You need a lot of outrage to get through these days

It started, I think, with the Jan Moir article.

I use Twitter a great deal (hell, my business, which has just gone and won itself an award, is based on Twitter), and I saw all of that take off pretty sharp. I went and read the article and was stunned – as I wrote here – that somebody was actually paid to write such an awful piece. I also read many of the reactions to it, which were mostly deeply personal in their attack.

Then there was Nick Griffin on Question Time. More outrage. How could we allow a man who has denied the facts of the Holocaust and hangs out with the KKK onto mainstream television? At the time I felt that if we believe in freedom of speech we can’t then dictate to whom the right is given. That would be fascist. But then, of course, whenever people like Nick Griffin get a chance to appear in mainstream media they always end up losing their core support. I believe a BNP supporter remarked that he made them look stupid, which I have to say is quite an achievement given what their protest marchers make them appear.

And then, the Baboon Debacle. AA Gill, the Times television and restaurant critic, shot one in Africa. Astoundingly, the row didn’t seem to kick off until two days after the offending column where he mentioned this fact. And I found I had really run out of moral outrage. I felt a little guilty, as though I should be reaching for my pitchfork and torch and ranting along with everybody else, but to be honest, I struggled to find the energy. There’s only so much moral outrage a person can take in the space of a week.

Besides which, I’ve been reading AA Gill in the Times for ages. Not because I go to the restaurants, and not because I watch the TV he reviews. I don’t have a TV and I never live near to the restaurant involved. I just read AA Gill because I happen to like his writing. I am sure saying that is the equivalent, post-baboon, of saying that Hitler might have been a genocidal bastard but Mein Kampf was pretty compelling (which, actually, it wasn’t, it’s more like a raving lunatic in print). Or, perhaps, arguing that since Roman Polanski has done so many amazing films and made such a contribution, what’s a little rape of a 13-year-old here and there?

And perhaps also because if you’ve read a lot of AA Gill you know that he tends to go around shooting things a lot. Not in a Columbine kind of way but in a kind of 19th century sportsman sort of a way. Nobody has complained at his mentions of stalking, or even entire columns devoted to hunting expeditions in the UK with fellow hunters like Marcus Pierre-White.

This makes me wonder: Are baboons higher up the moral ladder than, say, a Scottish stag or a pheasant? Nobody appears to have noticed AA Gill’s shooting habits until the baboon.

Of course, there has been another mob incident, which unfortunately I was too hungover from a Halloween party to notice. Somebody called Stephen Fry boring, and said it on Twitter. Stephen Fry is sometimes a delicate soul who has depression. I know what that’s like and I know that unless you have a metaphorical skin of re-enforced steel girders, you have a down day and somebody says, “Gosh, you’re dull” and it hurts. This happened on Twitter, in public. It’s even more public than getting a megaphone and saying it in the street.

I missed it completely, but I felt sadness for both Stephen Fry and the person who made the comment, and was then deluged with outrage and hatred from Stephen Fry’s loyal supporters.

The poor guy apologised. It was one of those comments that if you made it down the pub, or at an evening soiree or in all the other places where we used to go and say things to other people, Stephen Fry would have been none the wiser. But the thing is, instead of going out and saying things to people In Real Life, we say them on Twitter. Where Google stores them up like a kind of OCD manic digital squirrel, just in case we should need them later.

We don’t really notice the difference, but in the last couple of days I have been more aware that what we say on Twitter is often just the same kind of thing we’d say in private to friends, but now it’s on record for the whole world. It makes one slightly more circumspect about the whole thing.

And if somebody says something online that causes moral outrage, it’s so much easier to create a mob, mass complain or attack en masse. After all, the old method of getting out the pitchfork and torch, gathering in some agreed location and running about required so much organisation, effort and time. Nowadays you can participate in a mob on your lunch break.

When the Jan Moir story broke I thought it was a new means by which the social milieu defined the boundaries of acceptability. After all, we get rid of irrational hatred of other people (for whatever reason) by making that hatred socially unacceptable. Eventually, it is pushed to the fringes before being wiped out altogether.

Yet the constant provision of sources of moral outrage is, to be honest, exhausting. And what good does it do? I find myself uncomfortable at the idea of personal attacks on people for expressing their views; I preferred the Times Finkelstein rebuttal of Jan Moir than the many people who levelled personal insults in her direction. One of the great things about not being eight is that there’s so much less name-calling involved in day-to-day activities. I know I’m boring and academic but if you are going to critique somebody, I’d rather it wasn’t the kind of insult that I last heard slung across a playground when I was eight years old.

So I suspect I may be hanging up my pitchfork and torch. I don’t like myself angry, I don’t like being swept up by a mob. And to be honest, I don’t think I have that much moral outrage in me. After all, if I picked up on everything that runs through my Twitter stream of a day, I’d have no time for anything else.