Protest puts intense pressure on other people to do something.

We used to say, “I blame the government” but the cult of individualism fostered by the internet has led, increasingly, to single souls, rather than institutions, being blamed and those attacks being very personal: condemnations of someone’s whole character and worth as a human being, suggestions that they kill themselves, even threats to murder them. The constant, 24-hour accessibility that the internet affords makes The Blamed terribly vulnerable and they can be horribly persecuted. They can be cut out from their support group, isolated and hunted down. And, of course, the lower down the organisational or social hierarchy the victims are, the more vulnerable they are likely to be. 

In the past, we’d have thought it deeply tactless to try and co-opt other people’s grief to fuel our own grievances. Nowadays, MeToo culture informs us it is all part of the same structural, hegemonic prejudice. “Micro-aggressions” reinforce a culture that enables the most monstrous of crimes. So activists can, without blushing, join demands for reform by the bereaved of Grenfell , or vigils for the brutally raped and murdered Sarah Evarard because they get patronised at work. 

And, actually, that works. Convincing people that someone else’s grievance is none of our business helps to divide and rule, I guess. 

So banding together to fuel each other’s anger and to persecute our perceived enemies is highly effective in forcing action towards change. It spurs people and organisations on to make decisions and declarations beyond their usual murmured good intentions. However, I’d make the distinction between that and actual and effective social change. For example, the inevitable first sign of a targeted institution buckling to the pressure is for some scapegoat to be thrown to the wolves, losing their job, income, standing in the community, peace of mind, friends. But blame and human sacrifice is rarely going to solve the underlying problem.

Campaigners don’t seem concerned with that. They have demonstrated their power. They don’t need to come up with workable, targeted solutions to problems. In fact, Social Justice warriors like to use individual tragedies and crimes as the springboard for their demands for vague nationwide changes: the awful fire in Grenfell Towers became a campaign against inequality and racism in general terms (somehow); the murder of Sarah Everard became a chance to promote (and condemn) the dubious and divisive concept of “Femicide”. These are terrible injustices, but are far too vast to be addressed by the people dealing with these individual cases, and can draw attention and energy away from more effective solutions to more localised problems: how and why such dangerous cladding had been commissioned for Grenfell; on what, how and why had the local government decided to spend the limited budgets allowed by central government, given the intense pressure across all parts of the civil infrastructure to budget and cut; the recruiting and vetting and supervision of Met police officers, and so on. (Some of these issues are being addressed, now.)

Those tasked, often reluctantly, with finding solutions have to work out what, specifically, they are being asked to do, and what, practically, they can do. They must confront the details, the difficulties, the nuances, the other stakeholders whose rights will need to be maintained, the cost. If they are only paying lip-service to the cause for fear of the mob, their solutions may well be lack-lustre and superficial. Skilled and experienced operators often resign, some have probably already been sacked, while those who secretly oppose the project may use these difficulties to undermine, indefinitely postpone, or fatally water down any proposed changes at all.

And, of course, pressure often leads to ill-thought-out responses that simply make things worse. History is littered with these, from prohibition, which simply delivered the whole drinking population of the USA into the hands of Mafia suppliers, who became immensely rich, to the rise of tower blocks to solve housing problems but only made urban deprivation worse, to the Oxycontin scandal, when the new slow-release opiate pain-killers turned out to be stronger and more addictive than their predecessors and so were summarily banned, leaving thousands of now addicted users to turn to illegal dealers.

The most scandalous of recent examples in Britain is probably when various British police forces, shamed by their truly woeful conviction rates on sexual crimes, and the revelations of Jimmy Saville’s immunity, instructed investigating officers to assume allegations of sexual abuse were true. Rather than learning the true lesson of their past errors, which was that they should listen with sympathy and without bias. Instead, they decided they should remain biased, only now in the other direction: they should assume the accused’s guilt until they were proven innocent. Presumably Police bosses were flustered by the pressure. 

This encouraged respectable police detectives to entertain mad conspiracy theories and allowed a fantasist, Carl Beech, to invent an elaborate and impossible paedophile and murder ring centred around parliament and the British establishment^[1]. Investigating this fiction took years of police time and millions of pounds that could have been spent on trying to increase the conviction rates for real sex crimes. 

