We’re all going on a witch hunt

Why woke politics is so vicious

​Welcome, please sign up as a free subscriber to receive more Writing from London posts. Or you can help me carry on working by becoming a paying subscriber. Along with a warm glow of satisfaction, you will then receive access to all posts, archives and podcasts for £1.15 a week, and there is a free trial on offer too!

---

Novelists and psychiatrists make better political commentators than supposedly worldly journalists. Like a school teacher watching children turn vicious in a playground, they understand that sadism has an appeal of its own. If given sanction by authority figures, many people who consider themselves good and responsible will welcome the chance to bully and ritually humiliate scapegoats in the name of a righteous cause.

My atheism stops me admiring the Christian apologist CS Lewis. But perhaps because Lewis had to come to terms with Christianity’s history of pious persecution, he had a better understanding of cancel culture than contemporary commentators. Writing in God in the Dock a collection of essays published in 1948, Lewis observed,

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

Woke politics, or if you don’t like the term, identitarian politics, allows adherents to torment others “with the approval of their own conscience.” It gives licence to the modern equivalents of the righteous persecutors who threw stones at criminals in the stocks or made women wear the scarlet letter in New England.  It thrives in frightened environments where rights to free speech and dissent are suppressed and people go along with authoritarianism for fear of being punished themselves.

To understand how deeply the fear extends, take a case from the end of August. In a healthier culture it would still be haunting liberal-minded people. The Irish singer Róisín Murphy, who is hardly an alt-right fascist, criticised the use of puberty blockers on “little mixed-up kids” The policy was “fucked, absolutely desolate,”  she said, and led to “big pharma laughing all the way to the bank”.

However crudely expressed, Murphy was reflecting a medical consensus. The NHS has restricted the use of puberty blockers on children with suspected gender dysphoria because of “gaps in evidence” about their effects. The Swedish, Finnish and French health regulators have done the same.

The science did not matter.  In Murphy’s world of the arts, any criticism of the trans ideological package is a modern heresy.  Her record label duly dropped a promotional campaign for her new album The BBC appeared to blacklist her work. The Guardian denounced her for leaving an “ugly stain”. The only way Murphy could stop the savaging was by issuing a humiliating apology. None of her contemporaries dared speak in her favour for fear of receiving the same treatment.

So far, so commonplace. But to my mind what made Róisín Murphy’s case so symptomatic of righteous sadism was that her remarks about puberty blockers were made on a private Facebook group for her friends.

The "friend” who exposed her to so much hatred had other options. He or she might have just had a quiet word instead. He or she might have sent her a private message saying why they thought Murphy’s views on the dangers of puberty blockers were wrong or prejudiced, and tried to convince her to change her mind. Instead, they found a sadistic pleasure in leaking Murphy comments and seeking the destruction of her career.

No journalist writing on the “scandal” mentioned the role of the informer and how he or she had made a conscious decision to inflict the maximum amount of pain. The media took it as a given that people will inform on their “friends,” colleagues and acquaintances. Squealing is now apprently an entirely normal way to behave on the political left as it was in the Soviet Union or the Europe of the inquisition.

There are interesting historical questions on how social media allowed the growth of cancel culture and unnerved liberal institutions. But the basis for understanding it must surely lie in grasping the perennial human urge to seek approval by denouncing the outsider and the non-conformist.

Policy intellectuals tend to dislike explanations that refer to timeless failings. They minimise threats to freedom by ignoring them.  Yascha Mounk’s otherwise excellent Identity Trap, which I reviewed last week, suffers from his political scientist’s inability to understand the driving power of malice and envy (surely a motive behind many of the attacks on JK Rowling and Róisín Murphy), the urge to pick on a licenced scapegoat whether from a political, religious or racial minority, the careerist desire to remove rivals, and the simple joy that comes to sadistic minds from inflicting punishment.

Mounk follows many in blaming Donald Trump for the chaos the woke revolution brought to progressive America.  And although I have no trouble in dumping any amount of blame on America’s proto-dictator, it does seem a bit rich to blame the far right for the internecine wars of the left. It turns progressives into children without independent agency.

But as serious people appear to want to treat them like toddlers, I will lay out their argument before dissecting it.