The worst thing is not the mob; it’s the cowardice that we display before the mob. In every age, some people have formed gangs to persecute deviants or heretics. It seems to be in our genes, a hangover, perhaps, from our hunter-gatherer days, when commitment to the kin-group was a survival trait. Modern technology facilitates that mob instinct — it’s much easier to Tweet an anonymous invective than to light torches and brandish a pitchfork — but the internet did not create the problem. What it has done, is make us more pusillanimous, even when we know that the mob is misdirected.
Let me pluck two current examples more or less at random. Last week, there was a row about a British Conservative member of Parliament who had blocked a ban on a disgusting practice known as upskirting. I confess that hadn’t heard of upskirting before, but it turns out that there are creeps who surreptitiously take photographs under women’s skirts. This behavior was not covered by existing indecency laws, so a Liberal Democrat MP sought to create a specific criminal offense of photographing beneath someone’s clothes without their consent.
Because her proposal was brought in as a Private Member’s Bill — in other words, a law not sponsored by the government, and which receives little scrutiny — it needed unanimous approval to be given time for consideration. When a long-serving and slightly unworldly Conservative MP called Sir Christopher Chope yelled “object,” the Bill fell — followed by the heavens. How, demanded MPs and journalists, could even a misogynist dinosaur object to such a measure?
Those asking the question the most theatrically knew the answer. Sir Christopher objects in principle to legislation being added to the statute book without a full parliamentary debate. He and a handful of bloody-minded colleagues block as many Private Member’s Bills as they can, arguing that, if the government wants new laws, it should propose and defend them.
Most MPs — especially those whose pet schemes he has thwarted over the years — regard his behavior as reprehensible. A few see it as principled. But here’s the thing: The MPs jabbing their fingers at him histrionically knew, though they wouldn’t say so, that he was objecting to the process, not the outcome. Chope wanted to ban upskirting, just like everyone else; but he wanted the change to be properly debated.
It naturally suited Labor MPs to caricature him as a pervert — that’s politics. What’s different this time is that several Tories joined in, calculating that best way to avoid being tainted by association was to be aggressive in their condemnation. Welcome to Arthur Miller’s Salem.
At around the same time, the author Lionel Shriver was removed as a judge from a literary award after writing a light-hearted and moderate criticism of Penguin Random House which, with the aim of precisely representing the British population by 2025, had asked authors to tick various diversity boxes. Literally, authors were offered, among other things, the options of “bi” and “bisexual,” which evidently counted as separate categories.
“Penguin Random House no longer regards the company’s raison d’être as the acquisition and dissemination of good books”, she wrote. “Rather, the organization aims to mirror the percentages of minorities in the UK population with statistical precision.”
If you use social media, you won’t need me to tell you how her relatively mild article was twisted by people who had no intention of reading it. Lionel Shriver says that only white men can write! She says minority writers are unintelligent! She’s basically a Nazi!
Now here’s the scary part. The literary magazine that ran the award, Mslexia, acknowledged that the criticism was unfair, but dropped her anyway — via Twitter, naturally: “Announcement: following Lionel Shriver’s controversial comments on diversity in publishing, we have decided to remove her as the judge of our 2018 Short Story Competition.” Note that word: “controversial,” not “wrong.”
The editor explained that, yes, she accepted that Shriver’s words were being taken out of context, but “the way it has been taken up by the media” had created an unacceptable “atmosphere.” Think about that for a moment. Here she is admitting that, in the age of Twitter mobs, being wrongly accused is no longer a defense. I suspect she is unusual only in coming out and saying it. How many others make the same calculation in ashamed silence?
The internet ought to have made it harder to misquote people, since we can now easily look up the original words for ourselves. But we generally don’t bother. We’d rather hug our self-righteous fury than risk having our prejudices challenged. Sometimes, we can be a singularly unattractive species.