The Social Justice Warriors take no responsibility for this. They can just prowl social media, waiting, to accuse, condemn and persecute if they don’t get what they want. 

It’s not really very helpful, guys!

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^[1] “Carl Beech, VIP paedophile ring accuser jailed for 18 years”, The Guardian, 26/07/2019; The Unbelievable Story of Carl Beech (Documentary) BBC 2, 12/09/2020; “The ‘Westminster paedophile ring’ is a lesson in how not to carry out a police investigation”, The Spectator, 29/02/2020, etc.

Mass protests don’t easily translate into changes of policy or practice in the way a country operates. They are necessarily decentred and polyphonic: made up of many voices. This is especially true for campaigns that grow online (all of them, nowadays) because the internet’s great claim is that it can give everyone an equal voice to express themselves.

Modern movements aren’t really organisations, more tenuous webs of connection: huge, headless grassroots groupings that coalesce around a vague sense of having similar values and grievances. By adding their voices to those of all the others, everyone is stating and strengthening their own, singular sense of identity, of belonging, rather than following an inspirational leader or offering practical advice on how a particular social problem can be solved.

So, protest campaigns tend to be unfocussed – a hubbub of dissatisfaction rather than a clear statement of intent. They are often without explicitly targeted goals, and they come together not to get anything done, But to express a sentiment, an attitude, literally millions of times, en masse, with enormous volume. (Although, I admit that protest movements have inspired dynamic individuals to begin activities and organisations that bring great benefit to their communities.)

Apropos of nothing:

It’s been impossible, even for me to avoid the Wagatha Christie debacle. I’ve read very little about this case compared to everyone else, but the consensus in the press seems to be that Rebekah Vardy probably did leak information about Coleen Rooney to The Sun. Their evidence seems to be the suspicious, yet circumstantial, losing of Ms Vardy’s agent’s phone in the North Sea, and the disappearance of many texts, which have been very convenient for her, they point out.

The press also seem astonished that Ms Vardy would take the risk of suing for libel, suggesting that they believe she has something to hide that would come out in court.

If they are right, this may have interesting implications about the internet, its effect on truth, and its promotion of the cult of heroic individualism: if Rebekah Vardy had leaked stories to The Sun, her motivation for going to court must have been something other than revealing or clarifying the truth. It was presumably about winning a fight with Ms Rooney, of dominating by force of will and personality. The one extended article I read in The Guardian, by Hadley Freeman (“Wigs, Wags & WhatsApp”, 28/05/22) quotes Ms Vardy texting “Not having her [Coleen Rooney] bad mouth me to anyone … if she’s doing that, my god she will be sorry.”

If Rebekah Vardy had been doing exactly what Coleen Rooney was “bad mouth”ing her about, this would stand as another example of the internet’s erosion of truth: all that seemed important to Ms Vardy, when she sued, was presentation. The relevance of reality can’t have occurred to her.

The internet, for all its vaunted “connectivity” has actually de-skilled us. Even in apparently group digital settings, you can only address one person at a time. We are not conversing face to face in real time. Instead we are coming out of communion to compose uninterrupted messages at our own pace, giving human interactions a stuttering, alienating  disconnection, and denying us the chance to build up interpersonal skills of fluency, patience and flexibility. 

So, conversation is no longer a way of making connections, of being with other people. Modern, online discussion is typically clumsy and aggressive, a clash between two wholly opposed and entrenched individuals, who don’t know each other, who have never met, and thus have no investment in maintaining a relationship.  It is an exchange of gunfire; a drive by. 

This amplifies the politicos’ misapplication of the ways society’s problems can be solved and differences reconciled. They believe they are fighting back, that conflict is good and that a willingness to indulge in it is a sign of strength and courage and self-belief. 

They also believe arguments can be won. Think of the ubiquity of the phrase “Changing the world, one conversation at a time.” 

In fact, you can only converse or argue with those who agree to argue or converse with you, an example of mutualism in apparent conflict. Arguments involve the collaboration of two involved sides and the darkest most malign groups on the right rarely agree to engage. For someone who thinks of discussions as head-on collisions, competitions to be won by one combatant and lost by the other, you can only triumph if your opponent agrees to be vanquished, or with the consensus of onlookers, who are likely (in practice) to be supporters already: those who have already invested their reputations in your success. 

