The Joy of Destruction

The blow to the groin soon showed up on video, of course, the way many things do these days. And, the way many things do, it quickly became an Internet meme, with Twitterers, Facebookers, and Instagrammers adding comic comments and song fragments to the scene that looked just like the hackneyed movie trope of a man hit between the legs.

The story might have ended there, but Josh seemed to like the attention. He posted on a Reddit thread some pictures of the protest, to prove that he really was the figure in the video and to tell readers that he hadn’t been hurt too badly. His lawyer would later reverse field, insisting her client had “serious injuries” that required significant medical treatment. But she had to argue something at his bail hearing—because, unsurprisingly, the hapless Josh was soon arrested. Once his pepper-shot video spread, a local television station, 3TV/CBS 5 in Phoenix, tracked him down through his Reddit postings for a live interview—an interview in which he apparently thought he was being cagey by showing his face but asking the station not to air his name.

“I don’t equate kicking or putting back tear-gas canisters as attacking police,” he told the television audience. Sadly, the police did equate all that with attacking the police, and they had no trouble identifying him from his postings and his television interview. On August 24, Joshua Stuart Cobin, 29 years old, of Scottsdale, Arizona, was arraigned on three charges of felony assault.

Nearly every part of this saga would have been unintelligible 20 years ago, mostly because nearly every part of it is driven by computer connectivity. Josh learned about the protest online, probably even before he learned about the presidential trip that was the occasion for the protest. The image of his taking a pepper ball to the groin spread because of online video sharing. And he boasted about his deeds in a popular online discussion thread, an odd modern form of confession.

Most of all, Josh Cobin’s story shows the strange social merging of virtual life and real life. The accusation that Trump is a fascist started as a typical bit of Twitter hyperbole, and now it stalks America in the form of a GoDaddy employee in a gas mask. To arrive at the notion that hurling things at the police isn’t attacking them, Josh had to confuse what one can get away with saying on a Reddit feed with what one can get away with actually doing on the streets of Phoenix. He looked like a cartoon figure in the online video—he bumbled his way into an online confession of his acts—in confusion about consequences offline. Joshua Stuart Cobin burned his hand because he didn’t know that recently fired tear-gas canisters really are hot, unlike the computer keyboards on which he typed his virtually hot protests against President Trump.

The glory of the Internet is that it allows like-minded people to find one another. And the horror of the Internet is that it allows like-minded people to find one another. Coin collectors, baseball-card enthusiasts, and used-book readers have all benefited from the opportunities offered by online connection. So have neo-Nazis, child-pornographers, and Communist agitators. Where they were once connected only by the sickly sweet smell of the ink from the mimeograph machine clumping away on the kitchen table, the forces of anger now have instantaneous links.

And that instantaneity allows a radicalizing more rapid than the world has ever seen. Back in a 1999 study called “The Law of Group Polarization,” legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein suggested that discussion among people with similar views causes a hardening of opinion. “In a striking empirical regularity,” he wrote, “deliberation tends to move groups, and the individuals who compose them, toward a more extreme point in the direction indicated by their own predeliberation judgments.” It hardly matters whether the groups are pro-gun, pro-abortion, or pro-anarchy. With sufficient group discussion on one side of an issue, everyone involved takes a step toward the extreme: The mildly supportive become strongly supportive, the strongly supportive become wildly supportive, and the wildly supportive become fanatical psychopaths.

In such books as Violence and the Sacred (1972) and The Scapegoat (1982), the French-American theorist René Girard offered an explanation for this kind of thing, developing his ideas about scapegoating and what he called “mimetic rivalry.” Against Freud, Girard argued that human desires do not always come packaged in predetermined forms. We create many of them in imitation of others. We learn to want by watching what others want, and we catch desire the way we catch a disease.

More recent years have seen some attention paid to the concept of “competitive victimhood.” A fascinating 2017 trio of surveys by Laura De Guissmé and Laurent Licata, for example, pointed out that a group’s empathy for the victimhood of others is significantly decreased whenever the group expands its own sense of victimhood. But Girard was there first, warning that the idea of victimhood, stripped of its Christianity, would itself become a device of cultural violence, with people competing for the status of victim even as they trample those who oppose them or merely fail to support them sufficiently.

