The terrible triumph of tenderness

When I was a young woman in the 1980s, videotape was the new-fangled entertainment form; on evenings in, my second husband and I liked nothing better than to whack in a VHS and record something off the the telly. We felt like we were in The Jetsons – though seen with a modern eye, we must have looked more like The Flintstones. We were particularly fond of Duran Duran videos – and of a philosophical debate which was first aired in 1986 on the then-sophisticated Channel 4, now most famous for showcasing a transvestite playing the piano with their penis. The debate was part of the Modernity And Its Discontents series, this particular episode being called ‘The Tough And The Tender’ in which Michael Ignatieff interviewed the philosophers Ernest Gellner and Charles Taylor.

I’d be lying if I said that a small part of my insatiable interest in this videotape wasn’t due to the manly Jewish beauty of the late Mr Gellner – a bit like Saul Bellow if he’d looked less chewed – very much ‘my type on paper’ as the Love Island kids say, though probably not often of philosophers. I’d never had a pash on anyone described as ‘a one-man crusader for critical rationalism’ before, let alone anyone described by the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography as ‘brilliant, forceful, irreverent, mischievous, sometimes perverse, with a biting wit and love of irony’ and I felt well grown-up, finally moving on from Jason Orange of Take That. I was gutted when he died from a heart attack one month short of his 70th birthday in 1995 before I’d had a chance to add him to my husband collection.

Gellner was the tough; Taylor was the tender, being an ocean-going drip, whose side my second husband took. Gellner and I thought that self-creation was good for people; Taylor and my ex thought that following tradition was. Watching the debate back in the 20th century, I felt confident that my team would triumph. The world would become a witty, confident, resilient meritocracy. People would stop complaining about their pasts and concentrate on their futures. The tough would set out their stalls in the public square and the tender would stay at home and do their flower arranging. Boy, did I ever have it wrong. Because the tender have totally taken over where once the tough held sway.

Academia has become addled by trigger warnings and censorship. Comedy castrated by cancelling. Publishing pulverised down to Complan levels of nourishment by the Nervous Nellies who infest it. Politics denying science rather than offend people. Simple weather forecasts replaced by pleas to ‘wrap up warm/stay hydrated/don’t leave the house lest that large yellow disc in the sky burns you to a crisp’. People refusing to reproduce due to fear of the future. Popular culture captured by namby-pamby box-ticking to a soundtrack of Adele ‘I’m a sad person’ and Sam ‘Sobber’ Smith weeping all the way to the bank. Bloody #BEKIND! A record number of people refusing to work due to ‘mental health issues’ – the ‘bad back’ of a sedentary society. A generation of youth suffering from anxiety like none before. Educated youth expecting that they may swerve offence at the views of others and avoid being tested on their own. Women encouraged to dwell ceaselessly on the allegedly devastating sorrows of menstruation and the menopause. ‘Crying rooms’ in the workplace. Public blobbing in general; it’s telling that on one of the few occasions the late Queen was reported to have cried in public, she had it be known that the wind was in her eye, whereas Kate and Meghan famously jostled to be The One Who Cried. When did everything slightly below par become a cause of ‘heartbreak’? HEARTBREAK FOR THE LIONESSES – no, they lost a football game.

In extreme cases, you can see people become a battleground of their own tough/tender tendencies, sloppiness edging forward like some kind of mental Japanese knotweed. Caitlin Moran, for example, once – whatever her limitations – a glorious tough writer, has now caught the ‘feelz’ to a disastrous degree, her writing so splotchy with hormonal discharge that her books might be better if they came with wipe-free pages, in the manner of those given to toddlers. And when it got panned, she wrote a column crying about it! Writers, of all people, didn’t use to be like this; what happened to Graham Greene’s ‘chip of ice in the heart’? It’s turned into a big old boring Slush-Puppie. When I was fat, a magazine published a photo of Jabba the Hutt and said it was me; not only did I not cry, I cut it out and put it on my writing wall. I thought it was a hoot. Now the tender have taken over, I’d have to pretend to be hurt by the opinions of strangers or risk looking like a psychopath. But I won’t pretend to have feelings I don’t have just so I don’t show up softies.

It’s personal as well as political. Over the past few years, I’ve lost a lot of friends; first accidentally through Brexit, when I realised that I had quite a few emotionally incontinent sore losers among my companions, and then intentionally by being nasty when I realised what a relief it was to be shot of so many encumbering hangers-on. Against perceived wisdom, I found that the more I lost, the happier I got, and I think that this must be related to the theory of friends being either radiators or drains. The tough tend to be the former, cheery and warming – the tender the latter, forever leaking emotion all over the show. Though ninnies now call themselves ‘empaths’, dealing with their emotions still reminds me of what Joan Rivers said about housework: ‘You make the beds, you do the dishes and six months later you have to start all over again.’ Except with the tender, the emotional housework returns daily, lurching as they do from one bout of heartbreak to the next. 

It’s easier to control a tender population than a tough one, which is why the ministrations of the Nanny State are always to be taken with a pinch of salt. (Best make it a very small pinch or you’ll die.) But like the sorcerer’s apprentice, rampant wetness can get out of hand and turn on its puppeteer. Sometimes it seems like the whole western world is having the screaming abdabs; as Lionel Shriver wrote recently here: ‘Vladimir Putin is successfully flogging his war in Ukraine to the Russian people as a battle against the whole spiritually depraved West, no longer the home of ruthless capitalism but of “selfishness, permissiveness, immorality, the denial of the ideals of patriotism…” you must admit, he’s got a point.’ So tender are our populations that each year the proportion of us willing to fight to defend our countries from invasion drops in the USA and western Europe, which Putin will definitely have noted; interestingly, countries become more willing to defend themselves the nearer they are to Russia, with the Netherlands scoring a pathetic 15 per cent but Finland an impressive 74 per cent.

All the endless chat about feelings and the new openness about the mental elf doesn’t appear to have made life one bit better or people one whit happier – a problem shared is a problem perpetuated. But I doubt if we’ll turn back now; addiction to the highs and lows of emotion is far harder to shake than addiction to substances. I don’t have my lovely videotape anymore, having abandoned it when I bolted from my second marriage. But it plays often in my mind and makes me so glad that I was young, hot and combative back then – in those glorious brazen days before the tender castrated the tough.