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.

Suggested reading

Simplicity is at the root of policy failures

By Polly Mackenzie

This is why morality is such a surprisingly tricky business. Because, among many other things, morality is a way of speaking about who deserves punishment. Which is why, at its most dangerous, morality can be a kind of exoneration of collective bullying. Cummings is guilty, he broke the rules, he lied, he deserves it. Morality often gives the bully their justification.

Let me be clear. I have no love in my heart for Dominic Cummings. I have never met him. And while his politics do align with mine in some respects, I don’t expect we would get on. Moreover, I don’t buy all of his story.

Nonetheless, I can perfectly understand why a desperate parent would drive to the other end of the country to make provision for the care of his child. And the anger now directed towards him is out of all proportion to the severity of his offence. Those who shout at him outside his home, hound him in the streets with glee; the collective pile-on; the viciousness of the public hatred directed towards him — here lies the far deeper moral failing. And a society that is content to see this happen even to its pantomime villains is weakening its resistance against public hatred being directed against the innocent.

Suggested reading

Why are publishers pandering to the mob?

By Sam Leith

It is precisely because of this that the guardians of public morality — the bishops — have to be especially careful in their public pronouncements. Yet, in recent days, and under the guise of brave-sounding phrases like “speaking truth to power”, several of the bishops of the Church of England have become — or have foolishly allowed themselves to become — cheerleaders for the spirit of collective bullying that has seized our common minds. At least a dozen of them, some very senior, have made unprecedented criticisms of Cummings and the Prime Minister.

I like many of these bishops. Some are friends of mine. I have no doubt that they felt they were being terribly brave in speaking up against some sort of moral corruption at the heart of the Government. But in truth they were speaking into a potential whirlwind of collective anger, looking for an outlet, looking for a way to express itself.

I don’t have a problem with bishops speaking up about politics — they should do it more. Perhaps if they did it more, it wouldn’t all be from a depressingly predictable angle. As if the purpose of our Lord’s astonishing intervention in time and space, his death and resurrection, was to usher in the kingdom of some benign Liberal Democrat toleration. Unfortunately, the age is over when we had firebrand bishops on the Left castigating Mrs Thatcher for her treatment of the miners, or even those on the Right banging on about the need for personal morality — all that has collapsed into the safe soft managerialism of the narrowly centre ground.

Today, the bishops seem a bit too much like health and safety officers, agonising over public compliance. It all feels a long way from a man hanging on a cross.

More from this author

Where is God in this Covid horror?

By Giles Fraser

Whatever one’s politics, the Christian mind has to be continually informed by the recognition that Jesus himself was destroyed by the dynamics of mob hatred, a collective power that was so strong that even Jesus’s most trusted followers could turn against him and deny knowing him. The first Pope was St Peter. Yet even Peter denied Christ, slinking away when called to stand up and be counted. If that isn’t a reminder that even the most spiritually elevated amongst us can succumb to the fear and fury of the mob, I don’t know what is.

During the great liturgies of Holy Week, the congregation in church begins by lauding Jesus as a conquering hero. “Hosanna”, we shout, waving our palms as he triumphantly enters Jerusalem. Within days the same people are shouting to have him strung up. This is why populism is so dangerous. And Holy Week, by making one face one’s own capacity for persecution, is supposed to be some sort of inoculation against the pitch-fork mentality.

That is why the job of bishops is not to say things that are popular — something Rowan Williams regularly chastises as “cost-free wisdom”. Nobody needs that, and politicians can do it better. Indeed, as the Peter story demonstrates, popularity is a kind of kryptonite within the Christian story. No, a bishops’ job is to be hated. To say things that no one wants them to say and no one wants to hear. And particularly, to speak up for those that collective moral righteousness has condemned.

Remember, the Gospel stories are often about the people you hate, not the people you love and agree with. The Good Samaritan is so powerful because the audience for this parable won’t have had a good word to say about Samaritans. And we have heard “love your enemy” so often, we can forget what shockingly counterintuitive advice it is. By contrast, the New Testament is very down on religious professionals, and those who are publicly associated with ‘doing God’.

