the madness of crowds

Ancient Forms of Party Strife

By in books, the madness of crowds, the statusphere No Comments

Consider, for example, the enormous social difference between an American who embraces Communism and one who embraces Nazism. One of these is a tolerated eccentricity, and one of them is the lowest thing you can be…The real difference between an American Communist and an American Nazi is that American Communists historically have been intellectuals and American Nazis have been rednecks.

— Kevin D. Williamson, The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics

It’s one of those things that I already knew, but I hadn’t thought of in precisely that way, so the succinctness made me laugh. Mark Forsyth, in his book The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language, makes a similar claim about the original Nazis:

It’s a funny thing, but Hitler wouldn’t have called himself a Nazi. Indeed, he became quite offended when anyone did suggest he was a Nazi. He would have considered himself a National Socialist. Nazi is, and always has been, an insult.

Hitler was head of the catchily named Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers’ Party). But, like the Cambridge University Netball Team, he hadn’t thought through the name properly. You see, his opponents realised that you could shorten Nationalsozialistische to Nazi. Why would they do this? Because Nazi was already an (utterly unrelated) term of abuse. It had been for years.

Every culture has a butt for its jokes. Americans have the Polacks, the English have the Irish, and the Irish have people from Cork. The standard butt of German jokes at the beginning of the twentieth century were stupid Bavarian peasants. And just as Irish jokes always involve a man called Paddy, so Bavarian jokes always involved a peasant called Nazi. That’s because Nazi was a shortening of the very common Bavarian name Ignatius.

This meant that Hitler’s opponents had an open goal. He had a party filled with Bavarian hicks and the name of that party could be shortened to the standard joke name for hicks. (Incidentally, hick was formed in exactly the same way as Nazi. Hick was a rural shortening of Richard and became a byword for uneducated farmers.)

Imagine if a right-winger from Alabama started a campaign called Red States for the Next America. That’s essentially what Hitler did.

That sounds almost too good to be true, especially as I’ve never heard this claim anywhere else. But either way, it speaks to the obvious truth of the omnipresent divide between urban and rural, sophisticated and rustic, educated and common-sense. We’re used to thinking this way in terms of consumption patterns — early-adopted gadgets and trends become uncool as soon as they become too popular, and the avant-garde head off in the opposite direction to spite the herd. Backyard breeders and puppy mills are concerned with papers and lineage; the conspicuously-compassionate start adopting rescuing mutts from shelters. Trailer parks are the ultimate low-status household; affluent anti-consumers rebrand them as “tiny house communities.” Now that any troglodyte can afford a smartphone, the upper-class are all about screen-free living. It’s easy to get the impression that social life is one endless game of musical chairs, in which the joy is to laugh at the yokels and bumpkins who are too slow to grab a seat in time. I just find it darkly amusing to see the same frivolous dynamic at work in the realm of “serious” matters like politics. “Oh, yeah, I was really into one-party rule, contempt for liberal democracy, and mass murder of political opponents and other undesirables. Those early releases, from around 1917-1924, were so good. But then around 1933, they, like, sold out and went mainstream, and all these beer-swilling Ignatius-bros started coming to the shows…”

He Fought the Mob and the Mob Lost

By in the madness of crowds, tribalism No Comments

It’s heartening to see that Roger Scruton has been reinstated to his architectural advisory position after Douglas Murray, among others, made such a tireless effort to expose the dishonesty of the “journalist” and the newspaper that got him fired last year. For an amusing cherry on top, the cowardly conservative MP who fired Scruton without even pausing to consider whether the outrage mob was justified or not has lost his own position in the recent cabinet shake-ups. Sometimes, in a world of idiotic mob rule, good people achieve tiny victories. Not all is lost.

In celebration, let’s revisit some of Sir Roger’s most artful and delightful prose aimed at leftist scoundrels and frauds. Savor the metaphors, relish the similes, luxuriate in the bubbly rhetoric. I can only hope to one day be able to turn a similar phrase with my own limited abilities.

