Cultivating outrage
Judge Kavanaugh’s controversial confirmation hearing marks a transitional moment in American culture. As critics have emphasized, the last nominee who faced such serious allegations got confirmed while his accuser was doubted and defamed. That outcome allowed Clarence Thomas to tilt the highest court in the country firmly to the right for the next 27 years; but his accuser, Anita Hill, ultimately prevailed in the court of public opinion. Kavanaugh’s hearing therefore takes place within an utterly different context. For the last two years powerful men have been defenestrated from every niche of US public life, often after decades of mistreating colleagues and employees with complete impunity. To many Americans Kavanaugh also serves as a stand-in for a president who has yet to face a proper reckoning with credible evidence of sexual impropriety.
The #MeToo movement is, however, inseparable from a wider cultural reckoning which has emerged from the weaponization of social media. The capacity to share reams of information at minimal cost has produced a constant stream of provocative messages, inflammatory stimuli that no society can adequately manage. The confused response, so far, to Russia’s interference in the US election (and other elections in Europe) and its trolling of online discussions on sensitive issues like gun rights and #BlackLivesMatter activism is just the tip of the digital iceberg. Researchers at Warwick University recently showed a correlation between Facebook use and hate crimes against refugees in Germany. Similar concerns have been raised about socially divisive Facebook use in India, Myanmar and Sri Lanka.
There is now increasing evidence that social media’s most pernicious uses are examples of the technology working exactly as designed. Digital platforms have compelling commercial reasons to keep users online, so they use algorithms that favour “viral” messages over less dramatic forms of communication. They do so even though history shows that such messages are far likelier to cause outrage and provoke violence in the real world. So while there is never a shortage of facts that ought to provoke us, incessant political anger not only leads to ethnic violence it discourages millions of people from constructive engagement in public dialogue.
Writing in the Guardian, William Davies notes that centuries-old distinctions between the mind and body, and war and peace have been eroding for more than a century. “The invention of aerial bombing in the early 20th century meant that war came to include techniques for terrifying and policing civilian populations.”
Since then “new forms of violence have emerged, in which states are attacked by non-state groups, interstate conflicts are fought using nonmilitary means, and the distinction between policing and military intervention becomes blurred.” In this new reality “[o]ur condition is one of nervous states, with individuals and governments existing in a state of constant and heightened alertness, relying increasingly on feeling rather than fact.”
The last few days have provided two striking examples of the overreactions that can result from this “heightened awareness” to everything. The first was the The New Yorker magazine’s decision to disinvite Steve Bannon from its annual festival after news of his attendance threatened to derail an entire week of events. In the ensuing media frenzy a headline for Times columnist Bret Stephens wryly observed, “Now Twitter Edits The New Yorker.” Further upheaval followed soon after when The New York Review of Books, another venerable highbrow publication, ousted its editor, Ian Buruma, for publishing an essay written by a Canadian radio host who had been tried but not found guilty of serious sexual violence. Both editors were treated as though their decision to grant controversial points of view were somehow endorsements of them. It should hardly need saying that this is not how a public sphere is meant to work.
The dilemma of what might be called the Kavanaugh moment is that the indisputable need for transparency and accountability cannot easily be separated from actions that merely inflame public opinion. If the Catholic Church’s ongoing struggles with sexual abuse scandals are any indication, it could take years to come to terms with abuses that have been overlooked or tolerated in politics, media or academic life – both within America and elsewhere. At the same time, while the ongoing moral housecleaning is almost always welcome, and long overdue, there is also a real danger that our hyper-awareness of bad news is also sowing a culture of perpetual outrage.