If that sounds like the current protesters—if that sounds like too much of our current political agitation on both left and right—it should. Trying to understand antifa, the Washington Post recently described the amorphous group as a collection of “predominantly communists, socialists and anarchists who reject turning to the police or the state” to achieve radical ends, preferring to pursue their radical ends through violent confrontation on the streets. The disorganized organization could not have existed before the Internet—or, at least, it could never have found so quickly people like Josh Cobin to march alongside it, before such leaderless collectives were made possible by computerized communication.

The group polarization of online discussions, the mimetic rivalry to show oneself more pure than others, the Twitterized brutality toward those who fail to show enough purity, the outrage on the hunt for something to be outraged about: The Internet sometimes seems to have been invented for the sole purpose of proving the social-contagion theories of René Girard.

It’s doing a bang-up job.

Perhaps the clearest example of Internet-fueled social contagion can be found in all the agitation these days about America’s statues and monuments. A statue of Robert E. Lee, for example, stood at the center of the clashes that left three dead and dozens injured on August 12, when a set of white supremacists met a counterprotest in Charlottesville, Virginia.

In response to the events in Charlottesville, protesters in Durham, North Carolina, chose another statue as the target of their ire, toppling the town’s Confederate Soldiers Monument on August 14 while shouting, “The people united shall never be defeated”—an odd chant for a destructive act born of divisive social condemnation but of a piece with the conviction, possessed by both the white supremacists and their radical protesters at the Unite the Right rally, that they represent the true will of the people. A different group of protesters vandalized the statue of Robert E. Lee at Duke University’s chapel on August 17. Yet another toppled a Confederate memorial in a cemetery in Columbus, Ohio, on August 22.

Even in the absence of protesters and vandals, many municipal, county, and state governments began preemptively eradicating memorials to the Confederacy after Dylann Roof’s racial massacre at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston in 2015, and the trend accelerated after the Charlottesville riots. The Episcopal Diocese of Long Island removed plaques commemorating a tree that Robert E. Lee had planted when the Army posted him to Brooklyn before the Civil War, and the Washington National Cathedral added an announcement on September 6 that stained-glass memorials to Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson would shortly be taken down.

Joining in, the mayor of Lexington, Kentucky, demanded that Confederate statues be hauled away from the courthouse. Baltimore’s mayor ordered a midnight raid on Confederate statues on city property “to preserve public safety.” On and on the list goes. Bradenton, St. Petersburg, and West Palm Beach, Florida. Annapolis and Ellicott City, Maryland. Kansas City, Missouri. Franklin and Worthington, Ohio. Austin and San Antonio, Texas.

Locations one wouldn’t suspect of having Confederate sympathies acted quickly to avoid the chance of social upset. Los Angeles tore out a Confederate monument from a cemetery, and San Diego pulled a plaque identifying Jefferson Davis Highway. In Brunswick, Maine, a Confederate marker was quietly relocated by Bowdoin College. On August 17, Madison, Wisconsin, removed a graveyard plaque commemorating Southerners who had died at a prisoner-of-war camp in the area. On August 18, one day after a city council vote, Helena, Montana, dug up a Confederate memorial fountain.

The list of removed statues and memorials seems mostly to prove what busy beavers the United Daughters of the Confederacy were from the 1910s through the 1960s. The South played a role in the 1892 election of Grover Cleveland, the only Democrat elected president between 1860 and 1912. But it was with Woodrow Wilson in 1912, and especially with Franklin Roosevelt in 1932, that Southerners became central to the coalition that formed the Democratic party.