Some Useless Information Supposed to Fire My Imagination

By in foolosophy, the madness of crowds No Comments

This state of moral and spiritual provisionality can be fairly unnerving, since it becomes clear how utterly temporary and groping all our most important judgements must be. Perhaps it is fear of this that leads so many people to think that the sign of a thoughtful mind is that it is well stocked with clear opinions on everything important: a view that I cannot but think of as a fiction and an expression of anxiety about how things really are.

— Christopher Hamilton, Middle Age

Several years ago, in the spirit of Montaigne’s skepticism, I rededicated myself to contemplating the basic question, “What do I know, really?” Like Socrates, but without the irony, I had to conclude, “Not much.” Long before Marie Kondo became trendy, I rummaged through the contents of my skull and decided that none of the sociopolitical clutter in there sparked joy. I grew disgusted with my own ability to maintain an appearance of being reasonably well-informed and threw all those flimsy garments in the trash, vowing to go around silently in a monk’s habit of honest ignorance. I’m interested in many things — many more than I’ll ever have time to fully explore, in fact. But that interest rarely leads to certainty. Quite the opposite.

The same people who sneer at consumerism and escapist entertainment and criticize the masses for foolishly pursuing happiness by way of material possessions think that having a mind well-stocked with clear opinions on current events is a sign of sophistication. Some people collect Franklin Mint tchotchkes, others stockpile convictions about public figures and events which they can never hope to influence. Some people line up outside Walmart the night before Black Friday to jockey and jostle over toys and flat-screen TVs, others flock to breaking news hashtags to line up and verbally assault strangers. One group takes itself far more seriously than the other.

I’m proud to say that I have never read a single article about the Trump/Russia brouhaha. I’d been aware of it, of course, in the same way that living in a college town means you can’t help but be aware of a football game going on, what with all the increased traffic, team pennants flapping from car windows, and the dull roar issuing from downtown where the stadium sits. When the Mueller investigation news broke last Friday, I was surprised. Again, not because I was interested or invested in it one way or the other, but because even I had vaguely assumed that with all the dense clouds of smoke wafting over the web these last couple years, there would probably be some sort of collusion fire discovered eventually. Understand, I go out of my way to avoid coming into contact with anyone online who gives off the slightest hint of #resistance! mania, and still I took it for granted that the popular narrative couldn’t be entirely a delusive product of wishful thinking. The progressive media bubble apparently extends much further than I’d suspected.

At any rate, I spent a little while clicking through various Twitter accounts of those to whom this news was a very big deal. It was like being in a foreign country. Not just because of the asinine, self-referential Twitter slang (which was bad enough, making even serious issues sound adolescent), but because of all the names and events being referenced that had no meaning to me whatsoever. For a moment, I considered how many hours, or days, of my life it would have required to be conversant in all of this, and for what? What possible difference would it have made, other than keeping me in a constant simmer of anxiety and anger? Would I have been called upon to make an epoch-defining speech, or cast a decisive vote? It’s such a strange conceit, this belief that our civic duty requires us to pay close attention to events far beyond our personal control, as if the arc of the moral universe is a spoon we can bend toward justice with the concentrated power of our enlightened minds. Most of us have more than enough work to do in our immediate vicinity, in being better spouses, parents, and friends, but as usual, we’d rather choose abstractions and distractions.

Out, Damn’d Spot!

By in antisocial networking, revillaging, technology, the geist of the zeit, the great awokening, the madness of crowds No Comments

Brendan O’Neill:

That Neeson’s expression of regret for his past thoughts counts for nothing in the eyes of the new morality police is striking, and worrying. It points to a streak of very anti-human fatalism in the Twittermobbing phenomenon. The new witch-hunters are not in the business of forgiving people — even people who confess to their one-time horribleness — because they fundamentally believe that people cannot change. That if you once had a racist thought you will always be racist. That if you made a homophobic joke ten years ago, you will be a homophobe forever. This is why they engage in the low pursuit of ‘offense archaeology’, as the journalist Freddie de Boer described the trend for poring over public figures’ every past statement and deed in search of something nasty or embarrassing that might be used against said public figure today — because they think people do not change, that their wickedness is ingrained, that they suffer from original sin and it cannot be washed away.

