If you missed it, last Monday was World Kindness Day. BBC Woman’s Hour released a video where various famous figures spoke about what ‘kindness’ meant to them, amongst them Caitlin Moran, Nadiya Hussein and Anita Rani. Moran focused on the importance of kindness to yourself. Hussein talked about giving. This makes sense - forgiveness and effort are reasonable ways of understanding kindness. Rani, however, talked about the “small acts” : letting a pregnant woman or elderly person have your bus seat, smiling and saying good morning, offering a cup of tea. I know still it’s a bit early for Christmas and I am probably going to come across as the Grinch but I have to ask: are these actions ‘kind’? Or are they just…manners? Something to be expected in civilised society rather than celebrated or needfully encouraged? Especially from adults. ‘Kind hands’ is one of the first golden rules taught to toddlers when they start nursery - don’t hit, share toys etc. It’s disconcerting how common it is now to see posters spattered around school, universities and workplaces reminding adults to be kind, to be nice, to be inclusive! I can only speak for myself but, personally, I don’t care for being addressed as though I am a barely-socialised child.
This mixing up of kindness and niceness stoked reflections in me about a certain bestselling novel that exploded onto the book scene in 2017. Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine. It sold over 2 million copies and won the prestigious, now-defunct Costa First Novel Award. I can’t remember the last time I went into a female friend’s house and didn’t see it on their shelf. It was on mine as well until recently when I gave my copy away on Olio. I feel enough time has passed to admit I really, really did not like the book. From looking at Goodreads reviews and star ratings, I know this makes me a rarity, so let me plead my case.
Eleanor Oliphant is a 30ish woman who really wants a boyfriend, works in an office and drinks too much at the weekend. So far, fairly standard chick-lit fare. What makes Eleanor different though, is that she has the most ludicrously and melodramatic tragic backstory, to the extent it feels the author built the character from sensationalist tabloid headlines. The painful details of Eleanor’s story are gradually revealed but the main problem plaguing her throughout the book is loneliness. Courtesy of her crazily traumatic past, she is incredibly weird, awkward and annoying to be around, hence has no friends.
One day, for reasons that aren’t really made clear, a nice IT worker and colleague called Raymond takes a (platonic) shine to her. He takes her to meet his nice mum and his nice friends and with Eleanor, they do a nice thing for a nice old man who introduces her to his nice family. Eleanor goes for a nice haircut and a nice bikini wax and a nice shopping trip and through the power of niceness effectively learns to live life, rather than merely survive it.
If EOICF had been a simple feel-good story about a lonely, socially-inept woman struggling with modern-day atomised life who, through “small acts of kindness”, became less depressed and learnt the social skills she needed to thrive, it wouldn’t have grated me. I bear no ill-will to author Gail Honeyman. If my disdain for her mega-bestseller does somehow reach her and makes her cry, she can dab her eyes with the wads of money she’s made. Her gratuitous handling of terrible human experiences, though, betrays a complete detachment from the reality of such trauma.
Eleanor’s eccentricity is played for laughs but beneath her quirks, she is suicidal, an alcoholic and, without spoiling the book’s extremely contrived twist, suffering from what seems to be serious psychosis. Small acts of kindness could brighten her day but they couldn’t mend her life- or anybody in that sort of state. It’s not just Honeyman who puts disproportionate faith in kindness. The unreservedly positive reception from reviewers and readers often came from how ‘real’ Eleanor supposedly felt, with hardly any focus on the patently unrealistic parts of her development. Six years on, it seems indicative of a cultural ‘kindness’ delusion that’s since worsened. If “Kindness solves everything” translates into twee fiction, it makes for disastrous thinking in the real world.
This week for instance, journalist Kenny Farquharson offered his insight into how the exhausting ‘trans row’ should be solved. Having apparently awoken from a coma that started in 2012, compromise was his radical vision. There were predictable, if understandable, feminist outcries about yet another man weighing in with the shallowest of understandings of the matter, to tell women what their boundaries should be. What stood out to me more was his wording here:
“…surely womanhood in all its glory is capacious enough, generous enough, diverse enough, to accommodate and perhaps even to welcome a small number of people who did not start life’s journey as women?”
