One of the founders of Extinction Rebellion boasts that he wouldn’t let an ambulance through if he was blocking the road, even at the cost of a patient’s life.

A biological male with criminal convictions for kidnap and attempted murder says at a Trans Pride rally: “If you see a Terf, punch them in the fucking face.” The crowd, holding placards about love, kindness and human rights, cheer and applaud.

Students at California State University glorify a Hamas terrorist paragliding into Israel to slaughter the innocent, while Harvard students write an open letter blaming Jews for their own execution. They grieve the “slow and sudden” deaths of Palestinians.

Acts of kindness bear witness to our shared suffering. But when kindness becomes pathological, it is cruel and divisive — as with these examples. And it is on the rise. In the West today, there are people whose suffering is deemed to be non-existent or of little value, and so judgement takes the place of understanding, punishment that of mercy. The result is a purity spiral whereby extreme kindness towards an in-group gives unlimited licence to act with cruelty towards an out-group. It’s this licence that gives progressive activists permission to clothe antisemitism as anti-colonialism.

Following the Hamas massacre, a lecturer at Stanford University used “identity-based targeting” to force three Jewish students to stand in a corner so they could feel “what Israel does to Palestinians”. He asked them how many Jews died in the Holocaust. One of the students said “six million” and the lecturer replied that “colonizers killed more than 6 million. Israel is a colonizer”. In New York, activists tore down posters pleading for the safe release of Jewish hostages, many of them women and children, while London saw a 1,353% increase in antisemitic attacks.

In the intersectional narrative inhaled by activists, kindness for the “oppressed” legitimises unspeakable cruelty against the “oppressor”. For normal people, whose instincts are not numbed by ideology, the dissonance of cruelty clothed in kindness is disorientating. In 2021, Milli Hill, founder of the Positive Birth Movement, challenged use of the phrase “birthing person” to describe a pregnant woman. Fellow birthing professionals denounced her — in the name of kindness. As the attacks intensified and the language became increasingly violent, Milli lost her sense of reality, telling an interviewer: “Am I the person I think I am? Do I have this dark side that’s violent and hateful and toxic and all the things they say I am?”

Polish psychiatrist Andrew Lobaczewski, who spent his early life under Nazi occupation, analysed the political and psychological processes that generate this loss of reality. He called it ponerology, or the “the study of the origin of evil”. Collaborating, in secret, with a number of dissidents in post-war communist Poland, he sought to explain the “pathological inversion of a normal social hierarchy” in which “psychological deviants” take power and create a “pathocracy…wherein a small pathological minority takes control over a society of normal people”.

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This minority is the “pathological underbelly” present in every society, about 6% of the population, of which a tenth are psychopathic — characterised by grandiosity, narcissism, personal charisma, impaired moral and psychological reasoning, a systemic incapacity for self-criticism and the sadistic pursuit of pleasure. Under communist rule, Lobaczewski witnessed such people, riven with mediocrity and oblivious to their incompetence, become leading members of the party. As their grip on power tightened, one malignancy bred another, until academics, scientists and psychologists succumbed to communist ideology. They acted as if in possession “of some secret knowledge; in their eyes we became their former colleagues, still believing what the ‘professors of old’ had taught us”.

From Mao’s attack on the Four Olds — old ideas, old customs, old habits and old culture — to the assault by critical race theorists on the universalism of the civil rights movement and the sublimation of antisemitism into support for Hamas atrocities, a defining factor of pathocracies is historical amnesia and psychological naievety. This allows for the separation of the “Old” from the “New”, and the metastatic transformation of what Lobaczewski called the “pathological underbelly” of society into the ruling elite.

In the West, progressive activists are denying their cultural dominance, despite using this dominance to shame, de-bank and destroy their enemies. They compete for status by aligning themselves with intersectional destitution to manufacture a world in which discrimination, inequality and climate deaths are increasing, when the evidence shows the opposite is true. Ultimately, elite pathocrats become totally isolated from the world of normal people. Their language becomes esoteric and they speak only to each other. The Polish philosopher Angnieszka Kolakowska described this descent into unintelligibility among Communist Party members as a defence mechanism: when they “feel cornered, they automatically lapse into textbook communist jargon”, she wrote. “Their words simply fail to refer and the result is gibberish.”

