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#BeKind? Jameela Jamil and her woke warriors should try it
If you want to bastardise a word, devalue it or indeed render it as empty and decorative as make-up, stick a hashtag in front of it. Right now, as the British twitterati eat each other alive, the hashtag they have chosen to run with is
#BeKind.
I try not to have much to do with Twitter. Peering into its abysses always feels a bit like lifting the lid on a rubbish bin left outside for the duration of a long hot summer: all that pungent dross; all that festering. Once you’ve seen maggots squirming that close, it’s hard to unsee them.
But I’ve had my head inside social media’s rubbish bin for the past ten days, watching the great kindness debate unfold with a kind of ghoulish fascination.
If you have even less to do with Twitter than I do, I should explain that although #BeKind recurs from time to time across social media as a pointless piece of virtue signalling, the latest onslaught of fraudulent kindness has come in the wake of
Love Island host Caroline Flack’s tragic suicide.
From the moment reports came in that the troubled 40-year-old had been found dead at her London flat last Saturday, the #BeKind brigade took to Twitter to apportion blame. In that moment, people were so excited about making their valuable opinions known, so excited about elevating themselves to meaningful mouthpieces, that any sense of decency or respect towards the family in the immediate aftermath of their immeasurable loss was forgotten.
It was David Walliams’s fault for making
a cheap joke at Flack’s expense at the National Television Awards. It was the
Crown Prosecution Service’s fault for pursuing a case against Flack after she was arrested for allegedly assaulting her boyfriend Lewis Burton last year. And yes, they should have seen how vulnerable she was; whether we can really blame them for doing their job is debatable.
But, of course, most of all it was the media’s fault, for doing what we’re always told we do for a living: being unkind.
Never mind that as someone who interviewed Flack twice and met her socially on several occasions, I know that the presenter had a very good relationship with the media. Never mind that two of the key journalists being targeted by
the #BeKind brigade – one a close friend of mine, and
the other my husband – were actually friends of Flack’s, or that there is very little being held up as evidence in what’s too base to be called a debate.
Social media doesn’t need facts or evidence to support its arguments. The beauty of it is that it’s
purely emotion-based, and purely self-serving.
Is social media really the place to ‘address’ any core human value, though, let alone one it couldn’t be further from representing? After all, this is one of the least kind and honourable communities on the planet, so for it to try and cover up its ugliness with a giant #BeKind label is a bit like covering up the ingredients on a Mars bar with a sticker emblazoned ‘BeHealthy’.
Twitter has always had aspirations beyond its abilities. It likes to see itself as the inventor of the kind of basic values we should all be being taught at home, if no longer in church. Because in our secular society, social media has become our church, and the likes of
'woke' TV actress Jameela Jamil our preachers.
Only the vast, flailing congregation being sold kindness as an exciting new commodity – this has the power to elevate your soul (but, crucially, get you lots of attention…) – need to understand this: kindness has been around for some time. And yes, it’s a good idea.
But the irony of kindness being used to further one’s own ends is enough to send me into an existential funk about the kind of hollow, hypocritical world my little girl will grow up in.
Talking of irony, I found a passage in my last interview with Flack in which she mourns our obsession with social media and phones: “I don’t like negativity on any level,” she told me. “And I don’t think people should ever Tweet anything too serious.”
If that’s not enough to puncture #BeKind’s grotesquely inflated self-importance, the words of Flack’s former dance teacher and friend of 20 years should be. Kevin Adams went on Sky News to address the army acting in her name: “I don’t want you to be kind,” he told them, “I want you to think about what you’re saying. If you see someone you don’t like, you don’t need to tell them, just leave them alone.”
Angry and tearful, Adams pared it down still further: “What I’m asking, is that if you’ve got nothing good to say, shut your mouth.”