If you missed it, the million-pound word was ‘generous’. Generosity i.e. kindness i.e. niceness will enable us to find a rational way to wheedle material reality into a more ‘capacious’ form. The silly extremists (on both sides, don’t you know) won’t be satisfied but all the kind, sensible people who know the sun can go round the Earth if you wish it hard and kindly enough, will be content. All will be completely fine.
It’s tempting, when making the argument that kindness/niceness is inhibiting our reason and resilience in the face of solving indescribably complicated political and social issues, to simply gesture vaguely at everything. I’ll use an example close to home though. If you doubt ‘kindness’ makes for stunted visions, whether sincerely or insincerely applied, look no further than Holyrood. Pieces of legislation which are, at best, embarrassingly inept and, at worst, dangerous have been waved through by kindness and inclusivity-obsessed politicians, one of the worst spearheads being the uber-progressive Humza Yousaf, now First Minister. I speak, of course, of the Hate Crime bill and the Gender Recognition Reform bill. Bills that threatened vulnerable women and children’s safety and basic freedom of speech. Bills that bring to mind that wonderful, acidic Magdalene Berns quote: “You’re so open-minded, your brains are falling out”. You’ll recall critics and questioners of these bills were treated with tellingly unkind dismissal and slander. See, when you lose sight of what kindness really is and where it’s appropriate to prioritise, some very nasty, self-serving people can weaponise it.
The trait that we sorely need to foster in our present and future leaders and thinkers is integrity. Integrity is having a strong sense of principles and, unfashionably, it means the pursuit of truth to obtain them; practising honesty and conviction, sometimes at the expense of ‘kindness’.
Not only does our current culture overlook people with integrity, it denounces them. Consider, while crowd-pleasing kook Caitlin Moran talks about kindness on Woman’s Hour’s platform, journalist Helen Joyce, whose honest, rigorously researched but, alas, heterodox views on gender identity shed key light on the issue, is blacklisted from the show. Until this is amended, all is very much not completely fine.
As ever you've hit the nail on the head. For years women have had "being nice" thrown at them if they didn't conform to expectations of how they should behave and now kindness has become positively toxic at times. We absolutely need more integrity.
Thanks for responding to my column in such a civilised way without recourse to insult. It's rare but very much appreciated! You make some very fair points, not least on the danger of well-intentioned but ill-considered "kind" legislation.
But I would push back on the idea that compromise is weakness, niceness or, worse, empty-headedness. Look at Northern Ireland where, 25 years ago, with 3,000 dead, loyalist and republican leaders compromised with the very people, sometimes specifically, who wanted them dead.
This was not weakness or niceness or kindness. It was courage. It was moral resilience. It was intellectual rigour. I don't claim any of these, but I do defend those at home and abroad who are willing to leave their comfort zones and seek some way forward in the full knowledge it exposes them to bile from both sides. More bile, in fact, than is usually directed at the "enemy" on the other side.
Forgive me if I quote at length from my colleague Danny Finkelstein in a recent column about assisted dying, which became a column about centrists:
"Most policy decisions, in other words, come down to a judgment about mitigation and proportionality. There are few controversies — perhaps restricted to disputes about matters of fact — in which only one side has merit. It is understanding this, and living with its implications, that is the core of the politics of the centre.
This leads centrists to four main conclusions. First, because there are many valid perspectives, the constitution must be pluralist, protecting free speech and the exchange of ideas as well as the rights of minorities.
Second, centrists accept the charge that sometimes, in hot disputes, we favour mere compromise. This is not because we are weak and buffeted about. It is because a stable society and the rule of law require that at the very least the vast majority of people, the vast majority of the time, must be willing to live peacefully with the solutions upon which society agrees.
Third, ensuring that arguments are properly considered and risks mitigated requires competent government and respect for the facts.
And finally, being in the centre involves resisting the allure of populism, the idea that there is a single “spirit of the nation” or “will of the people”. Nigel Farage’s description of the European referendum result as “a victory for real people” is a classic example of populism, suggesting that those who voted differently weren’t even people."