Madeleine Bunting has been a friend of mine, if not a particularly close one, for about ten years now, ever since we were rival religious affairs correspondents. I don’t always like what she writes or agree with it. But she’s a decent person, she’s very smart and hard working, and she tries to get her stories right. These are all quite rare qualities in a journalist. Talk to her and you learn stuff.
So the shitstorm of derision and abuse which has greeted her attempts to write about the Enlightenment on the Guardian’s comment site has been really unpleasant to watch. I know she hated it too. What is particularly nasty is the way that she is referred to as “Maddy” by some of her attackers. Every time I see the word, I flinch. “But this is my friend,” I think, with a sense of shock and wrongness that must be more familiar to the victims of journalism than its practitioners.
What has she done to provoke such nastiness, except to suggest that, just possibly, we aren’t as smart as we think we are?
I must get the arseholes essay finished and popped into the paper.
Yes, I saw that. A sad spectacle, even though it’s easy to agree with her detractors in substance. As many journalists are waking up to these days, blogging can be a brutally thankless task. Much of the time one is either ignored, or else the hate mail one used to delete is out there in public.
Well, at least some get paid for it — whatever sordid affliction drives the rest of us is more unclear. A future essay topic?
Us online chaps have been there for a while – we got talkback going on the site about five years ago (or thereabouts) and ever since then have been the recipients of All This Sort Of Thing for everything we ever wrote. I don’t think it’s made much difference: most of the arseholery is clearly that, and the people with genuine grievances are usually smart enough to stick to the facts. I’ve certainly never consciously changed anything for fear of another onslaught from HM Fleet Of Arse. If anything, the temptation is always there to tweak something to deliberately enrage one of the many reliable subspecies, such as Anus horribilis macfanaticii or any of the Freesoftwarea…
R
This is getting worked over at Crooked Timber: http://crookedtimber.org/2006/04/10/defenders-of-the-faith/
When I was in school I never heard of the Enlightenment–we called whatever it was “the 18th Century” and I thought, and think, it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Whether It, whatever it was, happened in the 18th Century or not, whatever the history, there’s certainly an ideology that you might as well call the Enlightenment for short that significantly improved people’s lives–the idea that individual rights mattered, that people should act on reflectively, critically considered policies rather than on the passions, that they should calculate utilities rather than operating according to codes of honor, that appeal to tradition is worthless, and most of all that choice and individual desire satisfaction are paramount values–that people should be liberated from unchosen circumstances of family, community, tribe, gender, race, blood and all that.
Look at how crumby 5th century BC Athens was–a slave society where slaves and metics who constituted 2/3 or the population didn’t have a stake in the “democracy,” and women of all classes were completely locked out, and where citizenship with very few exceptions was a matter of ancestry. Or even worse the heroic age–the Trojan War, gang warfare over a woman. Urban slums are simply the way the world was universally before the Enlightenment and the way it is now outside of affluent countries and apart from educated, cosmopolitan elites: women breed, men fight and everyone subsists in a twilight world of semi-consciousness mechanically running through conventional social scripts.
You bet we’re smart–not because we’re innately better endowed than people who live in cultures that haven’t plugged into the Enlightenment. We’re just damned lucky, and we aren’t doing slum dwellers or members of the global slum, the “developing world,” any favors by pretending their cultures are ok. These are garbage cultures and in the interests of making people better off they need to be liberated from them–because that’s what they’d want if they thought it were possible. This ISN’T what what the Bush administration is doing: invading and bombing isn’t going to dismantle their lousy cultures or make them over in the image of upper middle class latte-drinking liberals. We want some serious cultural imperialism here.
Makes you wonder if we’ll see Enlightenment terrorists coming into public view.
I’m sitting right now in a cafe in Vienna, with some Hume to read. When I return, I will be that enlightenment terrorist. When I find an old maid cycling to communion I will commandeer her bicycle and crash it into the churchyard. Your brutal occupation of Birchanger will avail you nothing.
H.E. — a proper reply is due you, but I’ve only just seen your post — for some reason the blog didn’t mail it me.
For Enlightenment terrorists, I nominate the Jacobins and their heirs in the District of Columbia.
OK already,
I take the point that we peaked sometime in the mid 20th century with being able to establish institutions which espouse the highest human ideals, to which we owe the Enlightenment. I understand that one of the many reasons Guantanamo is a disgrace is because it takes us back to the Roman Empire in its belief that prisoners have no rights. I see the fear that we are sliding back, and I also feel for those cultures who have not yet had the opportunity to emerge from religion-sanctioned patriarchy. I know, I know, I know.
But spare a thought for the priest who works in four primary schools and occasionally his local secondary school, who routinely has to deal with teachers who see him as a shaman. They have no sense that ancient pictures of sacrifice and redemption might illuminate our consumer-driven world, and their blindness to it condemns their pupils to simply conform the the culture that is presented to them.
You can’t crash your bicycle into Birchanger churchyard Harriett, because last evening someone dumped not one, but two forensically-intense mattresses and a toilet right at the lych-gate so you can’t get in, unless you trade your Larkin Roadster for a BMX, (now THAT I’d like to see!).
Enjoy Hume.
All I did, m’Lud, was write a short piece* saying that online flame wars were spilling over into the Libel Court.
and all the ordure in the world entered the air-conditioning… it’s tempting to get the cod out, and spell “psychology” – but it’s worth noting a couple of things:
1) the people who do this sort of thing (see links below) aren’t unusual, or psychopathic. They’re ordinary humans.
2) there’s the “isolated group” thing. We saw this with the four Tube bombers. They radicalised each other, inside the group.
3) there’s the “no submit” feedback. In human voice conversation, when you start to say something hurtful, there’s an instant response, and you normally stop. When the recipient gets it, and gives that instant response, your written message doesn’t stop. It just ploughs on. The reader decides you’re vindictive and cruel, and hits back, HARD.
4) yeah, some people online are very inexpert at social transactions!
Guy
*Links:
http://groups.google.com/group/uk.local.southwest/browse_thread/thread/ded6ed520629bc75/11920fdc21a5d6be?q=serious+question&rnum=1#11920fdc21a5d6be
or http://tinyurl.com/o3psc
http://groups.google.com/group/uk.local.cornwall/browse_thread/thread/ef9ddbdde0e0301c/0108ace71f2d2f3b?q=kewney&rnum=2#0108ace71f2d2f3b
or http://tinyurl.com/oet8h
http://groups.google.com/group/uk.local.southwest/browse_thread/thread/a94a22ec4328179c/1d0d5286d47331dd#1d0d5286d47331dd
or http://tinyurl.com/r5hqh
Guy — that is a very strange and disturbing story. It makes a sort of pendant to the Cannibal blogger: in the one case we have completely unremarkable people doing terrible things online; in the other we have totally anonymous and normal-ish people online doing terrible things when they do finally leave their computers.