Suggested reading

How I found God on Twitter

By Darren Grimes

When I was at St Paul’s Cathedral, there was a phrase that was regularly bandied about that I came to absolutely hate: “reputational risk”. People would say things like “Be careful of this, it carries reputational risk.” You now hear it more and more in church circles. And I get so annoyed. Christianity is all about reputational risk. Indeed, it is absolutely supposed to court reputational risk. Jesus deliberately stood alongside those people who were a constant risk to his good name. If we don’t risk our reputations defending the unpopular, we might as well give up on the whole Christianity thing altogether.

The bishops seem to think that because Cummings is powerful, they are being brave in having a go at him. But this is the sort of bravery of being in a crowd of many thousands, all angrily saying the same thing. So unfortunately, what I see isn’t bravery but a capitulation to the spirit of the mob. Simone Weil put the Christian vocation frighteningly well: “Whoever takes up the sword shall perish by the sword. And whoever does not take up the sword (or lets it go) shall perish on the cross.”

But our situation in Western democracies today is a novel one. There is no shared religion, and the old customs have been torn asunder by a culture of repudiation, which encourages people to shape their lives according to an “identity” of their own. Socialisation no longer means joining or obeying, but “becoming who you are”, regardless of the surrounding norms. This novel situation, which advertises itself as a kind of liberation, has instead produced in my lifetime a totally new kind of censorship and intimidation.

Thirty years ago I naively assumed that, with the collapse of communism, we would no longer see the persecution of dissidents or the imposition of official doctrines, and so I have been as astonished as everyone else by the mass denunciations and targeted character assassinations that enforce prevailing orthodoxies today. They seem as frequent and comprehensive here in Britain as they ever were in the world of totalitarian government.

True, you don’t go to the Gulag for your opinions; nor are there show-trials of “deviationists”, Zionists or the running dogs of capitalism. Nevertheless, you have to be careful what you say, and the punishments for saying, thinking or implying the wrong thing, even if administered by private enterprise and social media rather than by the state, are real, serious and largely impossible to deflect.

Suggested reading

The truth about hate speech

By Douglas Murray

The archive of your crimes is stored in cyberspace, and however much you may have confessed to them and sworn to change, they will pursue you for the rest of your life, just as long as someone has an interest in drawing attention to them. And when the mob turns on you, it is with a pitiless intensity that bears no relation to the objective seriousness of your fault. A word out of place, a hasty judgment, a slip of the tongue — whatever the fault might be, it is sufficient, once picked upon, to put you beyond the pale of human sympathy.

As Douglas Murray shows in his impressive and lively survey, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity, the emerging world of censorship is a world without forgiveness, in which people are condemned for what they are rather than what they do, and in which the real virtues and vices that govern our conduct are ignored altogether as irrelevant.

The crimes for which we are judged are existential crimes: through speaking in the wrong way you display one of the phobias or isms that show you to be beyond acceptable humanity. You are a homophobe, an Islamophobe, a white supremacist or a racist, and no argument can refute these accusations once they have been made.

You might, in your private life, have worked for the integration and acceptance of your local Muslim community, or for a wider understanding of the roots of Islamic philosophy. This will be irrelevant when it comes to rebutting a charge of Islamophobia, just as your record in promoting minorities in the workplace will do nothing to clear you of the charge of racism, once the crucial words are out.

Suggested reading

Is conservatism normalising the alt-Right?

By Eric Kaufmann

For your accusers are not interested in your deeds; they are interested in you, and in the crucial fact about you, which is whether or not you are “one of us”. Your faults cannot be overcome by voluntary action, since they adhere to the kind of thing that you are. And you reveal what you are in the words that define you.

These words may be taken out of context, even doctored to mean the opposite of what you said — as happened recently to me in an interview given to the New Statesman — but this will not affect the verdict, since there is no objective trial, no “case for the defence”, no due process. You are accused by the mob, examined by the mob and condemned by the mob, and if you have brought this on yourself, then you have only yourself to blame. For the mob is by nature innocent: it washes its own conscience in a flow of collective indignation, and by joining it you make yourself safe.

Such is the situation that the brave Murray confronts in his latest book, the title of which (taken from a previous anatomy of human folly by Charles Mackay) implies that it is crowd hysteria, rather than ignorance, that is largely to blame. But, as Murray goes on to show, that suggestion is also too simple. With admirable attention to detail he explores the ways in which the spirit of the mob has entered not only the language of public debate but also the sources of information and the institutions of decision making.

