That's all well and good, Mr. Gelernter ...

... but why don't you tell us how you really feel about it? David Gelernter takes a brave stand in favor of emotional continence here. He reminds me how much I hate the contemporary therapeutic "I feel your pain" culture, where public confessions and banal expressions of emotion are taken as evidence of authenticity and spiritual profundity.

In his lastest book of essays, Our Culture, What's Left of It, Theodore Dalrymple laments the shallowness of the "hug-and-confess" culture. His essay about the death of Princess Diana, "The Goddess of Domestic Tribulations," contrasts the bathetic public mourning over Diana's death with the dignified reserve exhibited by one of his patients:

She was a seventy-five-year-old working-class woman of dignified mien, who had lived through more than one tragedy in her life. Her brother died in a submarine sunk during the war, and her sister-in-law was killed in an air raid, leaving her the task of bringing up their orphaned child. Her own husband had died of a heart attack at the age of forty-two. ("He had just finished a game of football, doctor, and was in the changing rooms. He fell on the floor, and his mates thought he had just slipped, and they told him to stop messing about. He just looked up at them -- smiled -- and he was gone.")

The bitterest blow of all was the death of another son, recently killed in an accident in which a heavy truck, carelessly driven, crushed his car. He was fifty. She brought me his photo, her hand trembling slightly as she gave it to me. He was a successful businessman who had devoted his spare time to raising money for the Children's Hospital and to producing programs for his own radio station.

"It doesn't seem right, somehow," she said, "that he should have gone before me."

Did she still cry?

"Yes, doctor, but only when I'm on my own. It's not right, is it, to let anyone see you. After all, life has to go on."

Could anyone have doubted either the depth of her feeling or of her character? Could any decent person fail to have been moved by the self-mastery she had achieved, the foundation of her dignity and her strength? Yet her fortitude is precisely the virtue that the acolytes of the hug-and-confess culture wish to extirpate from the British national character as obsolete, in favor of a banal, self-pitying, witless, and shallow emotional incontinence, of which the hysteria at the princess's death was so florid an example.

I'll take this dignified old lady over the public vultures of private emotion every time.