Libby Purves

THE one thing you can rely on these days is the whipped-up storm of upset, indignation, hurt feelings and judgmental fury that is a Twitter spat.

Take this week, for example: the Church of England feels wounded and misunderstood because people are accusing it of ‘trolling’ after it tweeted ‘Prayers for Prof Dawkins and his family’ when the scientist suffered a stroke.

Professor Richard Dawkins, of course, is a determinedly furious unbeliever and opponent of churches, and the C of E message was assumed to be insensitively sarcastic.

Meanwhile, in another part of the forest, the actor Stephen Fry is upset and has flounced off Twitter (yet again) because people criticised him. How dare they! Fry, the famously politically correct, right- on, gay-proud national treasure!

His crime was to crack a joke while hosting the Baftas on Sunday night.

Poisonous

The joke( one of the few which wasn’t squirmingly sexually suggestive) was about Jenny Beavan, a costume designer he said had dressed like a ‘ bag lady’. Cue outrage on social media with people demanding an apology for the ‘vile’ comment.

Rather than letting the criticism wash over him, Fry threw a tantrum, angrily tweeting that she was a dear friend and ‘got’ his affectionate joke.

He said :‘ Will all you sanctimonious f***ers f*** the f*** off. Jenny Beavan is a friend and joshing is legitimate. Christ I want to leave the planet.’

Fry, of course, has form with over-reaction to minor criticisms. In 2009, he threatened to leave Twitter after a fan said his endless tweets were ‘a bit boring’.

Oh the irony that Mr Fry, one of the most prolific users of Twitter — a notoriously poisonous nest of bilious and judgmental so-called trolls — should react so ludicrously when he himself gets bitten.

Is that enough over-reaction and mindless affront for one week? Of course not.

Oscar-winning actress Meryl Streep is in hot water, challenged about a film jury she chairs because all the members are white.

Reportedly, Streep — as a woman a minority in the film world herself — unwisely said ‘we are all Africans really’.

Which, if you go back to prehistory, is true. A bit tactless, though, so cue more protest.

Oddest of all, gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell is rebuked by a pious madam from the National Union of Students, Fran Cowling.

She refuses to debate with the lifelong campaigner for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender rights (LGBT) as well as numerous other kinds of justice, because she thinks he is a ‘bigot’ and ‘supports the incitement of violence against transgender people’.

That last one makes you fall off your chair. Peter Tatchell is a principled and gallant man, as even his dissenters usually agree. Fighting this cause has l ed to him being arrested hundreds of times, and physically beaten up f or opposing dictators.

Gay himself, his campaigns against homophobia and transphobia are legendary. But not to Miss Cowling, oh no. The PhD student from Nottingham University is affronted because Mr Tatchell isn’t as ferociously intolerant as she is herself.

This saga began when another university with drew an invitation to Germaine Greer — a pretty radical ranter herself — after the veteran feminist observed that, in her opinion, male-to-female transgender people, such as former Olympian Bruce Jenner, are not real women but mutilated males.

Greer wasn’t demanding anybody ban, hate or attack them. She was just expressing a view, one quite common in her generation. Again, tactless, but a point of view.

When students‘ noplatformed’ her in outrage for saying this, she withdrew from the event. Then Peter Tatchell wrote that it was wrong of them to exclude her or any speaker because free speech, free debate a nd public challenge ‘is one of the most precious of human rights’.

Do you follow all that? Wrap a wet towel round your head and concentrate, as we all must: for we are staring, my friends, at a situation where a veteran LGBT activist is being accused of bigotry . . . for defending the right to be heard, of a woman he (presumably) disagrees with.

Somehow, for all our traditions of liberty, mockery and argument, we have entered the age of affront and offence: the century of wounded feelings.

Call it the cry-baby culture if you want to be cruel. And I am beginning to think it is time to get meaner, to tell these noisy fake-victims and professional offence-takers to ‘man up’. And if women are offended by that expression, tough. I’m a woman and I’ve got over it already!

Let everyone be prepared to argue, to share platforms with complete pigs and ignorant bigots, to laugh at them and point out the flaws in their arguments. Or, if they’re daft celebrities with no power, just shrug, quietly write them off, avoid their performances and don’t buy their books.

The worst part of the present age of affront is that the most vocal howlers, the keenest gaggers and excluders and noplatformers, are the young: both in universities and (one suspects) on blogs and Twitter.

It’s awful. Youth should be challenging everything, asking awkward questions as bright five-year-olds do, listening to the answers and weighing them up.

Youth should question everything — fuddy- duddy prejudices and liberal consensus, including pious political correctness and Blairite inventions like hate- speech laws. Youth should be up for furious, open debate and satire.

It is dismaying that in many universities they seem keener to close down argument, ban tricky people and create infantile ‘safe spaces’ where nobody says anything harsh.

Some London School of Economics students recently set up Speakeasy, a free-speech club to counteract this.

Someone (possibly jokingly) put up a motion to ban it.

Terry Wogan once observed that a first rule of broadcasting was to remember that ‘ there are people just waiting to be offended, pen poised over the Basildon Bond notepaper’.

There always were; yet now, because of Twitter and other internet outlets, they don’t even have to f i nd paper, envelope and stamp but can stay on the sofa and roar their outrage before you’ve finished your sentence.

It is rare for a week to pass, even on the harmless talk show I present (Midweek on Radio 4), without someone taking exception to something: a tone of voice, a word, a clumsy phrase, an outdated expression about race, sexuality, or gender, often used by some elderly guest with no intent to offend.

Indignation

Outrage bubbles up. Very often, in all these cases it is not on the complainer’s own behalf, but because they think someone else might be upset.

Professor Dawkins not only ignored the Anglicans’ crass but harmless Tweet about praying for him, but made rather a good joke by saying that since his fingers at the moment find fiddly things awkward, he’s thinking of becoming Amish [the deeply religious community in Pennsylvania] because, apparently, they don’t allow buttons on clothes.

You might argue that, by the sheer intemperance of his past attacks, Dawkins himself has helped create the atmosphere that makes his supporters assume the C of E tweet was a snide attack — rather than generous sympathy for an intellectual opponent.

Equal l y, the students denouncing Peter Tatchell are, in some ways, merely aping the vehemence with which he has denounced those he sees as hypocrites and bigots on gay rights. But the key point is that he doesn’t shut down arguments and they do.

Still, moral indignation can generate a kind of inflation and one-upmanship, spiralling into absurdity and unpleasantness. The lesson? Do calm down, dears.