Intellectuals will always, always overvalue the need for theory, but again, there’s no need to ferret out philosophical convictions which likely don’t even exist. The “new witch-hunters” don’t have a robust theory of human nature underlying their actions; they’re motivated by the same base incentives and cynical calculations as ever. Liam Neeson is more valuable to them as a target of their insatiable spite than he is as a political ally. Or, to put it another way, all he is to the Twittermob is an entertainer. The entertainment might entail watching him star in a movie, or it might entail trying to destroy his reputation and career just because they can. Social media is the insane, decadent emperor, and we’re all gladiators competing for its amusement. Apparently Neeson’s latest performance has gotten the thumbs-down. So it goes.

We’re living in an age of social norms being in flux. Many would say t’was ever thus, but I’m specifically talking about the sort of flux facilitated by the rapid expansion of personal technology. Let’s recall that smartphones and social media have only been ubiquitous for ten years, if even that long. The effects, however, have clearly been profound and widespread. For our narrow focus here — namely, the birth of a vanguard of Javerts who specialize in public shaming and mob behavior — it’s enough to note the leveling effect whereby a resentful nobody with too much spare time can now easily attack and humiliate a celebrity. Imagine what a rush it must be to see someone famous or powerful having to grovel and apologize because of something you found and publicized from their social media history. Imagine what a heady feeling it would be to be part of a news story, mentioned in the same sentence with your formerly-exalted victim. If Nietzsche were here, he would instantly recognize it for what it is — a flexing of muscles, a testing of strength, an indulgence of all sorts of normally-forbidden urges as people, free from the old norms and hierarchies, recognize a newly-opened path to status and influence and set about exploring the boundaries. New norms are still evolving, but it will be a while before there are any widely-accepted rules about how to behave on this electronic frontier. It’s a tale of two Williams — Golding was much more percipient than Godwin about what is likely to happen in the anarchic interlude between the decay of old mores and the birth of new ones.

Still, not all of the mob behavior is attributable to a new breed of resentful revolutionaries practicing the same old cutthroat political maneuvering. There’s also a different primal reaction that plays a significant role. Some of the critiques of social-justice fanaticism talk about the concept of moral pollution. The reaction to Neeson’s story of attempted vigilante vengeance was visceral, not philosophical. The absolute refusal to countenance any ambiguity resembles a moral germophobia, a reflexive desire to avoid contamination. The easiest way to stay safe is to culturally quarantine all the bad people with their bad thoughts so they can’t infect the rest of us. It would be useless to explain that you can’t catch racism by sympathizing with a man telling a story of being enraged beyond reason by the rape of his friend. They’re too busy frantically washing their hands for the hundredth time today to entertain any nuance.

Perhaps next time in amateur sociology hour, we’ll consider whether the dramatic increase in diagnoses of Asperger’s and autism has any correlation with this widespread social maladaptation and inability to process ambiguity. Also, Marie Kondo: symbol of the zeitgeist? Maybe the trend of denouncing and renouncing the Four Olds (or the Four Unwokes?) is just a political form of decluttering.

What Is Made By Humans Now Must Be Undone

By in environment, moralizing, the geist of the zeit, the madness of crowds No Comments

Jonah Goldberg:

There are a lot of different views on climate change on the right. (I myself am mostly in the Matt Ridley “lukewarmer” camp.) But he ignores all of the competing views in favor of an argument that amounts to little more than fan service for liberal readers. One can believe that climate change is a real concern, with some legitimate science on its side, while also believing there is a range of available policy options that do not conform to the liberal party line and declining to act in a spirit of righteous panic. (Noah Rothman notes how the enlightened position on climate change must always be even more “hysteria.”)

