Sentimentality and the Sixties Scoop.

Vincent J. Curtis

7 Jan 2018

RE: Sixties Scoop survivor awaits apology from Sask Premier

The handling of the Sixties Scoop survivors is an example of the ethic of sentimentality in action.

In the sixties, it was deemed in the interest of the children for them to be removed from abusive homes, and drunken and incompetent parents.  Aboriginal children were placed in foster homes and raised by decent, loving families.

Now that aboriginal is cool and it’s fashionable (and profitable) to be a victim, “survivors” of the program are coming out of the woodwork with their hands out.  Surviving in a middle-class suburban home in the sixties and seventies was no mean thing, for only ten or twenty million other Canadians managed it.

The wrong here seems to be that the racial aboriginal was deprived of his race’s culture as a consequence of the program.  Disregarding the condition of the culture in question when the child was removed from it, how is it that race endows one with the entitlement to a certain culture?  I thought we were past that in a post-racial society.  The adoptive parents only loved their charges and thoughtlessly prepared them for the real world, not the dream world of idealized indigenous language and culture and primitive happiness.  And now the ethic of sentimentality deems that the society that thoughtlessly protected the survivors – or beneficiaries, depending on your point of view – of the program should be punished and humiliated for its foolish generosity, and the “victims” rewarded and coddled.

Sentimentality is irrational and capricious, yet it forms today’s basis for public ethics.

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A further discussion of the Ethic if Sentimentality lies in the posting of 6 Jan 2019.