Western civilization across a thousand years, from medieval poetry to contemporary reforms on divorce, gay marriage and abortion. Through vivid historical analysis, this exploration shows how sentimentality in art and culture, despite being dismissed as weak or manipulative, has quietly driven social and political progress.
History is made of facts, not feelings – or so we’re told.But what if our sentimentality is more than soppy nonsense? This eye-opening lesson reveals how feelings have been the hidden force behind every major political revolution, from the abolition of slavery to civil rights movements.Spanning a thousand years of Western culture, it takes you from medieval troubadours all the way through to Twitter outrage, showing how each era’s emotional conventions have profoundly influenced everything from art and literature to law and social reform.
You’ll discover how troubadours invented love, how tear-jerking novels actually changed legislation, and why today’s “woke” culture is just the latest chapter in humanity’s long struggle with feeling.Love is love, we say today.But was it always love?
It turns out that our modern conception of love is actually a fairly new invention. When ancient Greek and Roman writers told stories of love, they treated it as a dangerous affliction sent by capricious gods – something that destroyed heroes rather than ennobled them.Warriors sought glory in combat and loyalty among comrades.Romance?
That was barely worth mentioning. Then, around 1100 AD in southern France, a group of wandering poets called troubadours came up with a revolutionary idea that seems completely natural to us today: that falling in love could be the most meaningful thing a person ever experiences.These poets created an entirely new literary vocabulary.Their songs portrayed love as an all-consuming force that gave life its purpose.Author C.S.
Lewis called this “one of the real changes in human sentiment” in recorded history. Take the medieval tale of Lancelot and Guinevere.When Lancelot receives a comb still tangled with the queen’s hair, he repeatedly presses each strand to different parts of his face in an act of near-worship, then tucks them inside his clothing directly over his chest.This kind of obsessive physical devotion to a lover’s remnants would have baffled earlier generations.The emotional transformation extended also into religious life.Crucifixes from earlier centuries showed Jesus standing upright with open eyes, radiating divine power.
By the 13th century, artists depicted his suffering in unflinching detail – twisted limbs, visible wounds, faces contorted in agony.Europeans wept freely at masses, processions, and public events.Displaying intense emotion became a sign of spiritual depth rather than weakness.Perhaps most surprisingly, this sentimental turn produced tangible political benefits.King Henry III of England exemplified the new sensibility.While military leaders derided him as ineffectual, he personally cared for lepers, funded hospitals nationwide, and maintained a daily welfare program feeding hundreds.
While critics expected disaster, his compassion-driven approach achieved stability that eluded more aggressive rulers.His peaceful diplomacy secured lasting treaties, the nation’s economy flourished dramatically, and early forms of representative government emerged. The troubadours catalyzed a fundamental shift in how Western culture understood emotion – showing that openness and empathy could be sources of strength rather than vulnerability.
After the discovery of modern love, open sentimentality had a long run – but it couldn’t last forever.Under King Henry VIII of England, the Reformation era ushered in a new anti-emotional culture that condemned tears and compassion. Henry VIII’s administrative reform of monasteries involved brutal executions, property seizures, and systematic destruction of sacred sites that had stood for centuries.When his commissioners arrived at Walsingham Abbey in the 1530s, they executed the dissenting Sub-prior as a public warning and auctioned off the property for a mere ninety pounds.
Within months, a private mansion occupied the site.Reformers like Archbishop Matthew Parker insisted that grieving the departed was disgraceful, “womanish” and “beastly.” During this era, the word “maudlin” emerged as a contemptuous term for emotional excess – ironically drawn from Mary Magdalene’s weeping at Christ’s tomb in the Gospels.Funeral practices transformed accordingly: crying at burials became evidence of insufficient faith in resurrection. This severity permeated economic policy as well.Hundreds of monastic infirmaries disappeared practically overnight, abandoning vulnerable populations who had depended on them for shelter and medical care.
Authorities began treating destitution as moral failure rather than a circumstance worthy of assistance.Without proof of forty days’ residence in a parish, the poor received nothing, condemning families to endless displacement as they searched for survival. William Dowsing embodied this destructive zeal most vividly.Appointed as official Commissioner for the Destruction of Monuments, he kept detailed records of obliterating artwork and symbols across 250 churches during a fifteen-month rampage.His journal entries catalog the carnage: scores of demolished paintings in one location, dozens of shattered glass angels in another.He destroyed memorial inscriptions requesting prayers and even dug through burial grounds where founders had rested for centuries.
