The age of umbrage weakens us all

The world goes mad not in major leaps or bounds but in small incremental steps. Inevitably a painful correction comes along but we are in the incremental phase.

I have given up thinking I can do much about it. All I can do as a columnist, public intellectual and observer is chronicle the madness so future generations might look back and recognise the warning signs.

People will look back on the decades from about 1990 to 2020 as the age of umbrage. It’s not that people generally are any more outraged or that there is a lot more to be outraged about. It’s just that the personal umbrage has a new vehicle in social media and a bottom-feeding media.

These fraught decades will eventually be seen as the time when social media gave minority opinion holders and nobodies the ability to make it look as though they represented a large section of society.

It would all be hilarious but for the fact that tiny segments of society have obtained a voice far exceeding their overall worth in terms of usefulness and achievement.

Facebook, online comments, blogs, half-arsed websites and tweets have empowered a group we could previously have dismissed as non-entities and snotnoses who should be ignored. But during this time of personal outrage, they have achieved a pernicious influence which astoundingly has rendered the rest of society cowed, paralysed, overly cautious, effete, and weakened.

No better illustration exists than the fuss about nothing last week when the Minister for Disability Issues, Nicky Wagner, tweeted she was ‘‘busy with disability meetings in Auckland – rather be out on the harbour!’’

A Twitter storm erupted and opposition MPs, who should know better, weighed in as well.

‘‘Oh. My. God,’’ Labour finance spokesman Grant Robertson said. ‘‘You are the minister for disabilities, show some respect. Actually, come to think of it, just resign and go be on the harbour.’’

Greens disability issues spokeswoman Mojo Mathers tweeted: ‘‘I really question her commitment to the disability sector if she’d rather be on the harbour than meeting them.’’

Come on, everyone. Who would not rather be out on the harbour than stuck in boring meetings? I bet the disabled people would rather have been out on the harbour too.

Wagner’s tweet was so patently innocuous and so clearly not meant to be disrespectful to disabled people and their representatives that any criticism was simply ridiculous.

Partly I blame the media which fanned this story. This was lazy news selection. The trouble is that the more of these trumped-up outrage stories we do, the harder it is to do justice to proper stories.

But social media is just a vehicle, albeit a self-fulfilling one. What it does is give enormous momentum to what I call the kindergarten philosophy often propounded by the Left-wing intelligentsia.

The kindergarten philosophy holds that somehow we can engineer society so that all elements of judgment, aggression, competitiveness, ambition, and the drive to be successful can be conditioned out of children and society as a whole.

The philosophy is fine for under-fives but somehow it’s perpetuated beyond them by a tiny minority on social media and by fragile politicians who want to ignore harsh realities and human tendencies.

Another example. In April the fortunate children at Whakarongo School near the Linton Army Base were shown how to operate rifles by Defence Force staff as part of leadership and team-building lessons.

What fun they must have had. Well, no more.

Hand-wringing Green Party education spokeswoman Catherine Delahunty thought it was unsafe for children to have assault rifles at school and felt it might brainwash children into thinking guns were cool.

Labour’s education spokesman, Chris Hipkins, stressed out because it was ‘‘definitely the wrong way to capture kids’ imaginations’’.

Now I believe strongly in gun control but showing kids guns in highly controlled settings is hardly going to produce mass murderers. Given the things children are exposed to these days in video games, television programmes and online, army assault rifles might actually be a useful contact with reality. The safety concerns, given that army personnel were hardly going to let the children start blasting away, are so ridiculous it’s concerning Delahunty would raise them.

The real problem is the total failure to appreciate that children got a useful lesson about the fact that guns kill people and are dangerous in the wrong hands but sometimes they are necessary. That is why we have armed forces like the military and the police. Sometimes firearms are needed for defence and to protect the innocent.

But such is the horror of that lesson that Education Minister Nikki Kaye is now preparing guidelines on firearms in schools.

It all seems part of the larger kindergarten picture where sections of society want to pretend we don’t need a military and that we shouldn’t be involved anywhere where our soldiers could get killed even though that’s what they sign up for.

Hence we have the ridiculous situation where we almost need a full commission of inquiry and a binding referendum to send two, yes two, military personnel to Afghanistan at the request of the Americans and Nato.

Given the way the request has been treated, you’d think the Americans had asked for a full battalion made up entirely of young men with PhDs from onechild families.

Again, I’m no sword rattler and think any wars should be conducted by men and women over 60, but I believe in playing our part in international treaties and partnerships, which are becoming increasing important as many fracture around us.

And sometimes the media, politicians and others just need to harden up a bit. (Normally I wouldn’t have added ‘‘a bit’’ but you can see how even I am not immune.)