Would You Believe That The Mayor of London is Running A Campaign Against Banter?

How long before we need to ask for consent before we banter?

The project of colonising the informal networks of everyday life drives the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan’s targeting of banter.

The targeting of banter constitutes an attempt to delegitimate the unregulated informal world within families, friendships and community networks. That is why protecting our right to banter is not a joke!

There is something truly disturbing about Sadiq Khan’s presumptuous and intrusive ‘Say Maaate to a Mate’ propaganda exercise. His public relations stunt exhorts young men in London to call out friends when they say something sexist. As soon as a mate uses an objectionable term like ‘chick’, the Khan acolyte is instructed to say ‘maate’ in a tone of disapproval. This pompous call on men to ‘say Maaate to a Mate’ is advocated on the ground that it will contribute to the cause of tackling violence against women and girls.

Whether or not the weird-sounding invention ‘Maaate’ possesses magic properties that inhibit men from adopting violent behaviour is a matter of dispute. But the importance of the chanting ‘Maaate’ ritual is that its performers signal that they are on the right side of the Culture War.

These boys feel good after trying out the word Maaate

Supercilious experts and paternalistic social engineers really dislike banter and regard those participating in this practice as mindless and ignorant individuals whose awareness needs raising. Why? Because they don’t play by their rules. People involved in bantering with one another inhabit a world where they feel free to make jokey and sarcastic comments, hurl slights at one another, and interact spontaneously and relatively unreservedly. Bantering is often free-floating, spontaneous and heretical. Bantering is not susceptible to the culture of micromanagement so beloved by social engineers. From their perspective, bantering is not a joke; on the contrary, because it eludes their purview, they regard it as risky and potentially dangerous behaviour.

Banterers are difficult to influence by earnest cultural warriors. That is why social engineers and leaders of cultural institutions have framed bantering in such a negative light. One group of lawyers warns of the ‘dangers of banter in the workplace’. From their perspective, a model workplace is one where people are not allowed to joke at each other’s expense. At times their narrative of bantering verges on the hysterical. According to one educational expert, ‘pupil banter’ turns into ‘the toxic maleness of politics’. According to Dr Bernard Trafford, ‘tackling classroom banter will not only stop bullying – it will also prevent the racist and sexist trolling of public figures’.

Trafford’s account of the danger of bantering attaches little value to what children experience through acts of sociability or to the lessons they learn from the rough and tumble of free play. His fatalistic teleological account of how banter leads to bullying and then to racist and sexist trolling is underpinned by a pessimistic outlook on human behaviour. From his perspective, childhood bantering must be controlled to nip in the bud the inevitable emergence of male violence.

The project of framing banter – particularly male banter – as a potential cultural crime is justified because unless jokey comments are vetted and policed, they can escalate to violent behaviour. The impulse to regulate and control banter is integral to the social engineering projects of formalising informal relations and the colonising of people’s life world.

Technocrats with social engineering ambitions are deeply suspicious of the unregulated and informal interactions between people. They believe that, left to their devices, people will behave in ways likely to threaten themselves and others. They wish to subject spontaneous and informal relations to their regime of cultural control. In recent decades social engineers have achieved considerable success in regulating informality out of existence in public and private institutions. By introducing codes of conduct, a vast array of procedures and rules, they have succeeded in formalising relations between people within institutions. In this way, people are discouraged from following their instincts and intuitions. Instead, they are encouraged to follow the rule book.

Usually, the project of regulating spontaneous human interaction outside of formal institutions has faced greater obstacles. Relations between people within a family, friendship or community network are relatively difficult to regulate without appearing as hyper-intrusive busybodies. To avoid giving the impression of overtly violating existing standards of privacy, social engineers have justified their colonial ambitions through the language of harm reduction. In particular, they explain their project of colonising the life world of people on the ground of protecting children, women and a variety of so-called vulnerable groups from the harm of being subjected to banter and unregulated speech. The mantra of protecting the vulnerable is used to validate the activities of behaviour managers.

The primary approach adopted by the micromanagers of human relationships is to attempt to de-legitimate specific forms of spontaneous interaction by characterising them as potentially risky, dangerous or a threat to public health. It is worth noting that Khan’s campaign against banter is promoted as integral to the mayor’s public health approach.  You might ask, ‘What does banter have to do with public health’? Very little, unless you wish to find more and more work for public health professionals and the growing army of so-called relationship experts.

Even the policing of speech is argued for to protect people from harm. That is why behaviour managers attach such significance to regulating private verbal and non-verbal communication.

Informal networks tend to invent their language and cultivate attitudes and behaviours specific to their experience. Often members of such networks forge strong bonds and create a world that reflects their experiences and inclinations. They adopt forms of behaviour and rules that are specific to their life world. Their values often contradict the culturally sanctioned norms that behavioural experts and social engineers advocate. That is why the project of discrediting and eroding the authority of informal networks has assumed such significance for social engineers.

A striking illustration of technocracy’s hostility to informal relationships is its negative attitude towards peer groups. Invariably, the influence of peers on one another is represented as likely to encourage anti-social and risky behaviour. The term ‘peer pressure’ has acquired an entirely negative connotation. Peer pressure is never used to suggest that it can lead to positive outcomes.

With so many publications and reports devoted to peer groups and peer pressure, it is worth noting that these are fetishised concepts used to mask the target of their concern. A peer group is simply a bombastic term for a friendship network of young people. The term peer group is used because such an officious-sounding concept is easier to problematise than to suggest that society should be worried about friendship groups.

Peer pressure refers to the normal projection of influence that young mates exercise towards one another. Young people constantly egg each other on and dare one another to go beyond their comfort zone. Throughout most of history, young people's influence on one another was regarded as integral to their development. It is only in recent decades, when behavioural experts so vigorously pursue the colonisation of people’s informal world, that peer pressure is regarded as a problem.

So why has peer pressure fallen foul of professional behaviour managers? Because they would rather that young people respond to their pressure and fall under their influence rather than to their peers. So-called sex and sexuality experts claim that there is something deeply dangerous when young people learn about sexual matters from one another. Yet generations of young people have learned about sex from one another. Often the information they gathered from one another was not scientifically sound.

Nevertheless, they survived and lived with the knowledge they picked up through peer pressure. On balance, the influence that friends exert on one another is positive and contributes to the development of their personality. Through peer pressure, groups of friends establish informal conventions of behaviour through which they often express their personalities.

That friendship groups are represented negatively by relationship experts illustrates their intolerance towards the informal attitudes that prevail in people’s life world. They wish to subject our life world to their petty rules and, in this way, undermine the freedom to live our personal lives in accordance with our inclinations.

It is important to realise that once our interactions and relationships become subject to formal rules, something very important in our lives alters. Our informal, spontaneously conducted relations become formalised so that how people relate to one another becomes transactional. A private world that lives by the rulebook ceases to be private. That is why we need to resist the colonisation of our lifeworld.

So, banter on!

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