This Protestant austerity resonated unexpectedly with Renaissance artistic philosophy emerging simultaneously in Italy.Michelangelo scorned Flemish painting specifically for provoking tears in viewers, celebrating instead Italian art’s emotional restraint and noble simplicity.These parallel movements – one religious, one aesthetic – both turned away from medieval intimacy and emotional richness toward something more austere, controlled, and fundamentally detached from messy human feeling.
When Samuel Richardson published his novel Pamela in 1740, readers across Europe wept.They were sympathizing with the trials of a servant girl defending her dignity against a predatory aristocrat.Critics mocked this new “cult of feeling” as dangerous nonsense.Yet something profound was happening.
Richardson’s epistolary technique – characters writing letters in real time, emotions raw and immediate – created unprecedented psychological intimacy.Readers didn’t just observe Pamela’s struggles – they lived them.But the Second Sentimental Revolution did more than change how people read books.It basically rebuilt society from the ground up.Alongside Richardson, philosophers like David Hume and Adam Smith were developing a parallel insight: human morality springs from feeling, not pure reason.We connect through sympathy and imagination, picturing ourselves in another’s situation.
Smith argued that we judge right and wrong by imagining what an impartial observer would think – a fundamentally emotional exercise and not a rational calculation.The Methodist movement, launched by the Wesley brothers in 1738, brought this emotional revolution into religion.Massive outdoor gatherings featured passionate preaching, visible tears, and hymns like “Amazing Grace” that treated Jesus as a personal friend rather than a distant judge.Establishment figures were horrified by such unseemly displays, but working-class audiences found liberation in this democratized spirituality.Here’s what critics then and now consistently missed: these tears led somewhere.Captain Thomas Coram, who witnessed babies dying on London streets, spent two decades building support for the Foundling Hospital, all in order to improve the lives of children.
And philanthropist John Howard revolutionized prisons through systematic inspections that treated even convicted felons as human beings deserving care.Even Quakers and evangelicals mobilized public sympathy through petitions, sermons, and pamphlets until Parliament finally abolished the slave trade in 1807.The gap between emerging sympathy and actual change often stretched across decades.But the direction became irreversible once ordinary people, gathering informally across the country, channeled their feelings into organized pressure.Sentiment without action remains hollow.Yet action fueled by sympathy can actually succeed in overturning established cruelty.
Eventually, the tears had to stop.By the 1790s, Britain was gearing up for war with Napoleon, crushing dissent at home, and building a global empire.Suddenly, all that weeping over sentimental novels seemed not just embarrassing but dangerous. When the French Revolution descended into the Terror, British intellectuals made a chilling connection.
They blamed the bloodshed on excessive emotion – the same tearful sensibility that revolutionary philosophers like Rousseau had championed.Robespierre himself spoke the language of tender feelings even as the guillotine fell.The message became clear: emotion without reason leads to chaos.English philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft’s dramatic shift captures this transformation perfectly.In 1788, she celebrated sensibility as the soul’s most exquisite feeling.Four years later, she’d completely reversed course, dismissing softness as mere weakness in her revolutionary work on women’s rights.
The new age of manliness demanded courage, stoicism, and above all, emotional restraint.Keep a stiff upper lip.Never show weakness.These credos became imperial policy.British colonial administrators deliberately used them to distance themselves from the people they subjugated.When Indian rulers wept during negotiations over losing their kingdoms, British officers felt nothing but scorn.
They interpreted every tear as proof of inferiority, justifying further domination.Yet there was another artistic current that emerged by the mid-1800s.Critics no longer dismissed sentimental fiction as merely weepy and self-indulgent.Now they feared it was dangerously effective.They were terrified of authors like Charles Dickens, whose moralizing tales of good and evil wielded alarming influence.One reviewer worried openly about the “pernicious political and social influence” Dickens had on younger readers.
Newly literate workers were getting ideas about reforming Parliament, the courts, and the workhouses. Across the pond, Harriet Beecher Stowe – the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin – faced even fiercer backlash.Southern writers produced an entire genre of “Anti-Tom” novels, claiming slavery was divinely ordained and that enslaved people lived contentedly.Eventually, history would validate Stowe.
Then, when the First World War started, the 19th-century ideal of manliness seemed to reach its ultimate test.Young men like Oscar Wilde’s son Cyril, desperate to prove themselves as men, were killed by the hundreds of thousands.The trenches exposed just how hollow and costly this ideal had become.The gripes critics had with Charles Dickens marked the birth of a cultural divide that still exists today – between art that moves hearts to inspire action, and art that prizes formal perfection above all else.
