Fighting back against the the fake Age of Unreason
by David Butterfield, Standpoint:
Keyboard warriors taking offence on behalf of others led not only to Sir Roger Scruton’s sacking but to Jordan Peterson’s exile from Cambridge.
Are you incandescent about the new age of outrage? Or have you, perhaps, been too busy getting worked up about vegan sausage rolls or insensitive emoji?
Wherever you look, righteous indignation is filling the airwaves, swamping the internet and filling frothing newspaper columns. But what’s truly odd about all this fury is not its fever pitch, but how little of it is genuine. Most, you will notice, is meta-outrage, proxy offence taken by self-appointed spokespersons for others, who are piously heralded as the real victims.
Weirder still, if those crudely-categorised “others” aren’t themselves offended, they’re told that they really should be. And so a self-employed thought police scours the world for off-message, behind-the-curve behaviour. Thus, Twitter histories are decocted into nuggets of decontextualised outrage-fodder and peccadilloes of decades past are treated as indistinguishable from present-day mistakes. Yet none of these DIY detectives question the morality of telescoping history. Unless we believe that people really can’t change for the better, and bitterly regret the behaviour of their distant selves, why should someone’s present-day character be torpedoed by its past?
In simpler times, a sincere apology could acknowledge poor judgment, rue the harm done, and draw a firm line. People could forgive, if not necessarily forget.
But in our more cynical age, those now marshalling offence on others’ behalf have no wounds to heal. Words of contrition fall on deliberately deaf ears. There is only one remedy: heads must roll.
So frenzied are these choruses of outrage, so pervasive their clamour, that many institutions now shy away from openly defending their principles, however deeply cherished. The Church, charities, political parties, educational providers, artists, writers — all seem afraid to risk something so valuable as their reputation on something so petty as their beliefs.
Outrage trades highest in the digital sphere, and its most successful trading floor is Twitter. Perversely, and pathetically, this platform has only been available for a dozen years, and only high-profile for five, yet its dominance over ancient institutions — even Parliament — is astounding. Sir Roger Scruton’s dismissal as chairman of a governmental commission devoted to designing better housing for Britain after a fierce Twitterkrieg is described by Toby Young and Sir Roger himself in the previous pages, providing another scalp for the meta-outraged, and another scare for those who believe politics must transcend private beliefs.
Most worryingly, the very theatre of controversial ideas, the university, is falling foul of this practice. For the last 15 years, I have been based at Cambridge, a university that has been no stranger to heretical and iconoclastic thought for more than 800 years and no stranger to attacks in the media.
Read also: Lost in Twitter space – sense, civility and free speech by Matt Archer, The Conservative Woman
Related Posts
Tags
Share This