And since even Northern Democrats had to make excuses for their Southern brethren, there seemed no one able to say boo to the Daughters of the Confederacy as they seeded the American landscape with memorials to what they called the War Between the States. Stonewall Jackson once slept here? Jefferson Davis once passed through? Robert E. Lee visited? A Confederate veteran spent his twilight years nearby? Up went a plaque. Last year, in response to the cultural turn against the Southern markers, Vanderbilt University renamed Confederate Memorial Hall, for which the Daughters of the Confederacy had raised funds in 1933—and the university was forced to shell out $1.2 million to the Daughters in recompense.

Quite how such things were supposed to be rallying points for racism was never clearly explained. Even the Unite the Right march in Charlottesville began as a protest against the removal of Robert E. Lee’s memorial, a statue generally unnoticed by the town’s white supremacists till the municipal government decided to make a point of it.

But that doesn’t mean the authorities in Virginia were wrong. Many of the grander memorials (the gigantic bas relief on Stone Mountain, for example) date from the revival of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1910s and 1920s, and many of the rest were erected during the civil rights protests of the 1950s and early 1960s. And though the proclaimed purpose was memorializing the figures of the Lost Cause without seriously attempting to undermine the United States in a revival of the Confederacy, the barely concealed agenda was intimidation of Southern blacks—as though to say, We will oppress you, just as our forefathers did. The Confederate flag was raised over the South Carolina statehouse in 1962, 102 years after secession, for a racist reason, and its message was clear. Why shouldn’t such things go?

The defense of American memorials—if defense there is—has little chance of gaining purchase in the midst of the current social contagion. Several writers have suggested that we be wary of the slippery slope that destroying Confederate statues sets us on. Even that formulation underestimates the steepness of our descent. Every schoolteacher knows the state of American knowledge about history is abysmal, in the literal sense of the word: It opens on an abyss. The abolishment of old memorials isn’t a slippery slope. It’s a slippery cliff. And once we fall off the edge, there’s no apparent social consensus, no visible ledge, that might stop us.

On August 18, in response to the Charlottesville riots, the Maryland statehouse removed from its grounds a statue of Roger B. Taney, chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court—even though Taney had stayed true to the Union, opposed the Confederacy, and generally supported Abraham Lincoln’s prosecution of the Civil War. His sin was authoring the despicable Dred Scott decision in 1857, which ought to have prevented the erection of his statue in 1872. But why take it down now, along with statues of Davis and Lee? In Ohio, a statue of William Crawford was decapitated, in yet another response to Charlottesville, for the apparent reason that the colonel from the American Revolution looked as though he might have been a Confederate to someone not able to distinguish the uniforms of the revolution from the uniforms of the Civil War. Francis Scott Key joined the list on September 13, with red paint splashed across a Baltimore monument to the man who wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner” during the War of 1812.

This spring, responding to protests that began after Dylann Roof’s murder of nine black churchgoers, New Orleans hauled away four major monuments only to have a city council member demand that the Confederate statues be not merely removed but melted, to ensure that they never be displayed again. Meanwhile, “Tear it Down,” the motto of the protesters, was spraypainted in black across the base of a golden statue of St. Joan of Arc in the French Quarter. “Joan of Arc is not on our radar,” the head of the local chapter of the anti-Confederate organization “Take ’Em Down” tried to reassure New Orleans residents—a less comforting line than he appeared to realize.

Earlier in the year, Pepperdine University decided to remove a statue of Christopher Columbus. “For years the story of Columbus and the fascinating exploration that brought him to the new world was taught in schools across America. It was heroic and exciting,” the college president wrote. But now, long after those benighted times, “for many, including those within our campus community, stories of conquest and the art associated therewith are painful reminders of loss and human tragedy.” Thus the statue has to go, lest students suffer painful reminders. (If you want to know when those dark times of historical blindness occurred, Pepperdine has helpfully given us a date: The statue of Columbus was erected in 1992.)

On August 16, New York’s mayor Bill de Blasio announced that the city would conduct a 90-day review not just of the small handful of Confederate memorials but of “all symbols of hate on city property.” He suggested the city start with the sidewalk-embedded plaque honoring Philippe Pétain for his military leadership during the First World War, because Pétain went on to collaborate with the Nazis during the Second World War. Activists quickly added a demand that the 76-foot-tall statue of Columbus be removed from the eponymous Columbus Circle and that the New York Academy of Medicine’s statue of J. Marion Sims, “father of modern gynecology,” be taken away because he honed his medical techniques operating on slaves.

