Part IV - Masses, Media, and Popular Judgment

10 Co-Production and Populism

Production fulfils the making of a thing by bringing it to public scrutiny. Production is therefore the cutting edge of rhetorical performance in law, politics, media, and all aspects of civic and social life. Its impact lies largely in the fact that the public – or ‘publics’ – are naturally most persuaded towards the positive reception of a thing where they perceive that they’ve had a hand in the co-Production of the thing. The appeal to ‘making with’ has been a technique favoured by orators throughout the history of political rhetoric. President John F. Kennedy employed it in his Inaugural Address on 20 January 1961, when he called on ‘both sides’ to ‘join in creating a new endeavor, not a new balance of power, but a new world of law, where the strong are just and the weak secure and the peace preserved’. With the very different motivation of seeking to divide one section of humanity from the rest, Donald Trump also appealed to collaborative construction when he famously said: ‘we have to build a wall, folks. We have to build a wall.’¹ Perhaps he borrowed the technique from his background in business and sales, for the appeal to ‘making with’ is also pervasive in modern marketing practices. Thus, in 2008, word-of-mouth or ‘viral’ marketing was called ‘the defining marketing trend of the decade’.² Analysing that trend, Jim Nail, chief strategy and marketing officer at media company Cymfony, emphasizes the public’s co-Productive influence on demand for the things that suppliers make: ‘To succeed in word-of-mouth marketing, you need to find that segment of real ardent fans and create special programs and tools that will empower them to share that enthusiasm.’³ The tactic of appealing to and empowering ‘that segment of real ardent fans’ sounds like something straight out of the Donald Trump playbook.

Making, Marketing, Meaning

So-called collaborative marketing and creative consumption have been called ‘the new marketing logic’.⁴ An example of collaborative marketing is the technique of engaging savvy consumers in product design on the assumption that the habits of today’s ‘lead users’ can predict the habits of general consumers tomorrow. Eric von Hippel notes that ‘since lead users often attempt to fill the need they experience, they can provide new product concept and design data’.⁵ From the mid-2000s, consumers considered to be ‘market partners’⁶ in the ‘co-creation of value’⁷ became a ‘new paradigm’⁸ and ‘the key process in the new marketing logic’.⁹ The terminology of marketing scholarship differs somewhat from my own. For example, marketing vernacular tends to apply the label ‘co-production’ to situations in which the consumer is a passive recipient of the provider’s values and the label ‘co-creation’ to contexts in which the consumer is more active in product development.¹⁰ Although our present definitions are drawn in different places, the marketing theorist’s distinction ‘between active involvement in the creative process’ and ‘decoding or meaning-making activities’ is potentially a useful one.¹¹

Owen Barfield found the distinction between primary thing-making and secondary meaning-making to be helpful in relation to making poetry, hence his suggestion that when a person, ‘having achieved self-consciousness, returns to the making of poetry, the secondary imagination is at work on the making (or, if you like, restoration) of meaning’.¹² Meaning-making in relation to poetry may be carried out by the same person who first uttered the poetic words, or it may be made collaboratively by and with other people as critical readers. Where I depart from Barfield is when (in his very next line) he goes on to state that, ‘as the secondary imagination makes meaning, so the primary imagination makes “things”’.¹³ It seems to me that interpretative co-Production through ‘meaning-making’ is just as much an essential part of making ‘things’ as the activity of poetic Production. Indeed, it is the engagement of a reader or audience that makes all the difference between a mere ‘object’ and a meaningful ‘thing’. Whereas an object is a matter that is in etymological terms ‘thrown against us’ (from the Latin ob- ‘against’ and iacere ‘to throw’), a thing, recalling Tim Ingold’s definition (see Chapter 4), is constituted by social connection, cooperation, and consent.

Popularity and Populism

Some will say that Trump’s rhetoric lacks elegance, nuance, and ethical virtue, but that is to judge him by the standards of traditional political oratory. Judged as a performer and businessman, it is hard to deny that he knows his audience, knows his market, and knows how to make his market and how to appeal to it. So it is with every ‘demagogue’ – a word that means people agitator or, as we usually put it, ‘rabble rouser’. There are serious consequences when the Production values of commercial marketing become the Production values of populist politics. Companies seeking to sell their goods and services become so beholden to the public that the public as co-Producer begins to market its demands to the supplier. When this dynamic operates in a political context it can be a force for good and a model of democratic, devolved government, or it can amplify errors by encouraging a political leader to pipe whatever tune the public pays for. In the case of Donald Trump, one senses sometimes that his more extreme and illogical utterances have less do to with his own manifesto than with maintaining the brand that his market demands. We sometimes say that Donald Trump ‘plays to his base’, which graphically expresses how demagoguery can produce a descent to the lowest common denominator. This mirrors commercial marketing practice in non-political contexts, where emphasis on manufacturer supply has shifted over time to emphasis on public demand.