In other words, you can avoid “losing” simply by refusing to admit your opponent is right; you can only “win” with their agreement, in which case they are being more reasonable and rational than you are. 

Perhaps this is why Critical Race theorists have turned against their own allies. Allies can be prevailed upon to admit their errors because that reinforces their commitment to an even higher cause, Liberal Humanism, and demonstrates their underlying, fundamental virtue. The Theorists, in their turn, can finally register a satisfying win as their white friends hang their heads in shame. 

However, if you are too accusatory and condemnatory of your allies, as Critical Race theorists tend to be, you run the risk of driving them away, increasing division and polarisation. In which case, we must ask, “what is the purpose or advantage in arguing, rather than reaching out, for the arguer?”

Undoubtedly it is about preaching to the choir: winning the admiration of your own tribe, consolidation your position among them. Perhaps, for some activists, advocates and protestors, it’s not so much about changing your world for the better, which would mean changing your enemies’ minds. Perhaps, for some (not all; not most) opponents are shadowy and irrelevant figures and it’s about proving your righteousness to yourself and to your own people, about personal gratification and advancement. 

Conversations, discussions, arguments: these used to be part of spending time with other people, enjoying their company. Anyone who has lived completely alone – days and nights without any meaningful human interaction – can tell you how spiritually nourishing it is just to be in the physical presence of people who like and accept you, hearing their light-hearted talk and occasionally joining in, basking in their phatic utterances: the murmurs of agreement and appreciation that show they’re listening. It is so natural that you don’t notice the good it is doing you. Only afterwards, you find you are in an inexplicably good and contented mood. Something that had been missing, leaving an inflamed, poisonous cyst of absence, making everything fraught and distressing, has been restored to you. Effortlessly. 

None of these restorative qualities can be found in online interactions. There is no phatic talk, of course, no warm human presence, no breath except your own, only the bleak silence of being alone, as you compose your next message uninterrupted and unguided. 

A huge amount, perhaps the majority, of human talk is a celebration of togetherness but all social media really allows you to do is leave messages of content. It’s like having a conversation with a flat-mate by leaving post-its on the fridge. (“Please stop stealing my milk. By the way, how are you?”) There is no point in conversation for its own sake, under these circumstances, so you need to have something important to say, some urgent information to impart, otherwise your messages seem utterly inane and pointless. Online talk is stripped bare of all human warmth. It is no wonder that it turns so often to hate-filled abuse. 

Hegelian dialectics were never a natural way to debate. Language evolved for personal expression, signalling to your own kind, warning calls, thus expressing emotions. But rational debate was a good idea and worth striving for. 

However, what little progress we’d made, as a society, seems to have been lost. Discussion has degenerated into angry shouting, and it will come as no surprise to you to that I blame social-media.

In the past, people would sit around in pubs and cafes, in kitchens, in student flats, and discuss matters that were important to them. There would be as many opinions and perspectives as there were people physically present. Many would be only tangentially relevant to the topic others felt most passionate about. Some would be irrelevant observations. Some people would be bored and try to get the conversation onto other subjects. At least one person would have the wrong end of the stick, and would think you’re talking about something else entirely. 

This is good and healthy. It reinforces a sense of community and the plurality of community. It helps diffuse antagonism and conflict and therefore any rising exasperation and antipathy. It gives the angry a sense of perspective.

The internet cannot replicate this sense of plural community, despite its constant use of the word, and its chatrooms. Online “communities” are formed around having the same opinion, rather than the geographical misfortune of having to live among this bunch of idiots and the consequent necessity of learning to tolerate, even like, those you profoundly disagree with.

Online interactions are strictly and artificially turn taking. They are thus binary, opposed, mano-a-mano single combats. Even in Zoom meetings, only one person can take the mic at a time. 

It seems to be entirely natural and organic to integrate some ideas or methods from other thinkers into your own systems. As animals who hunt in packs, we are collaborative thinkers and do our best work in groups. (Think about the co-ordinated hunting practices of lionesses, wolves, and dolphins, even the complex hive-behaviours of bees or ants.) 

