The most disturbing thing about the attempted destruction of Toby Young by time-rich offence-takers is that not one of them has taken a step back and said: “Whoa. What are we doing here, guys?” Not one of them, so far as I know, has had a stab of conscience, a moment of reflection, or any kind of serious word with themselves about their behaviour. Not one has stopped to reflect on their seven days of fury over what Young said eight years ago and wondered if perhaps it is a little excessive; if perhaps there’s a whiff of the Stasi to this relentless poring over every tweet and article Young ever wrote so that some rude or crude line might be presented as evidence for why he is “unfit for public life”. “Unfit for public life” – such an ugly phrase, such a telling brand, words only the most self-righteous, censorious and entitled of people could ever utter.
This lack of dissent, this failure of a single member of the excitable anti-Young Twittermob to regret or rethink their censuring behaviour, feels alarming. It suggests a complete absence of the mediating influence of individual conscience. It possibly suggests the erasure of individual thought itself, so that these people – these largely middle-class, influential people – come to be fully collapsed, mind and energy, into a feeling, a sensation, a moment. A moment in which the critical faculties of independent thought and self-analysis have no role whatsoever, and might in fact prove an impediment to the task, if one can call it that, at hand: to derive fleeting, collective pleasure from the destruction of a demon. And so these faculties must be discarded, the workings of the mind traded in for the visceral thrill of being part of a powerful rush of emotion against a wicked entity.
There are many good reasons why individual conscience might have, and should have, kicked in over the past week of splenetic virtual hate for Toby Young. First, there is surely the possibility of sympathy with the target, with Young, where one might reasonably deduce that the hardship caused to him by the Twittermob’s behaviour – his educational achievements trashed, his reputation sullied, his future career possibly jeopardised – is utterly out of proportion to his misdemeanours, which largely amount to making jokey, crude comments on Twitter. There’s the matter of consequence, of engaging one’s memory of similar past incidents of collective hate, to recognise that creating a situation in which informal groups of the self-certain and the self-righteous become judges of an individual’s fitness for public office will damage public life more than Toby Young ever could. There is also narrow self-interest, the rational assessment that if people on the right can be destroyed over things they said, then the same might be done at some future point to people on the left, too. And there’s the narrow matter of making good use of one’s moral energy, of asking oneself: is it a good use of my time, of my emotional resources, to scour a man’s social-media history to the end of making a spectacle of his past misspeaking in order to hound him from an institution?
Yet none of these workings of conscience – not empathy, not moral analysis, not self-reflection, not even self-preservation – has been apparent in the collective attempted destruction of Young. No individual in this heated fury has pulled out and rethought. This speaks not only to an alarming level of supposedly left-ish intolerance today – where it is assumed that anyone who isn’t a Guardianista is unfit for public life – but also to the formation of a permanent mob, of a means of politics ungoverned by thought, reason and conscience. For this is the very definition of a mob: a process whereby a group of individuals shear themselves of the skills of moral and intellectual self-reflection for the purposes of making a large, collective howl against some person or thing that has offended their sensibilities or their dogma. The mob – today this means the middle-class Twittermob – is no longer an occasional violent outburst, as it was throughout history; rather, it is a permanent feature and function of public life in Britain, to the devastating detriment of public reason, political rationalism, individual sense and free thought.
What is striking about the anti-Young Twittermob – as with the rage against Lewis Hamilton over Christmas after he said boys shouldn’t wear dresses or against any number of politicians, cultural figures or celebrities who in recent years have said something the self-certain policers of public fitness find objectionable – is that its leaders and participants tend to come from the same section of society that rages against the crowd, especially the crowd that voted for Brexit. These abdicators of reason, these rash, unforgiving, conscience-free punishers of unacceptable thought, are the same people who have spent 18 months fuming against “the people” (they always put it in scare quotes) and against doing politics by “crowd acclamation”. The “low-information” nature of the average person means such crowd decisions on major matters like the EU will always be wrong and bad, they say. “It’s time for the elites to rise up against the ignorant masses”, as one headline put it.
What they’re saying, in essence, is that the mob, their mob, is good, and the crowd – those people, that electorate – is bad. Their mob cleans politics up, expels undesirables, keeps public life pure; the crowd damages politics, injects prejudice into it, hurts reason and reflection. In truth, the precise opposite is the case. Firstly, it is patently ridiculous to suggest we should entrust big political decisions to these elites, to these influential groups who lack all sense of moral seriousness, instead flitting between being highly managerial and furiously censorious, both of which represent an abdication of moral depth and political thought. The more they behave like this, the more attractive democracy appears; the more we, the public, recognise the immeasurable value of a democratic system that allows us to wrest big decision-making from these jaundiced, closed-off elites.
And secondly, the difference between the crowd – us – and the mob – them – is that the crowd is thoughtful, reasoned and wise. It is a collective of individuals, unlike the mob, which is a collective in which the individual has no meaningful presence and in fact must agree to submerge himself fully into the pleasures of the howl. The crowd is individuals thinking and then engaging and debating with others; their conscience is always on, always primed; it must be, for everyday debate requires it and big, nation-shaping decisions demand it. The crowd thinks, reflects, moves, changes; it is the individual with other individuals. The mob, in contrast, is the end of individualism. There is no room for empathy or moral restraint or political depth or dissent – as we have seen with the week-long Twittermob against Young, which has been an alarmingly conformist affair, with not one of its thousands of tweeters or facilitators using their conscience to change their mind or change their behaviour. Sadly, this mob, this well-educated mob, wields great influence over political life today. That is bad for all of us. We need less of this mob and more of the crowd; less rash elitism and more measured public deliberation; less of the jealous, censorious hate of a wounded elite, and more input from the serious and thoughtful masses.
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