In the early 20th century, a seismic shift occurred in the art world.It would redefine what counted as legitimate art – and human emotion became the enemy.Let’s meet a young Pablo Picasso, aged sixteen, as he poured his heart into a massive canvas called “Science and Charity.” It depicted a devoted doctor attending a desperately ill patient, capturing the physician’s compassion with remarkable sensitivity.
Picasso remained proud of this work throughout his life.Yet later critics dismissed it as “sanctimonious,” using its sincerity against it. Modernist critics like Clive Bell launched a full-scale attack on emotional connection in art, using the example of a realist Luke Fildes’ painting called “The Doctor”.True art, he argued, exists in a world entirely separate from human experience.It should concern itself only with form, color, and spatial relationships.Compassion, devotion, love – these were all contaminations that dragged art down from its proper realm of cold, intellectual purity.
The irony cuts deep when you learn that many great modern artists like Vincent van Gogh treasured sentimentalists like Luke Fildes. Van Gogh kept a woodcut of Fildes drawing for a decade, so moved by its poignant emotion that it inspired his own iconic “Yellow Chair.” What one generation of artists found genuinely powerful, the next generation of critics condemned as sentimental fakery.But this aesthetic revolution masked something uglier: raw class prejudice.Writer Arnold Bennett produced deeply sensitive novels and championed modern artists from Chekhov to Picasso.Yet Bloomsbury intellectuals savaged him relentlessly for his supposed vulgarity.
Virginia Woolf and her circle believed that popularity with ordinary readers automatically signaled inferior work.This worship of emotional coldness had dark political consequences, too.The same intellectuals celebrating art’s coldness often embraced fascism, eugenics, and contempt for democracy.Italian poet’s Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto glorified war as “the world’s only hygiene” and revealed where the rejection of human feeling ultimately led: toward violence, hardness, and a dangerous contempt for ordinary human life.In pushing away sentiment, the modernist project pushed away humanity itself.
In 1967, three remarkable shifts happened within months: England decriminalized homosexuality, legalized abortion, and abolished capital punishment.Add divorce liberalization two years later, and you have perhaps the most dramatic moral transformation in British history.What drove this sudden change?Not philosophical arguments, but something simpler: people began feeling sympathy for those suffering under harsh laws.
The 1954 Montagu case exemplified this shift.When Lord Montagu and two others were imprisoned for consensual activity, public opinion began changing.Support for decriminalization climbed from 18 percent in 1957 to 65 percent by the early 1990s as people saw the human cost of these laws.This pattern repeated across issues.Capital punishment ended when wrongful executions like Timothy Evans’s made injustice undeniable.Divorce reform passed when people recognized friends trapped in loveless marriages.
Society gradually learned to extend sympathy beyond traditional boundaries.Conservatives predicted disaster, warning that loosened morals would unleash chaos.Yet over thirty years, homicide rates fell sharply.Burglary, robbery, and violent crime declined.The prophesied moral collapse never materialized.When Princess Diana died in 1997, her funeral exposed the ideological fault line: millions wept openly in what they saw as natural grief, while others recoiled at what they called a “carnival of sentiment.
” The nation split between those who believed public emotion showed humanity and those who saw it as a dangerous weakness.That same divide prevails today. The author interprets the “anti-woke” movement as coming about as a reaction to what it perceives as excessive sensitivity – the renaming of offensive terms, accommodation of transgender rights, trigger warnings and safe spaces.Critics champion the classical virtues of toughness, discipline, and stoicism over what they see as coddling and weakness.
Yet the evidence suggests societies capable of sentimentality don’t weaken – they expand their capacity for human flourishing.Our ability to feel for others, to let emotion guide policy, to cry when circumstances warrant tears are markers of a civilization learning, however imperfectly, to treat more people as fully human.The main takeaway of this lesson to Soft by Ferdinand Mount is that emotions are a key driver of human progress.
Western culture has oscillated between embracing and rejecting emotion for over a millennium.Medieval troubadours revolutionized society by inventing romantic love, while the Reformation brutally suppressed sentiment as weakness.The 18th century’s sentimental novels sparked genuine social reforms – abolishing slavery, improving prisons, founding hospitals. But by the 1790s, fears of revolutionary chaos triggered another backlash, championing stoic masculinity and imperial detachment.
Modernist art then rejected emotion entirely, dismissing sentiment as unsophisticated.The 1960s brought a third emotional revolution, extending compassion to marginalized groups through legal reforms on homosexuality, divorce, and capital punishment. Today’s "anti-woke" backlash mirrors historical patterns, but evidence shows societies that embrace sympathy expand human flourishing rather than collapse into weakness.
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