Adopting other people’s ideas is a necessary step in a healthy and benign evolution of mind – the creation of thoughtful, constructive, and community-minded citizens. You should hope, in the unending grail quest of your mental development, to encounter some brilliant ideas that trigger a fundamental change, a paradigm shift in the way you see the world.  

But this will only happen if you interrogate these ideas, identify their flaws and take the best bits for your own theories and methods. The student should outgrow the master.  

Some people, however, accept, wholesale, a complete prefabricated theory, believing that its originator is some sort of infallible genius, a messiah for a secular age. These people seem far less mentally healthy, their thinking far less hygienic. They are what Lenin is supposed to have called “useful idiots”, doggedly, slavishly loyal to their guru, no matter how far he falls. This has historically led to the embarrassing and unedifying phenomena of bewildered and well-meaning lefties trying to deny or justify Lenin and Stalin’s purges, massacres, murderous incompetence and Molotov-Ribbentrop treacheries. 

Unfortunately, such unedifying behaviour still seems to occur. I have just listened to an episode of File on 4 (on BBC Radio 4) called Ukraine: The Disinformation War. The producers of this programme have discovered British, left-wing academics, so intent on questioning Western, capitalist narratives that they have started parroting and promoting the Kremlin’s lies as a valid alternative reading of events. In other words, they have allowed themselves to become Putin’s propogandists rather than weighing up and cross-referencing different sources of information, for themselves to reach a plausible, mature conclusion on what actually happened. 

This is, of course, a classic conspiracy theorist’s argument and fallacy. We’re all familiar, nowadays, with that bloke who says, “Well, I’ve been doing some research…” and then delivers some insane paranoid fantasy, complete with add-on invented “facts”  all of which he gathered from one far right would be race terrorist somehere in his parents’ basement in the Mid-west. (“apparently, on that same day, 6 million dollars was transferred from the Soros Foundation, to CNN.”) 

This way of debating is fallacious because it misunderstands the process of Hegelian dialectic so beloved of Marx and Marxists. Conspiracy theorists think that “the official narrative” expounded by “The Mainstream Media” is the Thesis of Hegelian fame. All they need to do is posit an alternative more compatible with their world view, which they consider to be the Antithesis (“anti-thesis”), although they may not use these terms. (“I’m just putting that out there”, they say.)

Then, these free thinkers assume, we all just pick the one we prefer and battle it out, hopefully with a lot of shouting, vivid and inventive insults, and witty comebacks. The winners are the ones who make the cleverest comments and gather the most support and likes. Their argument wins completely without needing to be changed in any way. It has somehow, magically, been proved right by this process (often mis-named “democratic”) 

Of course, what is supposed to come next, in Hegelian dialectic, is a process of rational discussion, taking in all the available information and considering the merits of all analytical positions, leading to the formation of a Synthesis, which is neither the Thesis nor the Antithesis but an improvement on both. It is a constructive process, whereas an argument is just an alienating row and is highly destructive.

You are not supposed to confront the truth with your own social-media bubble’s invented hate-rant against people you fear and resent, and then discuss the issue by saying, “Well, screw you, I prefer my story and I’m not going to change my mind.” The dialectical idea is supposed to be that everybody changes their mind through negotiation and compromise. 

Of course, Hegelian Dialectic is already too simplistic because it suggests two opposing positions only, instead of many, or many contributing factors and circumstances. This fosters antagonism, as does the corrupting example of our democracy’s left-right, Labour-Conservative polarity. Parliamentary debates are sneering brawls, rather than constructive discussions of how to solve the country’s problems. Too often they are just a series of furious, petty and infantile rebuttals, but this unpleasant sight is labelled as a working democracy in action, which encourages us all to follow its unhelpful example. 

It is therefore extremely worrying to see academics from reputable British universities also making these basic errors in understanding. Universities are supposed to be bastions of rational debate and freedom of thought. Academics should be the very last people to be joining these destructive conversations. It’s their job to maintain the general health of the nation’s discourse, to supervise and correct our errors. 

Our political idols are probably mother or father-substitutes, a stepping stone in the process of breaking ties with our parents and becoming independent adults. 

Most of us grow out of the rebellious teenage and young adult phase, however. We become reconciled with our parents, and we come to recognise the flaws in our heroes’ thinking and characters, just as we did with our parents’ (although that original disillusionment felt like a betrayal.)