Gibberish, in the mouths of elite pathocrats, becomes wisdom, creating a utopia of nonsense, detectable in sentences like this, from the activist Rosa Lee: “By remembering the metaphorical character of any scientific model, we can draw out the insights of the theory of performativity while putting it into conversation with our other Marxist metaphors.” The end point is “communisation, the transition to new communist selves”. The mystique of this language cements the separation of ideology from reality and pathological elites from the “normal man”. Faced with struggle sessions, shaming, bullying and violence — and fearing for their sanity — normal people lapse into silence, unable to comprehend the pathocratic trauma unleashed upon them. When an individual is compelled to violate what she knows to be true, to substitute an ideological fantasy for reality, the result is psychological disintegration.

When an individual is compelled to violate what she knows to be true, to substitute an ideological fantasy for reality, the result is psychological disintegration. Such a spectacle is a source of pleasure to the dominant elites for whom “forcing others…to feel and think like themselves becomes an internal necessity, a ruling concept”. This “necessity” can never be satiated. No level of deindustrialisation can cleanse the West of its “abuse” of Mother Earth, no ritualistic recitation of pronouns can redeem the “sins of the cis” and no atonement can ever be sufficient to repay the debt owed by the Jews for their “crimes”.

This impossibility of salvation makes sadism eternal.

This process is viscerally described in Juliette, a novel written by the Marquis de Sade. In it, the eponymous heroine meets Pope Pius VI and demands that he offer up a dissertation on murder. The Pope obliges, arguing that to commit murder is in accordance with Nature:

“from time immemorial, man has taken pleasure in shedding the blood of his fellow man and to content himself he has sometimes disguised this passion under a cloak of justice, sometimes under one of religion. But, and of this let there be no doubt, his purpose, his aim has always been the astonishing pleasure killing procures him.”

Ideology, in other words, is used to conceal the sadistic desires of the libertines, to legitimise the raw exercise of power. Normal, virtuous people are imprisoned, tortured, brutalised and killed by aristocrats, priests and popes — purely for the pleasure of it.

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Pathocrats who seek the collapse of open societies do everything they can to conceal the “astonishing pleasure” they get from having the power to punish. They do so by redefining concepts like “justice”, “safety” and “kindness” in a language accessible only to the elite. Like contemporary identitarian progressives, Sade’s libertines speak only to each other. This enables them to hide the sadistic psychology that drives them.

And because it is impossible to prove that people are thinking “correctly”, the elite’s desire can never be satisfied. Pathocrats and libertines cannot be appeased. In a futile attempt to appease her attackers, Milli Hill offered her online platform to a Bame birthing expert. For this, her accusers amplified her guilt by adding racism to the accusation of transphobia. They shamed her for not paying the Bame woman for her work, and accused her of being a “white saviour”. The simple fact of Hill’s continued existence was an irresistible invitation to degrade her further. But still, they cloaked their cruelty in the language of kindness. Lacking the courage of the Sadean libertine, her tormentors clung to their progressive ideology, for fear, as Lobaczewski observed, that without it “nothing would remain except psychological and moral pathology, naked and unattractive”.

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It’s that nakedness we see when a mob is implored to “punch a fucking Terf” or a Hamas terrorist decapitates a dying Jew with a garden hoe. Yet those who raise their fists in support are, without doubt, on “the right side of history” — that is, the winning side. Pathocrats almost always win, the few silencing the many, because it’s easier to be kind than to love.

If we are to survive this cruelty in the name of kindness, we need to separate what’s benign and beautiful in progressive ideologies from the pathological underbelly that’s overwhelmed them. We need to salvage tolerance and inclusion for all trans people from the attack on science and single-sex spaces undertaken in their name. We need to rescue the universalism of the civil rights movement from an anti-racism that reverses the terms of a malevolent racial hierarchy in the name of justice. We need to protect present and future generations from the consequences of environmental degradation without sacrificing the poor to gratify an apocalyptic vanity. And we need to seek justice for Palestinians without glorifying unspeakable violence.

