Are we killing ourselves with kindness?

Many have termed it “weaponised empathy”, and we now see it everywhere. It’s at the heart of offence-taking, victimhood, buzzwords like “vulnerability”, the aggressive demand to feel “safe”. In 2019, when Piers Morgan publicly refused to accept there were 100 different genders, activist Benjamin Butterworth started a Twitter campaign to get him sacked. His words to Morgan on Good Morning Britain were bitterly ironic: “You don’t need to be a gender expert. You just need to be compassionate.” When people recently complained about the Christmas episode of the Vicar of Dibley being used as a platform for BLM, Dawn French was to tweet ironically, that it was “a lovely calm day, full of humanity” and “compassion”. Increasingly the word is being used to shame or shut down reasonable debate. Label someone lacking in compassion and you no longer have to engage with their motives or reasoning. They are out of the game.

To list the ways in which Pity has corroded national dialogue, to name all the institutions into which it has seeped, would make this article an unreadable checklist of gutted or demoralised estates. There is virtually no institution in the country now which doesn’t seem to have forgotten its first principles – from the British Library, to the Metropolitan Police and even (God help us) to Doctor Who.

In the 1980s, many were scandalised by the monetisation of things which, previously, had seemed not commodities for sale but natural rights. Now, just as effectively, social engineering beats everything and the quota rules. Challenge it at your peril.

The National Trust imposes rainbow lanyards on its workers to promote the gay credentials of one of its properties. Want to question that, or the ubiquity in modern Britain – close to fanatical – of the Rainbow Flag? Then prepare to be accused of bigotry and heartlessness.

The Turner Prize is awarded, in the name of inclusivity, to all four candidates. Feel like pointing out that the award is now castrated; that it no longer has any credibility at all and in future no one has any need to respect or strive for it? Don’t – or find yourself on the wrong side of history.

Make the case that Penguin’s introduction of racial quotas for publishing books is, though doubtless “progressive”, conceivably in conflict with putting literary standards first? Then risk being pasted day after day in the liberal press, get Twitter-stormed and labelled a racist – as author Lionel Shriver discovered to her cost after raising such questions in The Spectator in June 2018. We are killing ourselves with “kindness”.