What is our ideal of political behaviour in the people who seek our votes? Perhaps we imagine the ideal political candidate to be a person of principle who comes upon (Invents) a set of social concerns, then develops (Creates) a set of policies, and finally publishes (Produces) their policies in the form of a manifesto to be judged and voted upon by the electorate. If all this were done with integrity and transparency, we could find little to fault in such candidates – leaving aside disagreement with their particular choice of policies. In practice, though, our ideal politician may be unlikely to succeed if they simply offer the public prefabricated policies. By adapting our image of the political candidate and political office holder to that of a person seeking to involve the public in collaborative marketing, we see that the successful politician is one who gives the public not only what the public thinks it wants, but one who also encourages members of the public to believe that they had a hand in making the policies and a hand in making the politician. This appeals to the public’s proprietorial sense of ownership, but it also appeals to their Making Sense. One has to invite the voting and paying public into the entire making process, from Invention through Creation to Production, in order for them to experience the sense that their candidate and their candidate’s policies were tailor-made to the voters’ personal specifications.

Politics is not the only context in which performers appeal to their audience’s desire to be co-Producers of the show. It is, for example, highly prominent in the arts, as the authors of Getting in on the Act observe in relation to the trend among arts groups towards making opportunities for public participation.¹⁴ In his book Making Is Connecting, David Gauntlett attributes this trend to the possibility (or ‘hope’, as he puts it) ‘that we are seeing a shift away from a ‘sit back and be told’ culture towards more of a ‘making and doing’ culture’.¹⁵ For Gauntlett, one of the ways in which ‘making is connecting’ is through what I call ‘co-Production’. Gauntlett explains the merits of co-Production when he writes that, ‘through making things and sharing them in the world, we increase our engagement and connection with our social and physical environments’.¹⁶

What is true of commerce, politics, and cultural performance is also true of news marketing by news makers. In his book Making the News Popular, Anthony M. Nadler writes that:

By exploring the different strategies that news makers have pursued to popularize news, I suggest that making news popular is not only a matter of responding to an audience’s preexisting interests; it is also a matter of mobilizing publics and creating new forms of feedback between news outlets and their publics.¹⁷

That passage appears under the heading ‘Mobilizing Audiences’, but it is just as much about making audiences as mobilizing them. What Walter Dill Scott said about the orator seeking to move the political masses applies equally to the newsmaker seeking to produce popular mass media: ‘The difficult task is not to convince and sway the crowd, but to create it.’¹⁸

Popularity is, of course, a double-edged sword. The ‘public’ is never a perfectly homogenous mass, and from this it follows that any given gesture to meet a demand made by one segment of the public might prove unpopular with another segment. Take Procter & Gamble’s decision in October 2019 to repackage its Always brand sanitary products by removing the Venus symbol (♀) on the basis that ‘[a]fter hearing from many people, we recognized that not everyone who has a period and needs to use a pad, identifies as female’.¹⁹ The ‘we listened to you’ trope is now a trite gesture in co-Productive mode. In this instance, the co-Produced rebranding, which was popular with many transgender users of sanitary pads, proved to be unpopular with many other users. Unpopularity with opponents of the rebranding went to the extent of a Twitter movement to #BoycottAlways or, as one wag put it, #GirlcottAlways. This example begs the question whether Procter & Gamble’s decision to repackage Always was based on a calculation of net popularity gain, leading to the supplemental question, ‘if so, did it work?’ If it wasn’t calculated to be popular, was it simply a policy decided on as a matter of principle? If that were the case, we would have come upon a most unusual creature – a global, profit-driven company with more politically sincere motives than many actual politicians. There is another possibility, which is that the marketing changes were driven neither by the desire to make a statement of political principle or the desire to appeal to any particular segment of the populace but by a cynical desire to build brand awareness. In other words, not to make a political point, or to make friends, but simply to make an impact.

For some global companies, focused techniques of co-opting consumers in the performance of their brands have become a major part of what makes them distinctive in the marketplace. One of the best examples is the use of interaction between staff, consumers, and products in Apple Inc.’s famous retail venues: Apple Stores. It has been said of the participation of the public in such spaces that it is as if we, the public, are ‘actors in the theatre’, because ‘as consumers in branded spaces we loan the brand’s character the phenomenological resources of our bodies. We play out its fictions, making them appear in three dimensions, as if they were real.’²⁰ The Always controversy shows that the same effects can be achieved in the virtual theatre spaces of social media. Whether Procter & Gamble thought about it in these terms may be doubted, but the company effectively co-opted the collaborative, user-generated force of social media, and turned consumers into ‘improv’ actors, riffing on the provocative prop (the rebranded sanitary pad) that it had set up in physical and virtual space.