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Lobaczewski concluded that normal people protest against pathocrats “from the depths of their own souls and their human nature”. They protest against the evisceration of their language, the denigration of their values and the unjustified status of the elites who govern them. If we allow pathocrats to control our institutions and corporations, the future will #BeKind.

We must remember that it’s their weakness, not their strength, that compels the pathocrats to silence dissent. As the anti-apartheid campaigner Nadine Gordimer wrote: “No social system in which a tiny minority must govern without consent over a vast majority can afford to submit any part of control of communication.” To break their power means isolating the minority within the minority from the decent people who have become cruel out of fear, contagion and opportunism. In this struggle, we’ll find unexpected allies.

Having been one of the last prisoners in the Bastille when it was stormed in July 1789, the Marquis de Sade later found himself in the improbable position of a revolutionary judge. When the family of his estranged wife, responsible for his long years of incarceration, were brought before him for judgement, he chose mercy and spared them from the guillotine, saying: “Such is the revenge I take upon them.”

Kindness is one of those things that seems so obviously good that more must always be better — however much you start with. Telling other people to be kind qualifies as an act of kindness in itself, which a cynical person might point out is convenient, because otherwise being kind seems like a lot of work. (You have to think about what other people want and then do things for them! Exhausting!) But cynicism is itself not kind, which means kindness is hermetically defended against that line of attack.

Setting yourself up as an opponent of kindness would be extravagantly poor taste, especially now the hashtag #bekind is irrevocably associated with suicide prevention. This is unfortunate for me, because I am not a kind person; or at least, I don’t think of kindness as the quality I would like to be defined by or measured against in public life. I’m a critic, which makes it my job to say critical things.

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I think that paying attention to things — how they work, what they do, how people respond to them — is the highest sort of respect, even if sometimes you end up saying that the thing is flawed. Also, being mean is pretty funny. I’m very fond of Winnie the Pooh, but I’m even fonder of Dorothy Parker’s review: “And it is that word ‘hummy,’ my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Cornerat which Tonstant Weader Fwowed up.”

So I suppose I must be an enemy of kindness, and that forces me into a position on one of the great and endless battles of the discourse: in the confrontation of snark and smarm, I choose snark every time.

*

The last major snark vs. smarm skirmish took place in 2013, when the blog Gawker published an essay by Tom Scocca called “On Smarm”. “Smarm” was the term Scocca used to summarise a cultural attitude that had been developing since the turn of the century, and which Scocca identified particularly with the literary journal McSweeney’s, founded in 1998 and presided over by author Dave Eggers. “What is smarm, exactly?” asks Scocca, who then answers himself like this:

“Smarm is a kind of performance—an assumption of the forms of seriousness, of virtue, of constructiveness, without the substance. Smarm is concerned with appropriateness and with tone. Smarm disapproves.

“Smarm would rather talk about anything other than smarm. Why, smarm asks, can’t everyone just be nicer?”

One significant thing about McSweeney’s is that it’s always been partly a work of resistance to the internet — when people were making apocalyptic predictions about the demise of print, McSweeney’s was publishing beautiful and absorbing editions that could have no online equivalent (issue 13 has a dust jacket that unfolds to be a comic; issue 17 is a collection of letters and fake junkmail; issue 24 is Z-bound, so it reads as two books bonded back-to-back).

That goes for tone, as well as format. The internet had coalesced around a voice that was gossipy, knowing and sharp-tending-to-downright-abusive — the voice, in other words, of Gawker. Whereas if any one principle animated McSweeney’s, it was positivity — and how better to manifest positivity than by being against critics? McSweeney’ssister magazine The Believer for a time ran an online column called “Snarkwatch”, where authors could return fire at reviews they found unfair or displeasing. Eggers’ own position on criticism was summarised in this quote, which Scocca repeats in full:

“Do not be critics, you people, I beg you. I was a critic and I wish I could take it all back because it came from a smelly and ignorant place in me, and spoke with a voice that was all rage and envy. Do not dismiss a book until you have written one, and do not dismiss a movie until you have made one, and do not dismiss a person until you have met them.”