Censorship begins in the media themselves, with the silicon valley elite introducing “machine learning fairness” designed to eliminate “hate speech”, and programmed to recognise as “hate” all those expressions of opinion that violate some norm of political correctness. What Orwell so vividly foresaw — the manipulation of language so as to make heresy inexpressible — is now routine practice.

Suggested reading

Broadcaster bias is destroying public trust

By Douglas Murray

The result, however, is not a culture of gentle conformity, in which “niceness” is the norm. On the contrary, the clamour for recognition involves a constant assault on those who are assumed to be preventing it. These purveyors of “hate” are given no leeway on social media, and the practice of mass denunciation on grounds of race, tribe, class or social milieu is now an accepted weapon in the identity wars.

Murray gives riveting examples of the way in which whiteness has become a moral fault in the eyes of identity warriors on the American campus. It is, for example, now legitimate to condemn people for the colour of their skin, leading some to try to apologise for being white.

Various devices facilitate the emergence of the censorship culture. Three in particular come to the surface in Murray’s carefully constructed argument. First, there is the art of taking offence. Whole sections of the university curriculum are devoted to explaining to students that words, arguments, comparisons, even questions, are “offensive”, regardless of the intention with which they are used.

Invariably, the offence is given by the old majority culture, and is taken on behalf of some privileged minority. Current concerns about Islamophobia are relevant here: it is offensive, for example, to make jokes about the burqa, but not offensive to appear in public with your face entirely covered, even though the face-to-face encounter is at the root of our shared way of life, as important in showing respect as taking off your shoes when entering a mosque.

Suggested reading

Why conservatism is failing

By Mary Harrington

More important, from the intellectual point of view, is the attempt to rewrite hardware as software. As Murray shows, identity politics, which insists that everything relevant to our sense of self lies within our power, so that nothing can be imposed on us without our consent, is at odds with the facts of biology. To get round this problem, sex has been re-written as gender, and gender defined as a social construct. In this way, hardware becomes software, and fate becomes choice.

And the result is the “trans” lobby, determined to make all those areas where one sex was hitherto privileged (for example, female sports or female bathrooms) available to whoever wishes to appropriate that sex as his own. The hardware/software confusion has now penetrated the culture, and Murray shows the devastating effect that it has had on our understanding of human difference.

Finally there is the new scourge of “intersectionality”, which encourages people to explore all the ways in which they have lost out in the pursuit of advantage, and to construct their identity accordingly. A kind of reverse hierarchy of privilege emerges, as you come to see that you are disadvantaged as gay man, and then as a black man, and then as a Muslim man, and so on. The result of this scramble for “virtuous disadvantages” occupies Murray over many partly amusing, partly distressing pages.

As he abundantly shows, the attempt to derive a positive philosophy from this assemblage of negatives leads to absurdity and contradiction at every turn. The problem, however, is that contradiction is not regarded by the mob as an obstacle, but merely as further proof of the great conspiracy by which we are surrounded — the conspiracy enshrined in the old majority culture, which told us that we must accept human nature, find our fulfilment within its bounds, and not engage in a futile metaphysical rebellion.

Suggested reading

How I overcame my class stigma

By Roger Scruton

Murray’s comprehensive survey of the prevailing madness will not persuade every reader. But it raises the real questions of our times, which are these: can we reject the idea of a benevolent God and still hold on to our inherited morality, founded on respect for the other and the absolute authority of truth? Can we adopt the posture of forgiveness that Murray is so keen to advocate, without turning to the supreme example that was once given to us?

Can we re-learn the habits of polite disagreement, and address each other as rational beings, capable of forming real communities in which differences are respected and decencies honoured? I want to answer yes to those questions. But as someone who has suffered more than most from the prevailing madness I have my doubts.

My own solution — which is to ignore social media and to address, in my writings, only the interest in the true and the false, rather than in the permitted and the offensive — confines me within a circle that is considerably narrower than the Twittersphere. But here and there in this circle, there are people who do not merely see the point of truthful discourse, but who are also eager to engage with it. And I cling to the view that that is enough, as it was for the Irish monks who kept the lamp of learning alight during the Dark Ages. They may have thought they were losing, but they won in the end.

Douglas Murray’s The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity is published by Bloomsbury Continuum