The Always controversy was not Procter & Gamble’s first brush with the double-edged blade of popularity. The year 2019 began with an advertising campaign in which its Gillette brand of shaving razors ditched its traditional slogan, ‘The Best a Man Can Get’, for ‘The Best a Man Can Be’, in a move apparently calculated to distance the brand from ‘toxic masculinity’ in response to the #MeToo movement. While many of Gillette’s male customers appreciated the gesture towards positive aspects of male social behaviour, many others objected to what they perceived to be politically correct virtue signalling. For some objectors, the root of their complaint was not that a politically correct signal had been sent, but that the entity sending it was an impersonal, commercial, corporate conglomerate. It is one thing for a faceless institution to promote ideals of face-shaving, but to promote ideals of human social behaviour was perceived by its detractors to be bare-faced cheek. For all the controversy generated by the new slogan, the irony is that the traditional slogan, ‘The Best a Man Can Get’, had always equivocated between a manifesto for masculinity in grabbing mode and a manifesto in growing mode – in other words, it was never clear whether ‘get’ meant ‘to acquire’ or ‘to become’. That had been the puzzle posed by the pun all along, and the puzzle had made the slogan intriguing, engaging, and memorable. Political concerns aside, the new slogan lacks the pun and lacks the puzzle and therefore lacks the impact of the original.

The two 2019 boycotts did no harm to Procter & Gamble’s financial bottom line. On 28 December 2018, Procter & Gamble’s share price as quoted on the New York Stock Exchange was $91.18 and on 27 December 2019 it had risen to $126.09, despite the two headline-grabbing Twitter boycotts, or perhaps because of the boycotts. Speaking about the Gillette advertisement to BBC Radio 1’s Newsbeat in January 2019, Rob Saunders, an account manager at UK advertising company the Media Agency Group, emphasized the potential for publicity to triumph over unpopularity, noting that the Gillette commercial ‘is getting them good publicity and good numbers and causing a debate – which they must have known when they put out this ad’.²¹ Procter & Gamble might have been less concerned to move consumers one way or another on the issues of the debate than to make consumers take interest in the performance of its brands. The implications for politics of this species of principle-neutral or principle-equivocal brand-building are serious. It is possible, for example, that a president might be voted into power, not on the basis of rigorous policies sincerely and consistently expressed, but on no better basis than the robust and attention-grabbing nature of their own personal brand. Donald Trump is just the latest, eye-catching example of the phenomenon.

Reader-Response as Co-Production

The relevance of co-Production to making things has received some of its most serious attention in relation to novels. The very name ‘novel’ suggests something new and original, and this, combined with the fact that the novelist nearly always works alone or publishes in their sole name, can give the misleading impression that a novel is crafted in the manner of an engraved stone – to be set up as a memorial monument to one person’s genius. The reality is very different when one considers the great variety of readers who engage with a novel and the great variation in what they make of it. As you read this book, you are almost certainly reading something that I didn’t write. Text might be set in type, or even in stone, but the meaning of words can never be fixed once and for all. Words are always more or less vague, and the accuracy of the author’s expression and the reader’s interpretation will vary with mindset and physical setting – even down to such factors as the time of day and whether the text is read in a doctor’s waiting room or on a sun lounger by a swimming pool. The author’s words and expressions Produce an inchoate meaning that only approaches solidity through the confirming co-Productive activity of a critical reader. In short, this book depends for its meaning upon what you, the reader, make of it.

This idea is familiar to us nowadays as ‘reader-response theory’, which is the idea that the reader’s interpretation plays an active part in making a literary work, in something like the way that an actor or director fulfils a script, or an instrumentalist or conductor fulfils a musical score. Composer Antony Pitts concedes that ‘[t]he life of the work over which I now slave so assiduously will have a shape free from its creator’s legal reach: I cannot say how it will be interpreted and received, however hard I try’.²² Quintilian said something similar when he opined that rhetoric depends more upon the impression made on the hearer than the thought formed in the speaker.²³ It has likewise been said of painting that ‘art is not what you see, but what you make others see’.²⁴ For an example of the radical way in which an image can be made to mean something that its originator did not intend, consider the famous Vietnam War photograph of a member of the Viet Cong being executed by a policeman in broad daylight on a Saigon street. In the USA and elsewhere, the photograph became an emblem for public opposition to the Vietnam War, but the photographer Eddie Adam, who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for that image, is said to have been dismayed by this interpretation of his work. His New York Times obituary reported that he had believed the policeman’s claim ‘that the man he shot had just murdered a friend of his, a South Vietnamese army colonel, as well as the colonel’s wife and six children’, adding that Adams had later gone on to challenge viewers by asking: ‘How do you know you wouldn’t have pulled the trigger yourself?’²⁵