There are a lot of problems with this as an ethos, and Scocca points out the obvious one: Do not dismiss … a movie? Unless you have made one? Any movie? The Internship? The Lone Ranger? Kirk Cameron’s Unstoppable? But if you can’t dismiss a movie without making one, why should you be able to praise one either? If critical authority can only come from artistic creation, that should go both ways.

It’s also true that knowing how hard something is and being able to say how good something is are not always compatible. An author acquaintance once gave a positive review to a book which I’d dismissed because it looked twee. I read it; it was twee. When I gently asked my acquaintance about it, the explanation was that, no the book wasn’t great, but it was hard to dismiss another writer’s efforts. As a critic, though, I need to be on the side of the reader, and as a reader I need critics to be on my side. I don’t care how much sweat went into a book: I just want it to be good.

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This is one of the problems with “kindness” as a catchall value. Who, exactly, are you being kind to? If I’m sparing of a dull novel, that’s kind to the author, but less kind to readers who might spend their money on it. On the other hand, Gawker’s rapacious, consuming unkindness had already gone beyond “incisive” and into “intrusive” by 2013. In 2012, it published the infamous Hulk Hogan sex tape, which led to the Bollea [Hogan’s real name] v. Gawker lawsuit; this found in Bollea’s favour in 2016, leading to a settlement which bankrupted the company. The suit was financed by Peter Thiel, who had been outed by Gawker in 2007.

Some former adherents of the snark manifesto began to recognise its limitations. “Snark is not just a tool. It’s a habit,” wrote one, the Jeopardy! contestant turned liberal commentator Arthur Chu, in a 2015 post for Salon. “It’s the kind of habit that ends up with you doing indefensible things and then trying to defend them by saying you didn’t mean to.” Instead of binding himself to either snark or smarm, Chu concluded, “it’s the substance of the values I fight for that concerns me as a writer and a human being.”

Six years later, I wonder how that commitment is going. Here’s something Chu tweeted a few weeks ago, in reference to the fatal shooting of Ashley Babbitt by a police officer as she broke into Mike Pence’s office during the Capitol riots: “Ashley Babbitt feeding the worms is one of the few good things that happened as a result of the Capitol ‘protest’ and if you feel the need to mourn her Nazi ass it’ll be easier for both of us if you unfollow me now.” And there’s more where that came from:

“A Nazi is the opposite of a person, and therefore our morality to them must be reversed
To hate them is to love
To harm them is to heal
To kill them is to bring life”

How, exactly, does someone go from being a snarker to a snark apostate to tweeting that kind of 1984 murder fantasy nightmare?

*

I watched the video of Ashley Babbitt monologuing as she drove to the Capitol for what she expected would be a confrontation between the forces of good (her, Donald Trump, various adherents to the QAnon conspiracy theory she believed in) and evil (all non-Trump politicians, police, everyone else). I read the profiles of her, which quoted her loved ones, all of whom seemed baffled by her commitment to the belief system she would die for.

She didn’t seem like “the opposite of a human”. She seemed like someone unstable, damaged, susceptible to the cultish manipulations of QAnon. She seemed like a person who had acted violently and who had been killed because she constituted a present threat, but still — a person. I didn’t exactly mourn her (after all, I don’t know her and her shooting seems like an appropriate response in the circumstances), but I certainly felt some pangs that a woman could have got so snarled up in a deranged set of stories about pizza and paedophiles that she ended up dead.

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Because Ashley Babbitt believed, really and truly believed, that what she was doing was right. That when she went through that window, she was doing it to protect America and very specifically to protect children from being raped by senior Democrat politicians. She was on the side of kindness by her own lights; Chu, too, believed himself on the side of kindness when he celebrated her death. Once you’ve identified a certain cause or object as the essence of goodness, anything which threatens that cause or object is a justified target of any kind of attack.

That’s why the politician who called for “kinder, gentler politics” is the same politician whose supporters operated a reign of terror against anyone who criticised him. When, in an article about suffering a heart attack, the Guardian writer Rafael Behr mentioned that anti-Semitic abuse from Corbyn supporters had likely been one of the contributing stresses, the mass reaction of Corbyn supporters was to mock him and accuse him of exaggerating in order to harm Corbyn’s reputation.

