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Collective Mourning as Religion: Buck up, bleeding hearts!

12:36 / 23.02.04

Fascinating story on the beeb website-

In his report, Conspicuous Compassion, author Patrick West said people were trying to feel better about themselves by taking part in "manufactured emotion".

Describing extravagant public displays of grief for strangers as 'grief-lite' Mr West said these activities were, "undertaken as an enjoyable event, much like going to a football match or the last night of the proms".

Interesting viewpoint. Any theories?

14:03 / 23.02.04

Fascinating stuff. I'd agree. I found that really scary, the whole Di thing, to me, it felt like a very low key version of what was going on in Nazi Germany. Some shots of Jill Dando were released after her murder that definitely seemed to me to be trying to tug on the same strings. I'd also say the same thing has been in evidence for years in terms of giving people hate figures - asylum seekers, beggars, single mums, travellers - anybody who's poor and at the bottom of the ladder will fit the bill.

14:36 / 23.02.04

Off-topic but related: The Sun has started a "Shop a Scrounger" line. Sick of your neighbours laughing all the way to the bank with their £50 a week? Well, it's payback time! Now you can brand them as an Enemy of the State in a national newspaper.

People love having someone to hate, don't they? And the pooorer they are the better. Scrounging bastards!

Foust is SO authentic

15:29 / 23.02.04

Scroungers, that's Brit for welfare case?

15:35 / 23.02.04

Yeah, and as such public enemy one for the right wing press.

Phex: Dorset Doom

17:11 / 23.02.04

... the same Right-wing press that cries its heart out over every celebrity death, and deifies the dead.
Interesting that those who ascend into the Grief-Pantheon tend to fit a similar profile: female, usually blonde haired, usually murdered ( the article mentions, Di', Jill Dando and the Soham girls.) Bob Monkhouse, for example, got barely into the single-digit pages when he passed away of natural causes.
It's particularly endemic in Britain, which has barely any religious people, less so in America. 9/11 was the only event that bought out national mourning on the scale of Diana's death (the desert of flowers at Ground Zero actually looked smaller than those at Kensington palace.)

21:33 / 23.02.04

The whole Diana thing just confused the hell out of me. What I find interesting is that these occurances do seem to fill a gap in people's lives. As a teenager I went through a time when musicians were almost as important to me as Diana was to the bereft masses, somehow it never seemed as sordid. I wonder if these phenomena are indications of the state of our collective spiritual needs?

11:17 / 24.02.04

I thought it odd that this report made it to the front page of the Guardian yesterday (below the headline story). What next? 'Male graduate on message board explains why music is not as good as it used to be (it's all the fault of teenage girls)'? Or 'Man in Pub expresses irritation at "hysterical bloody women"'?

I dunno, I'd like to know what research went into this 'study' (as it was referred to in the Guardian yesterday). It strikes me that this is being reported in the same style as some scientifically researched discovery, when it appears to be nothing more than a paranoid opinion piece, the whinings of an irritable old sod. The sort of old sod that is most easily annoyed by people who make a fuss about things they aren't interested in, and by middle-aged women in particular (or am I doing a bit of invention myself here?) They way he tells it you'd think we were all of us permanently roaming about the land in facking sackcloth and ashes, wailing and mithering. It particularly annoys me that he claims that mourning has replaced charity. How does he back that up?

11:30 / 24.02.04

Right on Saveloy!

It was on the cover of the Guardian? How bizzare.

11:56 / 24.02.04

Well, in my own paranoid mind I'm trying to make connections between the article's prominent position and the fact that Francis Wheen - who I'm pretty sure has written regularly for the Observer and possibly the Guardian - has recently written a book called How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World, which covers this area and more; it is described in this review as "...a forensic attack on fundamentalism (religious and economic), on cultural and scientific relativism, on postmodernists, on pagans, on New Agers and everyone else whom Wheen identifies as belonging to the coalition seeking to undermine reason." (Funnily enough the review title mentions grumpy old men too). Another recent review included the Diana mourning in a list of things Wheen didn't like. I'll have to fish the paper out and see if there was an ad for the book next to the article.

Tryphena Absent

12:19 / 24.02.04

I know that a lot of people are down on the reaction to Diana's death but I'd argue that it was a social phenomenon that people required at the time. You can't be a part of a society and not be part of moments in which the group bonds, Diana's death came at a time when a significant number of people felt alienated by our culture and its power structure and to me it registered as a protest against. A large number of people joined in the mourning process after a number of events took place, the significant one being the failure of her family to raise a state flag at half mast that in all rights should have gone up. The country felt that her family wasn't grieving suitably so they stepped in and did it instead. It was a reaction to our perception of our own need for recognition when we die coupled with a need for a sense of togetherness. It's happened since- the petrol crisis, the anti war movement, if you don't like it than I'm not sure that you understand the motive behind it. Psychoanalytically it was good for all of us to express death so openly. It wasn't a 'Judy Garland' type of mourning, people were weeping for themselve and not the myth, this report doesn't work for me because it represents that as unhealthy but in a culture where death isn't open and is a very repressed and private thing this has to be a good thing. Actually those flowers were the most amazing thing I've ever seen, it was a massive ritual act and one of the most powerful magical moments of my life. People need the outpouring of ritual, I think that anyone who denied themselves a nightime at Kensington Palace during the Diana mourning period made a major mistake, it was something I will never forget. Grief isn't recreational, it's an entity we all experience and one that we think we shouldn't indulge in but what we need to do is scream it, we don't wear black armbands anymore and I think we've lost the code that expresses it and that makes Diana's death one of the most extremely important moments that the 1990's went through.

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15:05 / 24.02.04

Just to refer to the claim that it has 'replaced charity', he cited the example that while open display of poppy / ribbon wearing has seen an exponential rise (particularly from public figures), there has been no significant increase in actual contributions to the charities associated with the decorations.

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15:06 / 24.02.04

'Coz that's wot the Lottery's for, innit?

15:37 / 24.02.04

I know it's being pedantic, perhaps, but for it to be a replacement I'd expect to see an actual decrease in charitable contributions of at least equal magnitude to the increase in ribbon wearing. And how does one measure an 'exponential rise in ribbon wearing' anyway? Does he have figures for ribbon wearing going back to... well, when?