Ralph Waldo Emerson appreciated the dynamic of ‘reader-response’ before that label had been devised to describe it. In his speech ‘The American Scholar’, he observed that ‘[o]ne must be an inventor to read well … There is then creative reading as well as creative writing’.²⁶ To say that the reader plays a part as co-Producer of the work is not to disparage the distinctiveness of the instigator’s Productive activity. As Mary Louise Pratt writes: ‘To say that a text can be made to mean anything by readers does not require one to deny the text’s existence as a historically determined product.’²⁷ She approaches my sense of co-Production when she calls for the activities both of creating art and receiving art to be regarded as entailing ‘production of meaning according to socially constitutive signifying practices’.²⁸ In his book The Craft of Fiction, Percy Lubbock expressly acknowledges Emerson’s idea of ‘creative reading’ when he describes the task of a reader of a novel in terms of making a ‘compact fabric’ out of the impressions set forth by the novelist. This, he writes, ‘is a task which does not achieve itself without design and deliberation on the part of the reader’.²⁹ He elaborates the following expanded version of Emerson’s idea:

The reader of a novel – by which I mean the critical reader – is himself a novelist; he is the maker of a book which may or may not please his taste when it is finished, but of a book for which he must take his own share of the responsibility. The author does his part, but he cannot transfer his book like a bubble into the brain of the critic; he cannot make sure that the critic will possess his work. The reader must therefore become, for his part, a novelist, never permitting himself to suppose that the creation of the book is solely the affair of the author.³⁰

When Barthes announced the ‘death of the author’ with such assertions as his claim that ‘a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination’,³¹ it was to some extent a repetition of the idea propounded by Emerson as developed by Lubbock. There were, however, certain differences of emphasis. For one thing, Barthes targeted the habit of attributing textual meanings to the author’s biographical attributes. For another, and as befits social evolution from 1920s optimism to 1960s pessimism, whereas Lubbock had talked in positive terms of the reader as a ‘maker of a book’, Barthes’ approach can be read as a continuation or application of the Nietzschean nihilistic project of killing off the ultimate author – God. In Barthes’ words, his mission is ‘to refuse God and his hypostases – reason, science, law’.³² Of course, to talk of Barthes’ mission is to fall headlong into his trap, for it is to talk of Barthes as if he were the ruling author of the piece. It makes sense to read Barthes’ entire argument as heavily satirical (as his assault on ‘reason, science, law’ amply betrays).³³ We should therefore engage with Barthes as if he were our own spectre of Barthes. That accepted, we must interpret the spectre as we see it. We will then appreciate that the gap left by ‘the Author-God’,³⁴ has been filled by Barthes’ idea of the text as ‘a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture’.³⁵ This expresses well the sense of societal co-Production that I propose as ideal, except the idea I propose enjoys the possibility of working with the author, albeit an idea of the author that the reader has made up as if it were the author’s ghost. After all, to borrow the opening words of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, by the time the modern reader comes to a classical text there is no need to kill the author, for the author in the literal sense ‘was dead: to begin with’. From Barthes’ observation that ‘[t]he reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost’,³⁶ it follows that the space of the reader’s imagination is haunted by the ghost of the author and to some degree inhabited by the resurrected author. Barthes concludes that ‘the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author’, but a more hopeful vision is one in which the reader works co-Productively with the author (the idea of the author, the author’s ghost) to make something new. It is precisely this respect for tradition in the course of making something novel that characterizes all great works of craft and art, including both law and literature.

Lubbock’s preferred term for making is ‘creation’. This was also Emerson’s preferred word. A reader’s contribution to a novel is Creation in my sense of that word in so far as the critical reading of the work enacts an amplification, development, or enlargement of the text. Likewise, to talk of the reader as ‘Creator’ accurately informs us that reading develops the ‘original’ book into something larger, more expansive, more full of meanings. Emerson also referred to the reader of a book as ‘an inventor’ of the book. That is only accurate in my etymological definition of the word Invention to the extent that the book as read can be considered a new thing from the book as written. For the sake of distinguishing different modes of making, Invention is more usefully limited to the origination of the idea of the book rather than its subsequent Creation and Production (always admitting that these definitions, when considered as temporal stages, are bound to overlap). The reader, correspondingly, is best thought of as making in the mode of ‘co-Production’, for this emphasizes that the original was not fully made until the thing was read in critical mode by someone other than the writer. We are permitted through our readings to make something new. Some of the most brilliant effects and interpretations of Shakespeare’s texts, for example, are ones produced by scholars, directors, and actors engaging with his works in ways which the playwright surely did not foresee.