Corbyn’s pretensions to kindness did not, as you might naively imagine, make these abusers reflect on their own unkindness. Instead, it spurred their own sense of righteousness: only a very bad person would invent such a terrible thing to hurt a kind old man like Corbyn. The cult of kindness is, in practice, a permission slip to be cruel. After all, by the law of negation, unkindness to the unkind must be the truest kindness.

The actor — Rupert Grint — made his claim to kindness to explain why he had repudiated JK Rowling, even though she is the author of the Harry Potter franchise that made him famous. Rowling had shared a long and thoughtful personal essay, in which she explained why her experience of male violence made her wary of conflating sex with gender identity and fearful of the erosion of women-only spaces. Grint’s only response to this was to express a desire to “get some kindness out there” by stating: “I firmly stand with the trans community.” In so doing Grint, very unkindly, dismissed a woman’s testimony of her own trauma.

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But then, kindness is gendered. Women are the ones who are supposed to be kind, to give of themselves, to play the universal mother and make other people happy. People find it particularly shocking when a woman refuses to be kind: there’s something unnatural, offensive about a female mouth declaring that the limits of her care are here and she will not be giving any more.

I resent the demands for kindness partly because they fall particularly on me due to my sex, but also because I think that kindness is lacking. It is an inadequate virtue. If all you mean by “kindness” is “the absence of cruelty”, then I suppose I am for it because I am against harassment and violence and telling people they deserved their heart attack because they were mean about Jeremy Corbyn. But in reality “kindness” is used to mean “the absence of criticism”. It means a kind of pandering.

Pandering is an error. There are things in the world that are faulty and wrong and sometimes (like Ashley Babbitt’s conspiracies) absolutely dangerous. However beloved these things are, however well-meaning, however sacred they are considered by some — they still need to have holes poked in them. And, when all the holes have been poked, if the thing cannot stand up, it needs to be discarded.

I don’t mean to suggest that by being a critic, I’m waging some kind of crusade against the forces of delusion. Most of the time, I’m just trying to tell you what I think about something and make a few jokes along the way. Sometimes I’m being a bitch, which is a word that specifically designates “unkind woman”. A life defined only by kindness is a soft, stunted, incurious one, and probably a dishonest one too. We are all capable of being cruel and wrong. It’s the ones who believe their ideology or intentions put them beyond fault that you really have to look out for.

It is ‘The Ace Of Spades’, by Motörhead, and, played at maximum volume inside a sealed bedroom, it can just about drown out the tinkling of wooden spoons on saucepans at the windows.    

When it comes to the Health Service pot-bashers, I’m torn. On the one hand, there is something creepy about the party line we’re being squeezed into. Praising Our Beautiful NHS seems a mania: an all-too-convenient distraction from deeper, messier questions. On the other, I recognise the instinct. We all want to help. Many seem to have been waiting their whole lives to know what they would have done during the Blitz. Now we have our answer: 750,000 NHS volunteers inside a week, ungrumbling financial hara-kiri by small businesses, and fistfuls of notes shoved down the negligée of Captain Tom. We’re amazing. But in our heightened state, we’re also at the whim of various madnesses of any number of crowds.

It is this paradox that Rutger Bregman stumbles into in his new book, Human Kind: A Hopeful History. It’s not clear he makes it out alive.

“We are basically nice”, is Bregman’s big idea. Just this weekend, Bregman went viral on the Guardian website with a story from Human Kind about a real life Lord Of The Flies, arguing that the book was more a product of William Golding’s own abberant, alcoholic psychology than any model for human nature.  When six real boys became stranded near Tonga, he points out, they made a pledge never to quarrel, and shared out their scant water supplies equally, initially at a cup a day.

