Why I’m calling time on call-out culture

‘The galling thing about these judgments is the paper-thin ethics they’re built on’

Call off the boycott, disband the picketers and reach for that Big Mac and fries with a clear conscience: Mcdonald’s is once again a safe space, thanks to “appropriate action” having been taken to remove the fast-food giant’s British-born CEO.

Now the details of Steve Easterbrook’s crime are emerging, we may want to play down that Britishness. After all, here is a man – a divorced father-of-three – who had a (whisper it) consensual relationship with an employee.

I know. Makes you wonder whether any good came out of Metoo, doesn’t it, when, two years on, you’re still getting consenting, unattached adults engaging in romantic relationships with people they met at work?

“Given the values of the company,” the 52-year-old divorcé from Watford wrote, in a suitably contrite statement written shortly before he was taken off for his chemical castration: “I agree with the board that it is time for me to move on.”

I’m curious to know where all the people who have fallen short of our exacting moral and ethical standards have been “moved on” to. It must be getting crowded, wherever it is.

But I think I’d rather live there, in sardine-packed non-woke-ville, than here in sanctimony-land, where organically formed human relationships are deemed preposterous enough for people to lose their jobs, doulas are being forced to resign for claiming that only women can have babies, theatreland is phasing out the words “ladies and gentlemen” (in favour of the gender-neutral terminology approved by Equity, the entertainment trade union), and we’ll all be seeing in Christmas to the strains of a rewritten and distinctly less “rapey” Baby, It’s Cold Outside, in which John Legend respectfully responds to Kelly Clarkson’s “…if I have one more drink?” with: “It’s your body, and your choice.”

With many of us now living in daily fear of committing micro-offences with macro-consequences, isn’t it time we called out call-out culture?

Barack Obama did just that last week, lambasting the excessively strident activist Left with the words:

“This idea of purity and you’re never compromised and you’re always politically woke, and all that stuff, you should get over that quickly. The world is messy. There are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws. People who you are fighting may love their kids and share certain things with you.” Most non-millennials applauded him.

But although the former US president went on to make another pertinent point about social media activism – “If I tweet or hashtag about how you didn’t do something right or used the wrong verb, I can sit back and feel pretty good about myself… But that’s not activism. That’s not bringing about change” – and the lazy, back-seat driver aspect of call-out culture is indeed one of the most disgusting things about it, Obama could have gone further.

He could have pointed out the contradictions implicit in the purist generation’s commandments (and why have just 10, when you can make up thousands?). He could have praised their eco-consciousness… and then asked them to hand over their smartphones for the greater good. Because, of course, no more oil means no more state-of-the-art touchscreen handsets.

He could have queried whether sending each other photographs of their genitalia on social media and lying about everything from their age and sex to their achievements and attributes was, indeed, a cleaner way to conduct relationships, or whether the whole “In Real Life” thing might have something to be said for it, after all?

And he could have told them a few home truths about the techno-gods they’ve chosen to worship: gods like Mark Zuckerberg, who would force doula Lynsey Mccarthy-calvert to delete her Facebook post about women being the only ones to have children, but refuse to take down the graphic images of 21-year-old British backpacker Amelia Bambridge’s dead body when they appeared on Instagram last week. Not that the company wasn’t “saddened”, you understand, but with “sharing”, Facebook’s loftier mission, “this can result in content appearing that some may find upsetting”, sighed a spokesman at the weekend.

That might be the most galling thing about judgment culture: the paper-thin ethics it is built upon. So whether it’s the cowardice and cynicism of big companies that have to be seen to react “appropriately” (and that means an immediate, often disproportionate, knee-jerk reaction), or the fraudulence of the activist generation who feels and cares more than anyone ever has, but are too lazy to vote: it’s all a pious pose.

And that needs to be called out.