Sentimentalism

A sentimentalist is simply one who wants to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it. We think we can have our emotions for nothing. We cannot. Even the finest and most self-sacrificing emotions have to be paid for. Strangely enough, that is what makes them fine. (Oscar Wilde)

Politicians dismiss the talk of saving people's cultural patterns and ancestral shrines from so called benefits of technical progress as mere sentimentalism.