As ideas go, Bregman’s is a whopper. After all, “What is fundamental human nature?” is the bedrock of all politics — you don’t need Jonathan Haidt to tell you that much of how we each dispense justice in the world goes back to a deeper view of who we are, which nests in our childhoods and even our genes. It’s certainly nice to find someone who is willing to have a go at a question this big. Academia has a tendency only to offer us  A+ answers to C+ questions. Human Kind addresses an A++ question, but even at 400 pages, it can only really gesture towards answers; Bregman is like a man with a pen knife cutting chunks off a blue whale. 

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Far from being rapacious apes, Bregman says, humans have been bred to be the most pro-social species. He introduces what he calls Homo Puppy — the idea that it was the most sociable — those who could count on their neighbours — not the most aggressive who ended up winning the evolutionary race. We’ve been told we’re like chimpanzees — violent and territorial. But in fact we’re more like bonobos — co-operative, mild, fans of delicious free love. He cites the work of Dmitri Belyaev’s Soviet scientists who turned snarly wild silver foxes into cuddly domestic tail-waggers in thirty generations. We are those foxes.

As his thesis advances, we learn that Rousseau had it spot on, Hobbes was a dismal cynic. Even the Holocaust can’t hold back Bregman. He points to research suggesting that Germans in the Second World War fought hard for the love of their comrades, their own band of brothers. He quotes a German serviceman, who quipped: “Nazism begins 25 miles behind the front lines”. So long as the shock troops pounding mortar shells into Warsaw flower markets weren’t particularly keen on the whole Reich thingy, his theory checks out. Like a humanist Gok Wan, a Queer Eye for an entire species, Bregman would like to take the soul of man and say: Hey. Look at yourself in the mirror. You’re beautiful! Now go out there and slay, queen.

Maybe we do need a bit of a pick-me-up. There are things we forget, and things we’ve mis-remembered. Bregman is at his best when exposing some shoddy psych experiments that have left a watermark on public policy.

As he points out, new evidence shows that the Stanford Prison Experiment — in which the randomly-selected ‘guards’ in a mock jail transformed into brutal sadists — was more an early stab at experiential theatre than anything with scientific rigour. The 1957 Robbers Cave trials — in which groups of small boys were split into tribes and began to attack each other — flunked its first reproduction test when the new boys had singsongs instead. And the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese that gave us the entire notion of ‘the bystander effect’ has since crumbled into little more than shoddy reporting from the New York Times.

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After our basic goodness — even if we grass on our neighbours — is firmly established by Bregman, it is perhaps deflating for the reader to realise that much of what comes next is basically ‘90s management theory — the sort of stuff Tom Peters was writing about as far back as In Search Of Excellence (1982). Trust the people. Cut the middle managers. Democratise. Decentralise. Devolve. Or “Management by objectives,” as Peter Drucker had it.

Bregman focuses on a charmingly iconoclastic Dutch healthcare provider, Buurtzog, who run 14,000 nurses with only 50 administrators by grouping them into self-organising teams with their own budgets. He mentions a radical school, Agora, that allows its children to bugger around all the live-long day, with no curriculum and great results. And the new generation of Norwegian prisons, which treat inmates with more courtesy than most Premier Inns.

These are examples of real success, of the soul of man singing in the right cirumstances. But are they examples of the soul of man being good? For instance, if there is a lesson in Buurtzog’s de-centralisation, it might also be that middle-management rent-seekers are the barnacles who must be eternally scraped off the boat of any organisation. Is that a hopeful history? Or a cynical view? Depends on how full your glass is. Or whether you’re hoping to do some rent-seeking later. 

To sell socialism with a side-serve of freedom is definitely a step up on its pre-1989 marketing strategy. As Bregman gladly points out, people have a deep aversion to being micro-managed. It’s the same sexy freewheeling world that Aaron Bastani describes in Fully Automated Luxury Communism. But none of this wave of new young Left thinkers have gotten close to untangling the contradictions of a messy, hyper-open society. This is why it often seems as though the ideal Novara Media prison would be ping-pong for rapists and The Hole for hate speech.

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Bregman, whose last book argued strongly for Open Borders, of course explains Brexit as being a result of whites who have no non-white neighbours voting Leave because they had  limited contact with ‘the other’. The happy conclusion he proposes is that we all need contact therapy to get closer to his view of society. Likewise, Bregman is glad that Britain has left the EU, precisely because it allows for swifter integration of the remaining bloc. So, is a superstate of technocrats also about ‘trusting people’? Or is it about trusting the right people? Perhaps all animals are good — but some animals are more good than others?