I have dogmatic family members who typically take the talk-radio party line on the political issue du jour. You know the type — they greet every snow flurry with triumphant cackling and a hearty chorus of SCREW YOU AL GORE. It’s probably fair to call them “deniers,” since their positions are usually reflexively determined by whatever they perceive to be the official stance of liberal elites. But the Lady of the House has a cousin, a geologist, who visited us at the beginning of the month. While we were hiking, she succinctly summarized her view on climate change: “Is it happening? Yes. Is human activity contributing to it? Most likely. Is there anything we can realistically do about it? Probably not.” She’s not actually a conservative, but among the conservatives I read and talk to, I find that to be a fairly typical view. One of them had a useful rule of thumb for weeding out the cranks — if they’re opposed to fossil fuels but refuse to even countenance the idea of nuclear power, they’re not serious enough to bother with. It may well be that I’m just inclined to hear what I want to hear, but I find the stoic pragmatism and lack of hysteria refreshing. As Auden said, we are changed by what we change. We’ll adapt, or we won’t, but when has that ever not been the case?

The received left-wing wisdom, by contrast — well, it’s usually facile to compare various beliefs and behaviors to religion, but in the case of climate change, I’m not sure what else to call it. As I mentioned before, I check in with The Week as part of my daily bookmark routine, to keep tabs on what the somewhat-sane left is talking about, and I’ve been amused to see the resident fire-and-brimstone fundamentalist Ryan Cooper pounding the pulpit recently. “Climate change is going to fry your state,” he thundered toward a heretical Utah senator. “Wealth cannot save you from climate change,” he warned us in the prior week’s sermon. Sinners in the hands of an angry Gaia, indeed. But for the clearest, most painstaking demonstration of how so much green activism is nothing but a surrogate outlet for moral evangelism, you can’t do better than read Peter Dorman’s steamrolling of Naomi Klein’s recent spasm of righteousness posing as a book, This Changes Everything. If this were a boxing match, it would have been stopped after the first few paragraphs.

I don’t have any strong views on climate change, but what I find most interesting and amusing is the idea that I should, like it’s a dereliction of my duty as a citizen to avoid pronouncing on events that I can’t influence. I couldn’t be more ordinary and anonymous. What practical use could I possibly make of a doctrinaire opinion? Too many people seem convinced that a diploma and an advantageous upbringing qualify them to serve as volunteer policymakers and amateur heads of state. I think I’d like it better if they devoted that time and energy to church activities.

Fooled By the Seductions of Violence

By in ohferfucksake, the geist of the zeit, the madness of crowds No Comments

I wouldn’t have thought anything would be more pathetic than seeing balaclava-wearing middle-class anarchists doing their best to embody the mocking image Mike Doughty painted of them almost two decades ago in his song about the 1999 Seattle WTO riots, “Busting Up a Starbucks.” It’s hard to outdo a bunch of imbeciles fighting “fascism” by, uh, disrupting peaceful assemblies, smashing store windows and beating people in the streets with metal poles. But legacy media desperately attempting to stay relevant by cheering them on is even worse. Yes, Milo sure did get “schooled” by having his book rocket straight to the number one spot on Amazon’s besteller list and getting even more invites to appear on TV programs. Honestly, if this weren’t just part of a long, long tradition of the utterly useless, self-defeating stupidity of left-wingers, I’d suspect Milo organized the whole thing as a brilliant marketing strategy. As it is, they were like this long before he was even born, and will continue like this into the foreseeable future, never learning a thing.

I’ve Done No Harm, I Keep to Myself

By in antisocial networking, conspicuous crusading, moralizing, ohferfucksake, revillaging, the madness of crowds No Comments

You’ve heard me say it before, and no doubt I will have to say it many more times: there’s no neutral ground in a holy war.

Lord knows that humans need no special incentive to indulge in tribalism. Protecting the in-group and attacking the out-group is one of the most deeply-engrained instincts in the species of chimpanzee that made good. As numerous experiments have shown, even the most trivial and nonsensical distinctions can turn formerly peaceable people into bloodthirsty enemies.