Made in Translation

‘The Theory of Production’ set out by G. Wilson Knight, in his book Shakespearean Production, proposes an idea of dramatic production that resembles Emerson’s idea of creative reading and chimes with my idea of participatory co-Production. Knight argues that ‘we must not start where Shakespeare left off, but rather start with Shakespeare and go with him’.³⁷ He writes that the theatrical producer ought not to present a play to the public as if merely communicating a thing completed by Shakespeare: ‘The producer’s business is not translation, but re-creation.’³⁸ While I approve of Knight’s understanding of co-operative Production, I do not agree that ‘translation’ should be contrasted with ‘re-creation’ as if translation were not itself a process of making. Translation is actually an exemplary instance of making and specifically in the mode of co-Production. Knight’s error of contrasting making with translation in the context of making theatre has also been committed by Isaiah Berlin in the context of making laws. Berlin writes:

Legislation is not the making of laws (that would be more properly called ‘legisfaction’). Legislation is the translation into legal terms of something which is to be found in nature: ends, purposes.³⁹

Translation, which is etymologically a ‘carrying across’, is a highly skilful process of making through which an original is remade into something new and even into something improved. Susan Bassnett, a pioneering scholar of translation studies, laments that ‘so much time should have been spent on discussing what is lost [in translation] whilst ignoring what can also be gained, for the translator can at times enrich or clarify the [source] text as a direct result of the translation process’.⁴⁰ Translation, on this view, is a species of Creation by which the original is enlarged, and it is a species of co-Production through which an expert, critical reader brings forward something new (and sometimes improved) out of the original published work.

For James Boyd White, participation in the Production of something new from the past, in something like the manner of Emerson’s creative reader, is an art of translation. In his book Justice as Translation, he identifies translation as the central work of an excellent judge when called upon to respond to new cases using the precedents of the past:

Authority … lies in a kind of respectful interaction between mind and material, past and present, in which each has its proper contribution to make: not simply in the tradition, then, but in the tradition as it is reconstituted in the present text.⁴¹

White adds that the participatory process of translation is central to the lawyer’s craft:

The art of the lawyer, like that of the judge, is to put together the prior texts that are the material of law in new compositions, which, while respecting the nature of each item, so order them as to create a new arrangement with a meaning of its own.⁴²

In the two preceding quotations, White uses the words ‘respectful’ and ‘respecting’ respectively. Respect is the key. Like any rhetorical craft, translation must respect the original materials, respect the community to whom it is communicated, and self-reflexively respect the craft of translation.

Public Participation in Judicial Production

This section brings in another important element in the judicial tradition, and one with powerful implications for the ‘court of popular opinion’. It is the idea that the public good is the sovereign consideration underlying the authority of the legislature and that the commonwealth of the people is the prime purpose to which the common law ought to be directed. What Cicero made the motto of judges in Republican Rome must apply as well to judges in all civilized systems of law: salus populi suprema lex esto (‘the safety of the people shall be their highest law’).⁴³ Writing in relation to legislation, Thomas Hobbes asserts that:

The Legislator in all Common-wealths, is only the Soveraign, be he one Man, as in a Monarchy, or one Assembly of men, as in a Democracy or Aristocracy. For the Legislator, is he that maketh the Law.⁴⁴

He then identifies an important additional prerequisite for the legitimacy of laws – that the laws as published ought to be demonstrably derived from an authoritative source:

Nor is it enough the Law be written, and published; but also that there be manifest signs, that it proceedeth from the will of the Soveraign … There is therefore requisite, not only a Declaration of the Law, but also sufficient signes of the Author, and Authority.⁴⁵

Hobbes’ demand for ‘manifest signs’ is a call for the legitimacy of law-making to be publicly performed, not only at the point of publication as if Production of law was the entire process of law-making, but also performed in such a way that the entire process of law-making will be manifest as an integrated practice progressing from Invention to Creation to Production. The sovereign will is the notional source or fountainhead of legislative law in every nation, so what Hobbes is saying here is that the integrity of law requires that the law as published must be demonstrably and directly the product of sovereign will. He was speaking to a different time and constitutional situation to ours, but the principle still holds good. To use the fluvial metaphor, we can say that when the law flows out to the wide public sea, it must be seen to derive in an unbroken stream from the sovereign source. In Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘The Reeds of Runnymede’ (about the signing of Magna Carta at Runnymede on the river Thames in 1215), the river Thames is his symbol of a sovereign will that is of prince and people without being tyrannical or populist:

And still when mob or Monarch lays

Too rude a hand on English ways,

The whisper wakes, the shudder plays,

Across the reeds at Runnymede.

And Thames, that knows the moods of kings,

And crowds and priests and suchlike things,

Rolls deep and dreadful as he brings

Their warning down from Runnymede!