What he gets right is that modern economies — with their abstruse GDP calculations, endless atomisations, their Gradgrindian welfare grants and ghastly Nudge Units — have weaponised our moral instincts against us, and thereby ground down the soft bonds that used to keep us all in a more fluid relationship with each other and society. In other words, he finds himself on the exact same terrain as Charles Murray did in Coming Apart (2012), which charted how that kind of neighbourly community-centred social capital has declined in America since the 1950s — though as Murray is  an arch-conservative, it is perhaps not a lift either would wish to get stuck in

The diffence between Bregman and Murray’s views comes down to something even more fundamental. Both see an optimism in the self-organising community. But Bregman doesn’t see that this has any limits. In his world, you could parachute any 300 people together, and they’d start to co-operate just as well. The idea that social capital is something that often accrues over long periods of time is lost to his particular idealised state of nature. Deep in his dream of Rousseau, he seems to feel it all went tits up the moment we lost the hunter-gatherer band. Once we had the tribe with its chief, then the settled village — once our leaders had tributes paid and manufactured gods to keep their political economy rolling — well then things were really down the pisser, and we were forever turfed out of Eden.

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He doesn’t mention Dunbar’s Number — the idea that the quantity of people whose moral debits and credits I can keep track of caps at around 150, a tribe’s worth. Small groups work best precisely because we’re all flesh-covered moral calculators, audibly tutting at defectors. What he observes as spontaneous goodness only works because, if the group is coherent enough, if the game is long-term enough, then somewhere underneath, everyone knows the score, and punishment only needs to be implied, not stated.  

This is exactly why being socially-minded is not the same as being good. Shame works. And starting the shaming — being at the top of a temporary shaming hierarchy — is its own kind of social capital. It’s why clapping for the NHS might be a fine example of our innate goodness. Or it might equally be an example of another famous psychology experiment — the Ascht conformity experiments.  

The Ascht experiments measured the vast capacity of ordinary people to take their beliefs about reality from those around them — even in the face of bald, bang-to-rights physical evidence to the contrary. A literal 2 + 2 = 5 phenomenon that links social disasters from Covington to Salem to, yes, that loving band of brothers, the Nazis. Homo Puppy or otherwise, we may just as well have been selected precisely not to disagree with each other. It’s why divergence, stating the uncomfortable or nuanced, has become such a prickly act in a hyper-networked world, and why groupthink has become more and more paralysing to our progress.  

Even with his big brown eyes and his soft wet tongue, Homo Puppy could still smother us all.

What is especially troubling about this genre, though, is its disturbing use of morality. The initial act of savagery is there to provide a moral justification for the otherwise cruel and immoral things the protagonist goes on to do. And it justifies our Schadenfreude. Or, to put it another way: morality is dangerous. It can easily exist to exonerate great harm.

Which brings me, slightly obliquely, to Jeremy Kyle and his now cancelled TV show. I absolutely share in the moral condemnation of the programme: putting poor people on trial, holding them up to public ridicule, exposing their faults and family grievances, all for the titillation of a baying audience. The psychological damage the show did to contestants was long-ignored. And I choose the word ‘contestants’ deliberately – because not only was the show all about contestation, but also because it adopted the format of a game show, recycling private misery into the financial gold of light entertainment.

But the really terrible thing about the show is how it allowed itself a veneer of moral justification. It sought ‘the truth’ – hence its routine use of lie detectors. And under the pretext of this moral justification visited great harm upon those foolish enough to submit themselves to the cruelty of Kyle’s hectoring interrogations.

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By Giles Fraser

Perhaps Jeremy Kyle saw himself as performing a public good. That by exposing the truth at the centre of a dysfunctional family he was bringing about some much-needed restitution. That he was the righter of wrongs. But as I said, morality can be dangerous. Here, it quickly became an alibi for bullying.

