“The temper of the multitude is fickle,” wrote Niccolò Machiavelli in The Prince.
In America today there are people who have had everything taken away – jobs, money, friends – despite violating no laws or workplace conduct rules. Instead they are accused of breaking social codes having to do with race, sex, personal behavior, or acceptable humor: codes which may not have existed just a short while ago.
It’s not easy to determine what these people actually did, or whether they deserve their turn of fate. Frequently they have been denied the right to face their accusers, or even a chance to defend themselves. In the absence of due process, partisans nonetheless appropriate these stories as proof of woke or conservative tribal narratives.
Context and nuance are essential to the rule of law. America has juries, judges, and witnesses precisely to learn whether a crime has actually been committed before administering punishment. Before that process, our system presumes the accused are innocent. We have a right to self-defense. We have a statute of limitations.
Social media, conversely, is a playground of rigid ideologies and snap judgments, a world where nothing is forgotten and mistakes are never forgiven. Twitter declares its judgments in 280 characters, and it favors neither nuance nor ambiguity. Yet the values of online anarchy now dominate many cultural institutions: universities, newspapers, foundations, and museums.
In response to tweet storms, these institutions sometimes punish people who have not been accused of anything remotely resembling a crime. Instead of courts, they use secretive bureaucracies. Instead of hearing evidence and witnesses, they make judgments behind closed doors.
For most of us, these incidents are easy to ignore. They don’t happen often, and the victims are often cultural elites who don’t elicit much sympathy.
Yet if we value the rights that sustain democracy, we should be concerned about these digital lynchings. As Marcel Proust wrote, “the instinct of imitation and absence of courage govern society and the mob alike.”
The costs of this trend are tough to quantify. How much intellectual output is self-censored now? How many have been muzzled by the fear of what a poorly worded comment could do if taken out of context on Twitter?
In the 20th century, social justice advocates extolled racial diversity as a remedy with multiple benefits. Adding a broader range of perspectives to boardrooms and other institutions was seen as a way to foster inclusivity and also achieve greater productivity.
Just as biodiversity yields more resilient habitats, liberals of that era believed thought diversity created a healthier society. As President Jimmy Carter once said, America’s goal was to become “not a melting pot, but a beautiful mosaic. Different people, different beliefs, different yearnings, different hopes, different dreams.”
America’s Founding Fathers worked to construct a republic that would balance the excesses of factionalism and the tyranny of the majority. The rise of Internet mobs policing rigid social codes threatens that balance.
At the heart of the Neo-Puritanism that critics label “cancel culture” are some admirable social goals. Women should be free from sexual harassment. People of color should be accorded equal status in all corners of society. Gender stereotypes and hetero bigotry should not control an individual’s career options.
The challenge is how best to achieve those goals. Policing speech seems ineffective. James Madison said, “in politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. Heresies in either can rarely be cured by persecution.”
Convening a Twitter mob doesn’t change the way people think. Why then are so many tempted to join in digital lynchings?
One answer may be found in Robin DiAngelo’s racial justice polemic White Fragility. DiAngelo’s belief is that “Everyone has prejudice, and everyone discriminates.” The core message of her book is that white guilt over the racial hierarchies underpinning American history has not correlated sufficiently to diminishing the material and structural advantages that benefit whites.
The target audience for DiAngelo is white progressives who consider themselves racially enlightened. Progressives who believe they have already transcended their prejudices “can be the most difficult for people of color because, to the degree that we think we have arrived, we will put our energy into making sure that others see us having arrived.”
Social media is a performative milieu. It is the perfect environment for the progressive virtue signaling that DiAngelo references. Just as Instagram influencers curate unrealistically perfect lives in their feeds, Twitter users strive to be observed liking and censuring the “right” things.
Outrage is the alpha algorithm. Expressing it digitally gives our brains a rush, satisfying self-righteous impulses without any of the work associated with effecting real societal change.
Digital lynch mobs are proliferating because people are more interested in signaling tribal certitude than engaging with competing perspectives and opposing ideas. Diversity of thought, the penultimate liberty of a democratic society, is suffocating under a shroud of techno puritanism.
