I went to public school, so I know a thing or two about bullying. The crucial thing is to develop the collective impression that the person being bullied deserves it. Once this is established, the bully can clothe themselves in a peculiar form of moral righteousness. The witch is persecuted, because she deserves it. The Jews are persecuted, because they deserve it.
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.
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.
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