In the June issue of The Rock, where we met the redoubtable Mabel, I suggested that BC, standing for Blame Culture is every bit as destructive of the society which it infests as its older brother, Political Correctness. I wrote:

Well, I was proposing to write about PC in this issue, but it suddenly dawned on me that another pair of Terrible Siblings, Icicle and Doormat deserve our attention even more urgently.

Using the liberty common to acronym-makers of inserting or omitting an odd letter here or there I have called these Bad Brothers Icicle and Doormat respectively.

ICICLE stands for "I Couldn’t Care Less"; DOORMAT for "Does it Really Matter?"

At first the two may appear to be one and the same thing; but although Doormat follows Icicle as surely as night follows day, and Political Correctness gives rise to Blame Culture, Doormat is by far the most dangerous, insidious and virulent of them all.

There was an elderly Anglican Bishop in the 1960s who professed to be "horrified" by the frequency with which young people at that time were heard to say "I couldn’t care less".

I suppose that the Bishop must have had an exceptionally sheltered childhood, was childless or else had been suffering for many years from profound deafness! Young (and not-so-young) people have been spatting the words "I couldn’t care less" or "I don’t care" ever since Adam or Eve pointed out to Cain (or was it Abel?) that his shoelaces were undone, or that his hair needed cutting.

Although spatting Icicles is inelegant and boorish, there is reason not to take it too seriously. A child or adolescent who spats an Icicle almost certainly doesn’t mean what he is saying because children do care a great deal about what others think of them. They long for, and actively seek, the approval of their parents and mentors more than anything else – even that of their peers.

Second, Icicle is no more than an expression of feelings. Like other feelings it’s short-lived and capricious. Moreover, it’s a feeling which children express very selectively. "Icicle" is something you simply don’t say to your Headmaster – or to a beloved maiden aunt for that matter. It’s strictly reserved for the family!

Third, Icicles by their nature are transitory creatures. Sooner or later they melt down into the most basic and beneficial substance in all creation – water. The problem then presents itself as to how to prevent the erstwhile icicle-spatter from becoming fiercely over-critical of his unregenerate colleagues. There’s no keener gamekeeper than a reformed poacher, we’re told.

The 1960s Icicle-allergy – as typified by that Bishop – had another untoward consequence. It persuaded people that caring was the only virtue of any worth in the Christian cupboard. But the result of concentrating on one virtue to the exclusion of all others, however estimable that virtue may be, is a formula for disaster, as CS Lewis pointed out many years before. In Chapter Two of Mere Christianity he says:

The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs. There is not one of them which will not make us into devils if we set it up as an absolute guide. You might think love of humanity in general was safe, but it is not. If you leave out justice you will find yourself breaking agreements and faking evidence in trials ‘for the sake of humanity,’ and become in the end a cruel and treacherous man.

 

That’s exactly how the Icicle-critics turned into Doormats in the 1960s. Supposing as they did, that the supreme virtue was Kindness, or Concern, or Caring (it went under a number of names) they began habitually to ask "Does it Really Matter?" about all other moral questions: and thence emerged the (morally)-disastrous rule-of-thumb that so long as our behaviour didn’t hurt anyone else, we were free to do what we felt like.

The reason why Doormats are so much more harmful than Icicles can be understood immediately we look at their respective grammatic-DNA-codes.

Icicle never pretends to be anything but a statement about an individual’s feelings. "I couldn’t care less" is of the same order as "I feel unwell", "I am tired", "I wish I didn’t have to". In each case it bears no necessary relation to what the person standing next to us feels, or to how we ourselves may be feeling tomorrow or next week. In other words it is a completely subjective statement, which anyone reflecting upon can recognize as such.

Doormat, however, purports to be an objective statement of fact, witness that its subject is "It" and not "I". It’s not describing the individual’s feelings about something; it’s describing the reality of that Something itself, irrespective of our feelings about it at any given moment. If we agree for instance that it is better to tell the truth rather than lie, it is wholly inappropriate to ask "Does it really matter?" – for by bringing in the concepts of better and worse we have already conceded that the answer to that question must be Yes, it does.

It’s easy to see, then, how the notion of Moral Relativity crept in whilst nobody was looking. Once people stop being objective about the moral nature of a particular action it’s pretty easy, as most of us discover sooner or later, to justify just about anything providing one gives it a suitable fancy-dress in which to disguise itself. Once the moral threshold comes to be regarded as "the way I feel about it", it’s one short step to being reduced to a Doormat over which people trample regardless; and once it has been crossed, the moral threshold is so much easier to traverse again and again until one is hardly aware that it ever existed in the first place.

We have allowed ourselves to become a nation of moral doormats. How has this come about?

Well, for a start we need to recognize that there are a great many people with a vested interest in creating a society of moral doormats. If people get used to being morally walked over it’s only a short step to them believing that this is the normal and inevitable state of affairs. In other words they become fatalistically resigned to it, forgetting that in the past many moral and social evils have been successfully overcome by an apparently powerless and insignificant group of people. The Church of the Apostles’ time is just one such example. So fatalism is one prerequisite of turning into a Doormat.

Next we must recognize that the Media, in the widest sense of Press, TV, Cinema and Theatre are almost solidly in favour of Moral Relativism, if only because it makes their job much easier if the question they have to ask themselves is "Will people watch/read/attend this?" rather than "Is this morally edifying – or the opposite?" Money, of course, comes into it, but the principal driving-force is the reluctance of its members to face up to difficult questions. This should not, however, prevent us from asking those questions – through journals like this one, New Directions and the whole plethora of tools like Websites which the IT revolution has placed at our disposal.

Probably the most powerful and subtle of the forces which has turned us into moral-Doormats, however, is the attitude of mind which supposes that if something "works" it must therefore be right. In many instances, of course, it will be. Our God is a God of order, not chaos, and, within certain limits, it is his good pleasure that we should gain knowledge and understanding of his creation by trial and error.

But only within certain limits. For in the account of Creation in Genesis God did place a certain limit upon man’s curiosity to see "what will happen if I do/don’t?" Trial-and-error is itself circumscribed by a moral imperatives. It is no more appropriate to ask one’s Creator the question "What happens if I disobey you?" than it is to say "Icicle" to one’s Headmaster!

Like all moral vices, Doormat is insidious and superficially attractive. Remember the story of the three Devils-in-Training who were asked by their Tutor how they would go about their business of tempting humans to distance themselves from God"

"I’d tell them that Science has proved that belief in God is all a load of nonsense", said the first.

"I’d tell them that doing God’s will involves alienation and suffering from their fellow-men", said the second.

"I’d tell them that it may all very well be true, but that it doesn’t really matter" said the third, after some thought.

"Excellent!" said the Tutor to the last speaker, "go straight to the top of the class!"

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