As the river runs to the sea and the sea supplies rain clouds to the river’s source, so the sovereign will of the people – represented in such communal concepts as the ‘commonwealth’ and the ‘common law’ – courses through a circle of authorship and accountability in law-making. Or, to use the horticultural metaphor, we can say that the law produced to market must be grown untainted and unmixed from the sovereign seed. This amounts to a demand for sincerity, for the etymology of ‘sincerity’ denotes integrity between seed, growth, and crop.⁴⁶ It also amounts to a demand for a manifest process that brings with it a considered pace in making decisions. Plants do not grow instantly from seed to crop and neither do waters run in a single moment to the sea from their mountain spring.

Creativity was a large theme for German legal philosopher Josef Kohler. One of his essays, published in 1887, is entitled ‘The Creative Force of Jurisprudence’ (‘Die schöpferische Kraft der Jurisprudenz’). Another is ‘On the Task of Jurisprudence in Industrial Law’ (‘Uber die Aufgabe der Jurisprudenz im Industrierechte’), where he writes eloquently, even poetically, about the Production of law by analogy to cycles of natural and industrial growth:

The strongest tree needs its period of growth, and industrial law also needs its time. Every right is sterile so long as it has not been absorbed by the circles of production; Law builds its place in the feeling of productive trade.⁴⁷

How perceptive it is to say that law ‘needs its time’. The same is true of justice and human judgment. Invention can occur in an instant – like a lightning flash sparked from the hand of God – but Creation takes time. Failure to appreciate the necessary factor of time is frequently a feature of popular impatience with the pace of parliamentary and judicial reaction to social change.

Nowadays we take it for granted that the public gives legitimacy to legislation, not only as co-Productive receiver of published law, but also in so far as public consent is implied at the point of the law’s origin as a condition of the social contract by which governmental authority is legitimated. In short, the people are understood to be the ultimate source of sovereignty in a democratic state. Which, of course, is the etymological meaning of the word ‘demos-cracy’. Josef Kohler argued that the will of the law-maker must be considered sociologically as being itself a construct of the culture in which the law-maker lives:

[R]ules of law are not to be interpreted according to the thought and will of the law-maker, but they are to be interpreted sociologically, they are to be interpreted as products of the whole people, whose organ the law-maker has become.⁴⁸

Even in a monarchy it is the people, not the princes, that are supposed to embody the sovereign will, and it is the implied consent or inferred well-being of the people that is understood to put the ‘common’ in ‘commonwealth’ and in ‘common law’ so as to turn the law from a set of rules into a legitimate scheme for the maintenance of social welfare. The monarch, as chief of the tribe, is not the whole body of national sovereignty but merely its symbolic head. The animating spirit of the whole body politic – the urge that drives the entire dramatic play of state – is the sovereign will of the people. An old maxim of English law recorded in Henry de Bracton’s De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae (c. 1235) asserts ‘lex facit regem’ – ‘law makes the king’.⁴⁹ The early modern legal antiquarian John Selden doubtless had the maxim in mind when he wrote that ‘KING is a thing Men have made for their own Sakes’.⁵⁰ As law makes the monarch, so law is made by the people or by the interests of the people (the safety of the people being the highest law – salus populi suprema lex esto). There is even a sense in which the legitimacy of a new monarch depends directly upon popular consent, a fact that is recognized in the collective acclamation (the collauditio) ‘God save the Queen/King!’ which is proclaimed three times in the coronation ceremony of the British monarch. Every time the British national anthem is sung, its first three lines (‘God save our gracious King! / Long live our noble King! / God save the King!’) perform an echo of the threefold collaudatio and serve to confirm the people’s coronation consent. The monarch is of course made by birth and by blood, but this is merely to say that the monarch is made in the Inventive sense that he or she ‘comes into’ the crown. The monarch is not fully made until the accession and coronation ceremonials (complete with the collaudatio consent of the Commons and the clergy) confirm the making of the monarch in the developmental or Creative sense and the making of the monarch in the publicized or Productive sense. Blood ‘Invents’ the monarch, but the consent of the Commons ‘Creates’ and ‘Produces’ the monarch. The collaudatio is an element in the Creative process and also serves to perform the Production of the monarch to public scrutiny and approval. Thus, by the light of the three Etymologies of Making, we can elucidate the seemingly paradoxical fact that a monarch is made by inheritance but not made until coronation.