It’s easy enough to shrug off these latest exercises in public shaming and forced political awareness on the assumption that of course pop music superstars and Fortune 500 companies will attract this kind of unhinged, obsessive attention. But rest assured that the only thing preventing these righteous crusaders from reintroducing a modern version of impressment for the culture wars is the problem of logistics, not the lack of desire. They would gladly conscript nobodies like you or I as well if they could.

Again, it’s incredibly easy for any human to reduce a complex issue to a Manichean battle between the saved and the damned. But this particular type of totalitarian impulse, to completely obliterate the idea that anything could be allowed to escape the gravitational pull of partisan politics, is especially appealing to left-wingers. It is axiomatic for conservative philosophy that there will always be a certain amount of imperfection and injustice in the world, and a sane response to this fact entails that people have to allow some sort of cultural or personal space to forget about crusading. At five o’clock, the whistle blows, and we set the bare-knuckle political brawling aside until the next day, like Sam and Ralph. There are more important things to concern ourselves with, better sources of solace like family and art to occupy ourselves with, and the fight will never be conclusively won anyway.

But to the progressive equivalent of theocracy, the idea of a “secular” space, free from political considerations, is heretical. Unsupervised free spaces like that are a breeding ground for subversive, reactionary ideas. For a political philosophy that accepts no inherent limits on mankind’s ability to perfect itself, the very existence of imperfection and injustice is an affront to its deepest identity. The grinding years of imperfect life cannot be forgiven. If something inherent in the world makes it incapable of being custom-fit to the Procrustean beds of reformers and revolutionaries, and provides no satisfying outlet for their utopian energies, they will eventually tire of vainly flinging themselves against the bars of their cage and start releasing their frustration on others unfortunate enough to be within reach. This is what we see here — in a world which, to them, seems to have gone completely insane, in opposition to all their wishes, they are reduced to lashing out against people guilty of standing by too innocently. In their desire to perfect the world through politics, they would destroy the oases of individual privacy and freedom that make this imperfect world bearable at all.

Fists, Fools, and Dollars

By in conspicuous crusading, getting and spending, moralizing, revillaging, the madness of crowds No Comments


BuzzFeed decides to publish a casual smear of some celebrity couple, no doubt in hopes of costing them their TV show, or perhaps simply because it was more entertaining than churning out yet another listicle. Not to be outdone in the stupidity competition, Breitbart demands a boycott of Kellogg’s in response to the politically-motivated withdrawal of advertising. I have been hoping for years to see these culture-war border skirmishes and vindictive economic embargoes explode into all-out Götterdämmerung. I’m fairly sure it meets the standard of “just war” when both sides richly deserve as much suffering and destruction as they can possibly inflict on each other. By all means, keep up the relentless politicization of absolutely everything. Keep trying to create economic circles of moral purity, micro forms of crony capitalism, in which your money never passes into the hands of anyone who hasn’t passed a stringent ideological background check. When you’ve finally taken your petty point-scoring and scalp-taking to its logical conclusion, and you realize that you don’t like the sort of society you’ve created, perhaps then you might finally think about growing up.

Do You Really Think You Could Stand Upright in the Winds That Would Blow Then?

By in moralizing, the cult of multi, the madness of crowds, unintended consequences No Comments

Alice More: Arrest him!
Sir Thomas More: Why, what has he done?
Margaret More: He’s bad!
More: There is no law against that.
Will Roper: There is! God’s law!
More: Then God can arrest him.
Alice: While you talk, he’s gone!
More: And go he should, if he was the Devil himself, until he broke the law!
Roper: So now you’d give the Devil benefit of law!
More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
Roper: I’d cut down every law in England to do that!
More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast– man’s laws, not God’s– and if you cut them down—and you’re just the man to do it—do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law for my own safety’s sake.

Avi Woolf:

But the horrible irony is that PC is actually a horribly ineffective weapon against the devil of intolerance. Real bigots, like real rapists who we are told should be taught “not to rape,” care nothing whatsoever for shaming or moral chastising. To the contrary, they take pride in being monsters. To call them bigots or racists or what-have-you is for them a badge of honor.

