BY SEAN WALSH
If only…
I don’t know if you’re into the football? I’m not particularly, not since the politicians decided to pretend that they really cared about the “beautiful game” on the assumption that the rest of us did as well.
But I was hoping that this year’s World Cup could be used to start waving the flag again, and especially in the face of Oxford City Council who are trying to ban it on -inevitably- “health and safety” grounds. Presumably in case some moron slips on one or something.
The oiks, you see, have taken to displaying the flag in public as part of the Raise the Flag initiative. And we can’t have that. Public displays of national feeling are not nice.
This spiritually enervating culture of required and universal “niceness” is carving out yet more territory in the public space. For a while we were optimistic that it could be contained within the regiments of Lanyard Zombies which would be bad enough when you think about it given the omnipresence of the public sector workers who largely comprise this army of the performatively concerned, often recruited from otherwise unemployable curtain twitchers.
We were too optimistic.
Now this contagion of enforced ersatz politeness has commandeered the bulletin boards, flyers and general information displays in a relentless campaign of perpetual reproach and accusation.
We have, in short, an ambient semiotic tyranny. The cultural Marxists have captured the narrative, literally, by colonising the public signage in order to remind you of your own default moral crapness when compared to them.
I’m told that it’s particularly bad on the London Underground, where passengers victims are taunted, shamed and demeaned on a quondam basis by signs which tell them not to stare at the imported doctor/engineer while he or she is picking your pocket or pushing you under the next Central Line service (terminating at Hainault via Newbury Park). Because to do otherwise is just not nice.
You don’t need the examples of London or Oxford to make the point that the culture of nice is getting out of hand. It’s even starting to get into the churches, under the evergreen excuse of “safeguarding”.
In the narthex of my own Catholic church in Devizes (a town which ought to be wary of paganism, even of the secular sort) the posters urging you to tout on your friend if you even suspect she is beating up her husband have all but replaced the more traditional iconography. The devotional mood is thereby downplayed, nudged aside by the subtler vibe of suspicion.
There is something very dangerous about compelled niceness, not least because it often runs cover for a deeper nastiness. Anybody who has recently interacted with a GP receptionist will know what I’m talking about.
But isn’t it nice to be nice?
No. Not always. In fact rarely. And when it’s required – never.
There is a difference between being nice and being kind, in the same way there is a difference between Hallmark and genuine love. Always be suspicious of the perpetually nice person, he is usually trying to sell you a story about his self.
The kind person is not concerned about that because in acts of genuine kindness the self ceases to matter. Thus the Thomistic definition of Christian agape: to love is to will the good of the other and for the sake of the other. And sometimes that isn’t “nice”.
And the inescapable semiotics are not nice anyway. Nobody looks at a poster which reads “be kind!” and decides on that basis to postpone that planned murder or lay off the rehearsed sexual assault. This is intrusion presenting as communion. The mood music of soft control.
The “health and safety” pretence is particularly pernicious: the suddenly activated road traffic excess speed warning; the Dante’s Inferno restyling of the weather map etc all of which is fake concern intended for the purpose of getting you to internalise the precautionary principle and become wary of everything you do, say and (therefore) think.
There is an ideological replacement strategy in play, and the aesthetics of the public space has been cleverly weaponised in service of it. It started with the statues, whose assertion of a national story is so offensive to the Year Zero Sanhedrin who are distributed throughout the higher ranks of local officialdom.
Could there be a more fitting culmination of this than the banning of the national flag on grounds of “health and safety”?
If you want a glimpse of your future dystopian inheritance just look to Oxford, where the Marxists have made their own niceness so front and centre by crapping on anyone who takes a different view.
That’s neither nice nor kind.