The age of competitive virtue: From higher education to football, purity spirals are ripping through all areas of life.

Both phenomena are signs of the times, both symptoms of the same insincere malaise. The ‘decolonising’ cult and the taking of the knee represent not so much an endorsement of a liberal, progressive creed, but rather a robotic, shallow fear of not being seen to endorse that creed.

The giveaway is the mechanical, subservient obedience of our footballers, and a similar, mindless repetition of clichés among the ‘decolonisers’. For instance, with regards to decolonising geography, the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education recently spoke of ‘racism, classism, ableism, homophobia and patriarchy’. What, no transphobia? It’s almost as if these bureaucrats were ticking off a check-list of modern-day transgressions. Also telling is the ignorance and historical illiteracy of our anti-Enlightenment, anti-Eurocentric decolonisers. The Ancient Egyptian and Arab mathematicians, chemists and astronomers of yore might be surprised to learn that science and logic are inherently European inventions.

The ‘decolonising’ delusion has spread with such virulence because there’s an unspoken competition between universities as to who can prove themselves more radical and more conscience-purging. This is how ideologies, religions and cults work: they drift to extremes, with each vainglorious member driven by the impulse to prove themselves ever more dogmatically pure and ever more righteous. We have seen this mirrored in the radical trans movement, which now struggles with the word ‘woman’. We have seen it replicated in the environmental movement, with the emergence of Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil, with their increasingly shrill and apocalyptic rhetoric.

Never mind that purity spirals result in doctrines that are ever more detached from reality. That’s not really the point. It’s about surface, one-upmanship, the self-salvation of one’s soul and securing one’s superior social standing. It’s an amplified, more sinister version of that custom in recent decades of people wearing ever larger Remembrance Day poppies and ever earlier in the year, or how corporations now cynically fly the Pride flag with greater proliferation and for a longer duration every summer that passes.

Concomitantly, there is the fear of failing to keep up, of being regarded as less pure, less caring and less progressive. Or worse: not joining in at all. What university would dare not embark on a decolonising programme today? What footballer would dare refuse to take the knee? Better and safer, conversely, to exaggerate, feign or loudly boast one’s belief in the new woke creed. This explains the ostentatious clamour of footballers to wear ‘OneLove’ rainbow armbands at the World Cup. It also explains the sermonising of Gareth Southgate and Gary Lineker.