Some people have been shocked by the findings, announced at the American Psychological Society annual conference in Denver, Colorado, at the weekend, that one third of people have no passion in their lives.
Those who expressed shock and horror at the discovery are of course people who pride themselves on the supposed passion in their own lives. Otherwise, they would hardly use emotive words such as "shock" and "horror".
The psychologists' findings indicate that a sizeable proportion of the population has no strong inclination towards any particular object or activity and that as a result, these people are less satisfied than people who have a "passion".
On the surface of it this is a sad state of affairs, or lack of them. However, the truth is that the concept of passion is wildly overrated. The psychologists have produced no conclusive proof that people without a "passion" are less happy. If a moratorium could be imposed on the words "passion" and its odious, saccharine, scented, soppy hand-holding companion, namely "love", as well as on the emotions they supposedly represent, the world would undoubtedly be a better place. We here in the Dispassionate Society (D.S.) are, so to speak, passionately opposed to passion. Serenity is our goal. A calm, orderly state of affairs is what we aspire to. Modesty and simplicity are the virtues we most admire, in all walks of life. Our applause is always muted, our satisfaction private, our thought processes logical and our prose unadorned. Our blood does not get up, our pulse rate stays constant and we never get excited.
The thought of someone getting upset over something is anathema to us. Herman Melville's Bartleby, the scrivener, is our hero, though we do not use such an emotive term, preferring to describe him as the character we most look up to. You will recall Bartleby as the immortal character whose unchanging response to almost any kind of request was: I prefer not to. That is how we respond to all appeals to our feelings: we prefer not to. We will help people as best we can. We accede to all reasonable requests on our time and talents. But as for becoming involved, never mind enthusiastically involved, we are disinterested.
Our attitude is not to be confused with the traditional stiff upper lip of the British ruling classes. It is not that we simply hide our emotions: in the ideal world of the Dispassionate Society, our emotions will be invisible even to ourselves. But do we cry, you ask? We do not. Do we cheer and laugh and celebrate? We do not. We respond to situations and people and places and events in a way that befits dignified human beings. We are not animals, particularly not lions or tigers. We renounce the feral beast that supposedly lurks in the heart of each of us. We search it out and we track it down and, dispassionately, we kill it.
In our modest way, we in the D.S. are artists in the Joycean mode. We stand alone, outside such vestiges as remain of our visible emotions: aloof, remote, unconcerned, paring our fingernails. If we have a moral imperative, you will never see it.
It will be obvious then that modern life is something of a trial to us. The media in particular would regularly reduce us to weeping, if weeping were in our vocabulary or our nature, which fortunately it is not. Radio, for example, seems to the D.S. little more than a diarrhoea-like torrent of inanity, banality and demented drivel, interspersed with repetitive so-called music and moronic advertisements. Television is the same, with pictures. The written media meanwhile are increasingly awash with pseudo-passion, ranging from bleeding-heart war reporting to the most embarrassing confessional-mode therapy pieces to the chirpy-cheery happy-clappy bouncy-wouncy puerile prose of the lifestyle writers.
Meanwhile the theatre, increasingly fed on pseudo-passion alone, has become an odious, self-serving, ego-ridden, uncritical, over-rated and preposterous construction, fiction writers have become more important than what they write, poetry consumes itself in a cannibalistic, self-referential orgy, and the movies all stink.
Politics appal us. Property repels us. Cities disgust, suburbia is a cluttered sink and the country a heaving mass of beastliness. Yet we have an affinity with the serene, anonymous Irish midlands, the flat plains, the blank sky and the ripple-free lakes.
Sporting events are, to us, a rarefied form of torture. Travel - its literature, imagery and reality - leaves us cold, though ironically we are attracted to colder countries, where verbiage and excess, chatter and comment, noise and commotion and all forms of passion are minimised by the climate.
We in the Dispassionate Society are icy-clear in our logic, pure in our dialectic, refined in our manners, and resolute.