These bullying bishops aren’t brave
by Giles Fraser, UnHerd:
Why are the guardians of public morality joining the pitch-fork mob?
I went to public school, so I know a thing or two about bullying. The crucial thing is to develop the collective impression that the person being bullied deserves it. Once this is established, the bully can clothe themselves in a peculiar form of moral righteousness. The witch is persecuted, because she deserves it. The Jews are persecuted, because they deserve it.
And it’s not just the physically weak who are targeted for collective punishment, it’s anyone who refuses to go along with the hive mind. In times of group stress, the need to find scapegoats, and thus collectively express our pent-up anger and frustration, is all the greater. It is not just the virus that is highly contagious at the moment, so too is what the French anthropologist/theologian René Girard called “the scapegoat mechanism”. And, of course, doubly so in the highly mimetic environment of social media.
And boy does Cummings deserve it. After all, wasn’t he the person who practically re-invented populist politics for the twenty-first century? And what is populism other than the harnessing of the ‘mob spirit’ for the intensification of politics? Cummings, the master-manipulator, deserves everything he gets. Those who seek to manipulate the wild eddies of popularity must not be surprised when they too get sucked under by its dangerous currents. It’s a kind of poetic justice.
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