No, as Professor Tom Nichols pointed out in his excellent article on PC and Donald Trump, what PC did was something else: utterly destroy the political center. Once upon a time, you could hold a middle ground, nuanced position on any given issue in public discourse. Now? You’re either all the way one way or all the way another way.

In going after the devil, PC has slain the good men, the knights who could fight the danger, or at least check or weaken it. It searched for enemies where none existed only to release the ones that did. It reminds me, sadly, of Europe of the 1930s, when democracy and any hint of moderation was so thoroughly discredited and weakened in the name of instant solutions and hatred of “the system” that everyone ultimately had no choice but to pick which side was less awful: Stalin or Hitler.

Radical Islamist terrorists certainly exist. We all know that. But fifteen or so years ago, to many of us on the political left, center, or even moderate right, it seemed at times that the threat of Islamic terrorism was a rhetorical trope more than a geopolitical reality. The Bush administration used the shock of 9/11 in service to an incredibly radical agenda, cynically conflating honest critics of particular policies with reflexive anti-American radicals, smearing the patriotism of people who had supported them in Afghanistan, but balked at invading Iraq. You’re either with us, or you hate America and you want the terrorists to win. We all know this by now as well.

Likewise, racists, sexists and rapists certainly exist. However, this generation of freshly-hatched university students, their heads filled with academic grievance-mongering and their hearts yearning for a grand, significant civil rights battle of their very own, started training analytical floodlights on language, video games and other harmless phenomena in order to make shadows appear larger and more threatening. The undeniable progress that society has made over recent decades regarding race and gender issues wasn’t good enough; in fact, it only added to the crusaders’ frustration. If devils couldn’t be easily found, they’d have to be invented. As should have been expected, the people who bore the brunt of their fanatical fury weren’t the proudly racist or the crudely sexist, but the mostly-liberal people who, up to the point of their own show trials, had thought themselves part of the fight against those reactionary ills. You’re either with us, or you’re with the misogynists. And the line defining who was a misogynist kept creeping closer. If you protested, you became a rape apologist.

The moderate Democrats circa 2003 thought that by giving the administration the benefit of the doubt, and by rhetorically distancing themselves from anyone to their left, they might be respected as loyal opposition. Likewise, many progressives made excuses for the social justice warriors, rationalizing that “at least they’re not Republicans”. They urged critics to soften their oppositional stance and inevitably smeared the character of anyone who refused. Honestly, though, I expect nothing less than fanaticism from those who would hunt devils, which is why I reserve the bulk of my contempt for the foolish cowards who make excuses for them in hopes of saving their own skins.

Capitalism Has Made It This Way! Old-Fashioned Fascism Will Take It Away!

By in political philosophy, the madness of crowds, waiting for the barbarians No Comments

Jonathan Chait:

The answer to this superficially appealing logic: Yes, electing Trump would amount to a dire peril for American democracy. But not only is violence unlikely to prevent his election as a practical matter (it makes Trump a figure of sympathy, and at any rate, his supporters are far more heavily armed). It would also be a disaster as a moral matter. Suppose that Trump’s election could be prevented by breaking up his speeches and intimidating his supporters. Such a “victory” would actually constitute the blow to democracy it purports to stop, eroding the long-standing norm that elections should be settled at the ballot box rather than through street fighting.

To be sure, the advocates of violence against Trump would disagree with this conclusion. And that disagreement lies at the heart of a deeper ideological fissure that has opened up on the left over the last couple of years. Liberalism sees political rights as a positive good — rights for one are rights for all. “Democracy” means political rights for every citizen. The far left defines democracy as the triumph of the subordinate class over the privileged class. Political rights only matter insofar as they are exercised by the oppressed. The oppressor has no rights.

Related: Everyone Wants to Kill Baby Hitler. I particularly enjoy the irony that the left has now found its own version of the “ticking time bomb” scenario to justify counterproductive tactics.

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