A. W. Dicey, the respected historian and theorist of UK constitutional law, once observed that ‘[l]aw and opinion are … so intermixed that it is difficult to say whether opinion has done most to produce legislation or laws to create a state of legislative opinion’.⁵¹ Dicey was talking about nineteenth-century reforming legislation on the status of married women in England. Gravitating to the same quotation from Dicey, Gary Slapper notes that ‘[i]n calculating why the population in the UK has become less racist and sexist since the 1960s, one factor clearly of some relevance and weight is the fact that such discrimination was declared unlawful in many circumstances by Parliament’.⁵² Slapper’s theory is supported by Dicey’s opinion that:

Laws foster or create law-making opinion … Every law or rule of conduct must, whether its author perceives the fact or not, lay down or rest upon some general principle, and must therefore, if it succeeds in attaining its end, commend this principle to public attention.⁵³

Dicey adds as an extremely important further observation that public acceptance of particular legislative provisions is not necessary for the legislature to succeed in implementing its original statutory intention. It will suffice for the success of the law-making project that the legislature generates in the public a sentiment of participation in the Production of the law. Indeed, it is surely more desirable that the legislation should be successful because the process has broad social acceptance than that it should be successful in a technical sense. In relation to this, Dicey writes expressly of the ‘production’ of popular affirmation:

Nor is the success of a law necessary for the production of this effect. A principle derives prestige from its mere recognition by Parliament … The true importance, indeed, of laws lies far less in their direct result than in their effect upon the sentiment or convictions of the public.⁵⁴

This is an admission, or acknowledgement, that Parliament is concerned with pure performance. Like the judicial law-maker, the parliamentary law-maker is not so much determined that justice should be done as concerned that justice should be seen to be done. To illustrate this phenomenon, Dicey cites the example of the Reform Act 1832 (which, while still limited to males, and to only one in five adult males, greatly expanded the range and social status of eligible voters):

[T]he transcendent importance of the Act lay in its effect upon public opinion. Reform thus regarded was revolution. It altered the way in which people thought of the constitution, and taught Englishmen, once and for all, that venerable institutions which custom had made unchangeable could easily, and without the use of violence, be changed.⁵⁵

A more recent illustration of the phenomenon is the radical reform enacted by the New Zealand Parliament when it legislated to recognize the legal personality of the Whanganui River.⁵⁶ Just as the Reform Act 1832 struck a previously inconceivable blow for parliamentary representation of the people (and opened the way for universal suffrage), the Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act 2017 struck a revolutionary blow for the parliamentary representation of First Nations people and for the natural environment as they relate to it. As with the 1832 Act, the importance of the 2017 Act arguably resides more in its performed response to public opinion and its potential to reform public opinion than in any technical effects of its provisions in practice.

In her book The Mind of the Maker, Dorothy L. Sayers acknowledges the people to be the ultimate source of sovereignty where she writes that ‘opinion is the authority’:

An arbitrary law unsupported by a consensus of opinion will not be properly enforced and will in the end fall into disrepute and have to be rescinded or altered. This happened to the Prohibition Laws in America.⁵⁷

America should have seen it coming. After all, the opening three words of the US Constitution are ‘We the people’, for it is expressly of the essence of a non-monarchical republic that it is re publica – a thing of the people.⁵⁸ In a modern constitutional monarchy the principle is the same, albeit performed through different symbols. In the USA, the chief is the president, in the UK it is the monarch. It might fairly be said that in practice the USA and many other republics founded in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are a good deal more monarchical than the UK, for younger republics are still at the stage in which the symbolic head wields real executive power. In the UK, the power of the monarch is the pure power of symbolic performance rather than the executive power of a democratically elected official. This is not to deny the significance of purely symbolic power. As Prince Philip said in 1977, the year of Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee: ‘People still respond more easily to symbolism than to reason’, adding, ‘[t]he idea of chieftainship in its representative rather than its governing function is still just as clearly and even instinctively understood’.⁵⁹ Whereas the UK has stripped all real governmental power from its prince, modern republics elevate their presidents to princely status and endow them with all the mystique and magic of royalty, with this crucial limitation – that their power is temporary and does not descend to the incumbent’s blood relations. The USA has monarchs for the day. Chapter 4 of this book began with President Joe Biden’s Inaugural Address, in which he called upon the people to ‘reject a culture in which facts themselves are manipulated and even manufactured’. The irony is that the first and founding fact that the people make when they make their electoral choice at the ballot box is nothing other than the artefact of their chief.

The Co-Productive Influence of the Mob: Going with the Flow

We will conclude this chapter on populism and introduce the next chapter on ‘fake news’ with some thoughts on mob dynamics in mass movements and their implications for mass media. The word ‘mob’ is an abbreviation of the Latin mobile vulgus, which translates as the moveable mass of common people. The authors of the chapter ‘Persuasion and Ballot Propositions’ have this sense of the moveable mob in mind where they write that, ‘when it comes to ballot propositions, voter opinions are like balloons in the wind, easily blown about’.⁶⁰ The first appearance of the Latin phrase mobile vulgus in an English text was in 1602 when the recusant Roman Catholic priest William Watson, an advocate of secular priests and in that matter an opponent of the Jesuits, referred to the ‘mobile vulgus in England’.⁶¹ The fickleness of the populace and fear of the mob was a pervading theme in the period surrounding the death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603. Indeed, the same William Watson was executed that year for plotting to kidnap the new Protestant king of England, James I. Further plots followed, culminating in the Jesuits’ infamous ‘Gunpowder Plot’ to assassinate the king in Parliament in 1605. Around 1607, against this backdrop of priestly plotting and the ever present fear of rumour and revolt, Shakespeare expressed the fickleness of the common populace poetically in Octavius’ powerful metaphor of a ‘flag’ (an iris or other rootless water plant) that sways and eventually decays in the motion of a river:

