Grieving Diana - public display of emotion or just a carnival of sentiment?

One of the truly uplifting moments during the funeral service for Princess Diana was the Mexican wave of spontaneous applause that broke through the hallowed walls of Westminster Abbey from nearby Hyde Park after Earl Spencer's moving tribute to his sister. It was as if the vast audience in front of the giant monitors in the park had effected the television viewer's dream of actually influencing the events taking place on the screen. It was a brief victory over the all-powerful mass-media that stalked the princess even at the moment of her death.

"Margaret Thatcher was wrong: there is indeed society," proclaimed The Guardian, pointing to the collective mourning of a nation united in grief. What it failed to mention, however, was that this is not the face-toface society of traditional communities, but rather a new oneness of sentiment forged by what the French writer Guy Debord has termed the "society of the spectacle". It was not just the memory of the dead princess which united the nation in grief, but the saturation coverage by press, radio and television.

Many commentators of the `stiff upper lip' school responded very uneasily to the mass solidarity produced by sorrow. For Melanie Phillips, in The Observer, it was a symptom of "a culture that confuses show with substance" and "in which moral worth is proved by wearing hearts on sleeves". Her fellow-columnist, Euan Ferguson, saw in the "temporary mass hysteria" even more ominous signs of a lurching "straight back to pre-Enlightenment days" of witch-burning and flat earth societies. But what kind of "Enlightenment" is it if the stiff upper lip is the official face of sorrow, as exemplified by the emotional paralysis of the Royal Family, and the rigid protocols of "duty and tradition" which Earl Spencer inveighed against in his funeral tribute?

One of the ambivalent legacies of modern ideas of progress was the emergence of new concepts of citizenship in the eighteenth-century which placed a prohibition on public displays of emotion. In his fascinating study, Neostoicism and the Early Modern State, Gerhard Oestreich shows how emotions were gradually removed from public space and domesticated in the `private' arena of the home or personal relationships. This had not only the consequence of making the everyday rounds of the community duller - removing the "carnivalesque" elements which helped to make life tolerable - but it also helped to smooth the impersonal calculations of commerce and the increasingly bureaucratic ideals of the state.

Taken out of public circulation, emotions resurfaced as "sentiments" and "sensibility" which were reserved for private affections such as immediate friendships, or matters of "taste" in the arts. The greatest casualty of this in public affairs was the kind of compassion and concern for others which permeated everyday life in the premodern period. There is no need to romanticise this sense of community in order to draw attention to the extent to which people lived continually "in the shadow of each other" (to invoke a graphic description of prefamine Ireland cited by Kevin Whelan), depending on mutual aid and social solidarity to get by.

According to the new philosophy of progress, however, those who could not control their emotions were also unable to rule themselves - which had the convenient consequence of preventing women from full participation in public life, and what were seen as "primitive" societies from political independence or self-government. Both were considered to be unduly susceptible to feeling and affairs of the heart, and thus were unfit for affairs of state.

In view of the public response to Diana's death, it is striking that the emotional excesses of the Irish at funerals, particularly the female practice of "keening" at wakes, were seized upon by successive Victorian commentators as proof of their underlying barbarism - and their incapacity for Home Rule or any other form of self-determination.

All this was part of a process which, under the guise of civility and "enlightenment", sought to dissociate compassion from justice, relegating expressions of care and concern for others to the domain of charity and philanthropy, conceived entirely along private, discretionary lines. In its most influential laissez-faire version, the founder of modern economics, Adam Smith, could write that while "a man shuts his breast against compassion, and refuses to relieve the misery of his fellow sufferers", he may still "often fulfil the rule of justice by sitting still and doing nothing". This is the credo which still informs concepts of justice and public policy in the "advanced" West, receiving its most chilling formulation in Margaret Thatcher's tirade against the very notion of society.

IT IS striking that it was against this backdrop, of a British society stripped of even the cold comfort of the Welfare State, that Princess Diana could come to fill a void in the public imagination. In this, she was greatly helped by the "star system" of the mass media which, as Walter Benjamin famously observed, emerged in the 20thcentury as a consolation for the loss of "aura" and personal presence in traditional culture. The illusion of private intimacy in public space generated by the cult of the celebrity was perhaps best evidenced in the tears shed by countless millions for someone they never met, but thought they knew. This can be derided for its elements of fantasy and sentimentality, but what is less easy to ridicule are the aspirations congealed in such dreams: of a world that could be better, in which the generosity reserved for charity began to infiltrate public policy (as in Diana's taking up the cause of banning landmines in the weeks running up to a major international conference on the issue).

Above all, it is important to distinguish the public ventilation of grief at Princess Diana's death from that true creation of the society of the spectacle - the "Oprahfication" of intimacy on American television, and the related voyeurism of the tabloid press. This latter reduces crying to indeed a game - to the triviality of game shows and other forms of mindless consumerism. The public relapses into the personal, in its most confessional and prurient form.

By contrast, the reverberations caused by Princess Diana's death have channelled emotions in the opposite direction, sending a clear political message which brought the monarchy itself to the verge of a constitutional crisis.

Not least of the tragic ironies of Princess Diana's death is that her persecutors - the paparazzi - may be brought to justice by one of the few residues of a pre-modern moral code: the "Good Samaritan" law which survives in French statute books (and in the criminal codes of fifteen other European countries). In its wisdom, Anglo-American law dispensed with such a provision, for attempts to mix compassion with justice would make it obligatory, contrary to laissez-faire nostrums, to intervene in cases of acute distress. If the public expressions of mourning have done anything in the past week, they have exposed this coarsening of public morality for what it is.

The British establishment will, no doubt, seek to restore normal reception as soon as possible. But that memory of the public in Hyde Park actively intervening in the depiction of what was on the screen may haunt them, like Princess Diana's ghost, in years to come.

Luke Gibbons is Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at Dublin City University