The mayor’s promise seems only to have increased the contagion. On August 28, a statue of Columbus in Yonkers was decapitated by vandals, its head thrown in a nearby trash can, and another statue in Queens was spraypainted with the slogan “Tear It Down: Don’t Honor Genocide.” On September 11, yet another Columbus was vandalized, this one in Central Park. Even New York’s many memorials to Teddy Roosevelt are under attack—in a city in which residents are sensitive enough to report feeling unsafe this year when the guitar intro to “Sweet Home Alabama,” Lynyrd Skynyrd’s bouncy 1974 Southern rock anthem, was heard over the Muzak speakers of a Brooklyn grocery store.

Meanwhile, New Jersey’s Stockton University has hidden away a bust of its namesake, Richard Stockton, a signer of the Declaration of Independence who owned slaves. In Philadelphia, activists (including several members of the city council) want to tear down a statue of Democratic mayor Frank Rizzo because he ruled a police force brutal to minorities in the 1970s. In Boston, yet more activists are demanding a new name for Faneuil Hall, a cradle of the American Revolution, because Peter Faneuil had commercial connections with the slave trade. In New Mexico, protesters have denounced a statue of the Spanish conquistador Juan de Oñate. In Chicago, they want the memorial to Italian aviator Italo Balbo erased.

As the cultural contagion grows—pushing us down the slippery slope, dropping us off the slippery cliff—it will not be halted by pointing out the absurdity of trying to eliminate references to the commerce of Peter Faneuil and the airplane flights of the mostly forgotten Italian fascist Italo Balbo. The idea that a mention of Marshal Pétain on a New York City sidewalk is a “symbol of hate” ought to seem silly enough to discredit the entire movement. For that matter, there exists, at least in theory, a principled stopping point, limiting our current wave of iconoclasm to the Civil War, for the Confederate memorials are generally in praise of those who tried to break the Union for the sake of slavery.

The Internet generation, however, tends to lack much sense of historical detail—and nonetheless to believe it possesses the complete key to American history in the knowledge that all the past is a tale of oppression. What need of nuance with that conclusion already in hand? Indeed, indulging nuance gives countenance to evil. If people point out that General William S. Harney helped keep Missouri from joining the Confederacy, they are accused of whitewashing the role he played in the Indian Wars, a role that recently caused South Dakota’s Harney Peak to be renamed Black Elk Peak. If people point out that Joan of Arc was dead long before American colonization, they are accused of lacking respect for the sensitivities of those who feel no connection to the French Catholic saint.

This historical absolutism, this sanding away of distinctions to reveal the unblemished skin of historical evil, makes possible the Internet-driven contagion that has brought down monuments across the country in recent weeks. After toppling the Confederate soldiers’ memorial in Durham, the North Carolina protesters took—and posted online, naturally—video clips of themselves kicking the fallen statue, as if to more fully prove their hatred of racism.

In one way, their enthusiasm to rid the nation of symbols of the rebel slaveholders is to be applauded. In another way, their enthusiasm is hard to distinguish from the zeal with which the Afghan Taliban dynamited the Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001. Or the destruction of the old regime’s symbols at the beginning of the Russian Revolution and again at the end, when the Soviets in turn became the old regime. Or the destruction of Christian symbols in the 1905 revolutionary journée in Limoges, “the Red City” of France. Or, for that matter, the stripping of the altars in 15th-century England. Or the work of Byzantium’s iconclasts, with “whole towns and multitudes of people .  .  . in considerable agitation over this matter,” as Patriarch Germanus complained early in the 8th century.

