Public outrage loves company
There is nothing quite so comfortable as a good, old-fashioned feeling of outrage. Of being thoroughly and completely affronted by the actions of another.
After all, being offended does wonders for a person’s confidence and belief in their values.
We are not living in a new era of outrage but we are living in a new era of communication where outrage can and does spread like a virus.
On Thursday it was the cafe with a tone-deaf Valentines Day message that may or may not have used domestic abuse as a punch line.
Before that it was the New Plymouth councillor and his shame at singing the national anthem in te reo, and before that it was a restaurant menu in Christchurch that childishly mocked the Chinese language.
And then there was the teen staring down (or not) the Native American man in Washington, any one of hundreds of ridiculous comments by Donald Trump and all the times an ignorant white person has painted their face black and didn’t get why it was a problem.
Each of these incidents gets people into a lather of hand-wringing, name-slinging and soap-box lecturing. When this happens on social media, as such confrontations increasingly do, the views are not so much shared as channelled into self-validating echo chambers.
That is the real tragedy of it all. Outrage may love company more than misery, but outrage is not genuinely educating people. It is almost certainly having the opposite effect of consolidating them into their poles of opinion.
We’d all probably be a bit better off if we treated our values less like a snowflake and more like a tortoise shell that can take a knock.
The outrage that erupted over the cafe sign may indeed stop another tone-deaf joke about domestic abuse being made in public. But it will also drive the joke underground and make it all the more thrilling for being subversive.
A more mature approach might have been to put some trust in the judgment of our fellow citizens that one off-joke will not instantly create an atmosphere of acceptance around abuse. An even more useful approach might be to calmly consider each side of an argument, rather than respond with knee-jerk outrage, while always calling out offensive comments and behaviour. We’ve never been much good at this. It’s too easy to get caught up in the moment and, after all, outrage can be an immensely powerful agent for positive change.
But even then, outrage is not always right. The now infamous video of MAGA-capwearing teenager Nick Sandmann staring into the face of Native American Nathan Phillips neatly summed up the terrifying arrogance of the Trump regime and the division his leadership is sowing.
It shocked America into a level of introspection that could genuinely influence the next election.
Yet the smug look on his face that so instantly outraged liberals and turned Sandmann, a high school student, into the most reviled man in America, was later explained as something more akin to terror – a teenager’s nervous attempt to defuse a situation being inflamed by another group not seen on the video. That the world was so quick to judge this child, justifiable or not, is perhaps the greatest outrage of all, and one that should make us all shudder in our boots.
Outrage is not genuinely educating people. It is almost certainly having the opposite effect of consolidating them into their poles of opinion.