We can still venerate thinkers, however, because all humans are imperfect and limited but some also come up with good ideas. We can integrate some of their methods, and their insights, into our own way of thinking, and our perspectives on the world. 

I still feel respect and admiration, even gratitude, for Karl Marx, and Fredrich Engels. Their theories contained glaring, fatal flaws, and their predictions proved demonstrably wrong. Putative Marxists such as Lenin, Stalin and Mao perpetrated the greatest evils on millions of people, with immensely damaging world-wide consequences that continue to this day. However, Marx and Engels gave me thinking tools, that changed how I was able to understand the world and thus immeasurably enhanced my experience of life. That’s quite a gift to give! I feel the same way about Antonio Gramsci on hegemony, Max Weber on Disenchantment (entzauberung), and Emile Durkheim on anomie. 

Another recap: 

Many politically active, vocal people, especially the young, are attracted to more extreme revolutionary theories that promise to do violence on the polity. These theories make sense of the world, articulate and focus the general sense of grievance felt by the dominated, and, at the same time, upset their elders very much. What’s not to like?

The more outraged your parents’ generation are, the more independent-minded you feel.  To hold such views is declamatory, emphatic. It causes a stir. You appear admirably defiant, passionate; it establishes your identity in an uncompromising, and thus secure, way. Fixing your identity is an urgent need for the post-familial young adult. 

Marxism remains a good source of such dogma, especially Marxism-Leninism. Like all socio-political philosophies, it simplifies and regularises the complexity and plurality of human experience to the point of falsity. However, these simplicities make gratifying sense and seem to provide genuine and illuminating insights into some aspects of how society functions. Personally, I love later Marxist ideas on hegemony and false-consciousness and how culture is both founded in, and reinforces, prevailing social prejudices and assumptions. Applying these ideas to art and literature is loads of fun. 

Marxism-Leninism also has the advantage of absolutely infuriating young people’s parents and grandparents. They abhor its careless cruelty and acceptance of wholesale violence and destruction as useful instruments of change. They were brought up, during the latter days of the cold war, on tales of monstruous, genocidal tyranny perpetrated in this philosophy’s name, by The USSR and Maoist China. They lived in mortal terror of world-ending nuclear holocaust, and were taught to blame this wholly on the USSR’s baselessly evil intentions. 

So claiming to be a Marxist is sure to be rewarded with some pleasing histrionics!

This next part of my blog will be entirely speculative. I’m sorry about that. I offer it only as a possible analysis: “Blue Sky Thinking” (?!)

So.

Many prominent radicals seem to come from happier homes. I suspect their early experiences of a warm and nurturing environment foster their self-esteem and give them the impression that the world is essentially benign in some quasi-religious numinous way. Misfortunes, they believe, are not the inevitable consequences of humanity’s limitations, but unnatural abuses: traps constructed and sprung by evil and abnormal people. In other words, someone must be blamed. And no matter what institutions they destroy in pursuit of these wrong-doers, activists assume the underlying society will remain well-meaning and nourishing.

In contrast, children from highly threatened households seem more likely to absorb the pervasive sense of anxiety and threat. Parents with serious money worries, insecure employment, substance-dependency, mental health issues, or who are abusive or neglectful or acrimoniously divorcing seem more likely to bring up sons and daughters who are too cautious and under-confident to be pioneering disruptors. They seem more likely to favour specific reforms and corrections of individual injustices than outright revolution. They are complainers. Their rebellions (those that have them) seem to be impulsive acts of destruction, driven more by despair than the campaigning spirit (and often committed from the collective safety of mobs.) 

In Britain, long-term social and political stability may also contribute to this feeling of confidence, The welfare state, critically underfunded and threatening to fall apart, still reassures us that it is natural to have automatic access to education, health care and financial support. No matter how much of the state apparatus we dismantle (defunding the police, for example) there will still be a safety net, a matrix of support services to fall back on. Your bins will still be collected on a Wednesday morning; supermarket shelves will still be well stocked. 

This makes modern activists very different from 19^th century grassroots socialists, who often seemed driven by desperation and poverty to seek reform, but not necessarily revolution. It is also the position that their own parents may have abandoned as they grew older and took on the fearful responsibility of parenthood.