All iconoclasm looks alike not because its targets or long-term effects are identical, but because its practitioners share a certain manic joy—a sense of grievance at last finding focus, given physical expression, and set free to rage through the world. Nathan Bedford Forrest is a good example of someone with monuments that should never have been erected: a man whose abhorrent work founding the Ku Klux Klan abolishes any need to memorialize him as a brilliant Confederate cavalry leader. But it’s not a long psychological step from removing statues of the Civil War’s General Forrest to beheading statues of the Revolutionary War’s Colonel Crawford. All it requires is a social contagion that calls into existence both the opponents of racialist fascism and the racialist fascists to be opposed. And the Internet, of course, to make it run like lightning.

Consider the example of Heather Franklin, a 33-year-old mother in Oregon who found a Confederate-flag rug hanging in a Portland discount store’s carpet rack this spring. Her response was to pull out her video camera and begin filming herself wailing uncontrollably while accusing the sketchy store’s boorish clerks of racism. And then, of course, she posted the video online.

Within a week, the video had spread enough for the local chapter of antifa to use its Facebook page to encourage a protest—which brought dozens to the store, demanding the firing of the store clerks who had dismissed Franklin’s complaints. In short order, the store manager had apologized, removed the rug, and promised to schedule his employees for sensitivity training.

The psychological disturbance, however, remains the most fascinating element of the incident, for to watch the video is to sense something both profoundly false and profoundly true. The filming is like a fast-frame account of a person working herself into a frenzy, while keeping self-conscious and calm enough never to stop recording it all. In her narration, she exaggerates every detail (even the ones her own video shows to have been fantasized), and she indulges her frenzy with two young, frightened-looking children in tow. The falsity we sense comes from the resulting cold-blooded image of a woman who has deliberately decided to be offended beyond measure. And the truth we sense derives from the same purposeful commotion: She appears psychologically damaged enough to latch on to an occasion, any occasion, for Internet fame and the moral stature of an anti-racist—even if it has to be ginned up. Even if it has to happen in front of children.

And, of course, it worked. In a nearly perfect example of mimetic rivalry, Heather Franklin, a 33-year-old mother in Portland, Oregon, imitated the opponents of racism and claimed a place for herself in the sun. What matter that she had to blame the salesclerks of a discount store? Her moral image is worth it, and her video brought out the Internet-informed protesters before whose outrage the store could not stand. In René Girard’s terms, we find the greatest unity with our fellows by scapegoating selected examples of those we can get away with naming our foes.

Every human situation is like a vase with two handles, the wise old Stoic philosopher Epictetus once wrote. If you have quarreled with your brother, you can pick up the relationship by the handle that is the fact that you have quarreled or by the handle that he is your brother. The protesters against the old Confederate monuments have taken the handle of the quarrel: They are offended because they choose to be offended.

Yale abolished the name of its residential hall Calhoun College this winter when the university elected to picture the 19th-century politician as a theorist of slavery rather than as a famous alumnus. Columbus Day was established in 1892, as the nation recoiled from the horror of 11 Italians lynched in New Orleans in 1891, and the statue in Columbus Circle was set on its New York pedestal as part of the same rejection of bigotry. The current refusal to see Columbus as a symbol of national unity begins with a decision to find the explorer divisive.

And perhaps those who take to the streets in protest are right in their choices. Perhaps they are right to pick the angrier options. But so many of our recent stories—Josh Cobin’s online boasting about the shot to his groin and Heather Franklin’s calculated videoing of her frenzy for the Internet—look like proof of Girardian accounts of cultural breakdown.

Social contagion does not need to be historically accurate, or philosophically wise, or even immediately practical. Why would it, when a sense of outrage lures us into mimetic rivalry and rewards agitation with a feeling of moral superiority—all delivered at the speed of the Internet? The local governments moving quickly to preempt protest may buy themselves a little time by hauling down memorials, but the protesters will soon lock on to new targets. The point of their protests, after all, is not correctly choosing what to be outraged by. The point is the outrage itself. The point, as Epictetus would have understood, is the quarrel.

Joseph Bottum, a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard, is professor of cyber-ethics and director of the Classics Institute at Dakota State University.