The relationship between truth and cruelty is a long and complicated one. In their brilliant little book, On Kindness, Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor chart the history of kindness from its Christian and pre-Christian roots, through a radical transformation at the end of the English Civil War, and especially through the massively influential work of the philosopher Thomas Hobbes.

“With Hobbes, selfishness and aggression were transformed from moral vices into psychological facts,” they explain.

Later with Adam Smith, selfishness was re-purposed as a moral good – a driver of the economy. By the end of the 18th century, apparently tough-minded truth-seekers understood human nature to be a form of enlightened self-interest. Kindness was just well-hidden egoism.

The historian David Wootton in his recent book on the Enlightenment has added further scholarly heft to this analysis, carefully charting the ways in which selfishness came to be justified as a basic truth of human nature. What we all really seek is Power, Pleasure and Profit, as the book’s title has it. From here on in, getting to the truth of human lives was always going to involve some kind of exposure, unmasking apparent virtues as little more than a nest of lies and self-interest. With Nietzsche, Marx and Freud – the so-called  “masters of suspicion” – human nature is again variously revealed as all about (will-to-) power, pleasure (sex) or (economic) profit.

Further reading

When did empathy become so dangerous?

By Gerard Degroot

So, by the beginning of the 19th century, as Phillips and Taylor put it:

“Kindness was steadily downgraded from a universal imperative to the prerogative of specific social constituencies: romantic poets, clergymen, charity-workers and above all women. By the end of the Victorian period, kindness had been largely feminized, ghetto-ized into a womanly sphere of feeling and behaviour where it has remained, with some notable exceptions, ever since.”

My beef with The Jeremy Kyle Show is not just with its swaggering machismo, but also – and not unconnected – with its total lack of kindness and human sympathy. It imagined working-class life as a Hobbsian war of all against all, a clash of grubby selfishnesses just waiting to be exposed by the fearless truth seeker. Kyle was never kind because kindness is a mug’s game, a sentimentalised simulacrum of benevolence that does nothing to uncover the grubby motives that are at the heart of human motivation.

And Kyle is hardly alone. With the advent of social media, we have experienced an epidemic of unkindness. The public sphere has come to be dominated by a digital swamp of Hobbesian contestation that presumes little good in our adversaries, forever seeking to expose the fundamental mischief that the other is up to.

Likewise, justified by the desire to expose, the political columnist is forever seeking to tell a grubby truth about opponents. According to a recent Nick Cohen column, for instance, The Brexit party candidate Claire Fox is “one of the most immoral people in public life”. I know her pretty well. She is clearly nothing of the sort. But Cohen just throws out this sort of nasty pseudo-exposure under the guise of a blanket assumption that he is exposing some hideous deceit. This is just flat out nastiness. As if kindness has no place in copy.

Why is the ascription of good motivations to people so often regarded as something credulous? When, for instance, do we ever seek to unmask people as being surprisingly good-natured?

I am delighted that The Jeremy Kyle Show has been axed. But there is something more to consider here than the demise of a popular daytime TV show. For so much of our public life has become dominated with Kyle-like presumptions.

Further reading

Whatever happened to TV's working-class heroes?

By Fiona Sturges

Philosophically, we have been led into a trap. On top of the basic necessities, what most of us want out of life is kindness and fellow feeling. Yet we sabotage our own desire for a kinder world because we have all been sold the idea that human beings are all at war with each other.

It is a theme that Adam Phillips regularly returns to in his writing. We all want a kinder world, but are often just too frightened by the demands that kindness makes upon us – the demand that we expose and acknowledge our need for, and dependency upon, other people. For by admitting that we have a lack that only other people are capable of meeting, we acknowledge a great vulnerability within ourselves.

We are so frightened by this vulnerability that we prefer to pretend that it doesn’t exist. Thus we make war on the very thing that could ever make is genuinely happy: the love and kindness of others and our need for it.

So perhaps ITV should be persuaded to develop the very opposite of The Jeremy Kyle Show. Not one in which people are exposed as nasty and selfish. But one where people who pretend to be hard and unconcerned are coaxed into admitting their own need for other people, their own love and kindness. Now that would be a show worth watching.

How Jeremy Kyle undersold humanity

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