Groupthink can take us into dangerous territory

Ionce bought a cup of tea on a train heading back to London from Somerset. To my surprise, the man behind the counter insisted that I place the tea, with its lid, into a paper bag for carrying. I tried to decline, but he shook his head and shrugged: “We’ve got to. ‘Elf an’ safety. In case you burn yourself.”

This is the sort of country Britain is. It feels all the more astonishing, then, that we are also the sort of country where hundreds of tower blocks can be unthinkingly clad in flammable plastic. It is likely that most of the people involved in cladding them thought it was a sensible, legal thing to do at the time. So you can burn to death in your own bed, but you must not be allowed to burn yourself on a cup of tea.

What can explain this strange situation? Badly worded regulatory guidance played its part. But it shouldn’t take a rule book to tell councils and builders that wrapping up buildings in materials that burn easily is a very bad idea.

Unfortunately, humans are flawed and one of our biggest flaws is the unthinking acceptance of “common practice”. While staying safely among the herd might be a good move in some circumstances, it can also prompt normal people to do illogical, irresponsible or downright evil things.

Given that all of the 181 tower blocks checked so far have failed fire-safety tests, it seems clear that the whole construction, design and planning industry was suffering from just this sort of groupthink. Energy efficiency was all the rage, fire safety rather old hat. One insulation specialist, musing on it, told me recently that the Grenfell fire had made him realise that he, an expert in the field, had clad his own Sicilian villa in a flammable polystyrene-like substance because “that’s what the locals use to keep their houses cool”.

This groupthink is at the heart of so many misjudgments and scandals. MPS’ expenses, the subprime mortgage crash, government policy on diesel fuel, economists’ and pundits’ Brexit predictions and sexual abuse scandals in all sorts of institutions. If it’s considered normal, most of us are inclined not to ask too many questions.

This is precisely the phenomenon that Hannah Arendt dubbed the “banality of evil”. Making the wrong judgment about what cladding to use might be a far cry from turning a blind eye to sexual abuse or killings. But it does show that it is often the course of action we thought most mundane that proves capable, in the fullness of time, of doing the most damage.

One institution called upon to mete out judgment when groupthink is exposed is the judiciary. So it’s unfortunate that we seem to be in the grip of an escalating crisis of confidence in our judges. A victims’ group and the MP David Lammy, who lost a friend in the Grenfell fire, want to sack the judge appointed to lead the inquiry.

This new surge in our suspicion of the judiciary, which was before mostly limited to grumbles about lenient sentencing, began with the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse.

The inquiry lost its first two chairmen after rows over their establishment connections. Its third, recruited from abroad, didn’t seem to know what she was doing. For the fourth, the government gave up on the legal profession and chose a social worker.

Thus Pandora’s Box was opened. If a judge could be found wanting and hounded out of her job not just once, but three times, then why not give it a go every time?

We then had the controversy over the Supreme Court’s role in triggering Article 50, which has rolled inexorably on to all manner of odd demands, like Mr Lammy’s idea that the Grenfell judge must be non-white and live in a tower block.

Britain’s judges aren’t enforcing God’s law, unlike their biblical predecessors. Their judgments are sometimes questionable. If you expect perfection, you will be disappointed. Their job isn’t to experience life as a victim, to do Parliament’s job for it or to take down the establishment. It’s to interpret the law in a reasonable, rigorous and fair-minded way. As the Hebrew judges could have told us, perfect justice doesn’t exist on Earth.

In a sermon at my synagogue some years ago, the rabbi observed that there were many types of Jewish observance. A common one, he said was the “revolving-door Jew”, who pops into synagogue on the new year and pops out again on the day of atonement 10 days later (with very little worshipping in between). There was a rumble of laughter. It was the new year that morning and also the first time the rabbi had laid eyes on most of us for 11 months.

According to the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, British synagogue membership is in decline, eroded by individualism and intermarriage. This has been interpreted as a sign that Judaism might disappear in the UK.

This is a category error. Attendance at services is not a prerequisite for holding on to a strong sense of Jewishness. The best festivals take place at home anyway. It is possible to maintain a sense of community and identity outside a formal institution.

What matters is not paying the membership fee, but the knowledge and ideas parents pass down to their children. That is harder to measure, though.