… This common body,

Like to a vagabond flag upon the stream,

Goes to and back, lackeying the varying tide,

To rot itself with motion.

(Antony and Cleopatra, 1.4.44–47)

What a striking image this is for the recently coined idea of the mobile vulgus as a rootless, moving mass. The movement of the river sways, dislodges, sways, carries, sways, corrupts, and eventually, we can suppose, swirls the broken stems into a stagnant side-water where they spin among themselves. Movement moves the mass, but, crucially, movement also makes the mass. Anyone who has ever watched vegetation floating on a river will attest to the dynamic by which the activity of going with the flow gathers the detritus together into a new mass – Shakespeare’s ‘common body’ – matted together by the motion of the flow. The orator who wishes to manipulate the people must likewise both make and move. As Walter Dill Scott wrote in his 1907 study The Psychology of Public Speaking: ‘The orator who is able to weld his audience into a homogeneous crowd has already won his hardest fight. The difficult task is not to convince and sway the crowd, but to create it’.⁶² President Donald Trump showed himself adept at creating a crowd in the form of the ‘Make America Great Again’ movement (and through reciprocal co-Production it is also true that the crowd made him after the model of Bourdieu’s ‘group made man’),⁶³ but he learned to his shame and to the cost of civil peace that a crowd once created is easily moved but much less easily steered. On 6 January 2021, Donald Trump’s supporters violently stormed the US Capitol Building in an attempt to thwart the Senate’s confirmation of Joe Biden’s election as US president. Writing in The Atlantic, Joan Donovan echoed Shakespeare’s aquatic analogy for the mob, when she observed that ‘[t]he moment at which the “Make America great again” movement became completely unmoored from the democratic process arrived at around 1 p.m. on January 6’.⁶⁴

Gustave Le Bon’s 1895 treatise Psychologie des Foules was extremely significant in establishing crowd psychology as a subject of scholarly inquiry.⁶⁵ It has been called ‘one of the best-selling scientific books in history’,⁶⁶ and ‘[p]erhaps the most influential book ever written in social psychology’.⁶⁷ It is not without its detractors, and it has not always been an influence for the good. It is thought, for instance, that Hitler’s techniques of propaganda and performance oratory were inspired in part by Le Bon’s theories.⁶⁸ Le Bon’s key analogy for explaining crowd psychology was his idea that an individual is mesmerized through immersion in a crowd and will go with the (magnetic) flow. He endeavoured to provide a scientific account for the observed phenomenon of the mass mind:

The most careful observations seem to prove that an individual immerged for some length of time in a crowd in action soon finds himself – either in consequence of the magnetic influence given out by the crowd, or from some other cause of which we are ignorant – in a special state, which much resembles the state of fascination in which the hypnotised individual finds himself in the hands of the hypnotiser.⁶⁹

When Adolf Hitler observed the same phenomenon of the mass mind, he resorted to spiritual and mystical explanations, including notions of ‘enthusiasm’ and ‘magic influence’ by which the crowd is ‘swept away’.⁷⁰ What their preferred analogies have in common – Le Bon’s scientific and Hitler’s mystical (and, for that matter, Shakespeare’s metaphor of the floating iris) – is the sense of going with the flow that is inherent in the idea of ‘influence’. It is sobering to think that for today’s social media demagogue – the online ‘influencer’ – the flow of the mob has become their very badge.

The ground had been laid for Le Bon’s thinking by the theories of earlier political theorists, not least John Stuart Mill. Writing in the mid-nineteenth century, Mill had warned that democracy might produce a ‘tyranny of the majority’, observing that:

At present individuals are lost in the crowd. The only power deserving the name is that of masses, and of governments while they make themselves the organ of the tendencies and instincts of masses.⁷¹

When Le Bon observed that it is ‘terrible at times to think of the power that strong conviction combined with extreme narrowness of mind gives a man possessing prestige’,⁷² he doubtless had in mind the examples of tyrants, despots, and demagogues throughout history and in his own time. He also anticipated the demagogues of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The protagonists vary from time to time, but the story never changes.

What is the relationship between ‘fake news’ and processes of creating and moving crowds? An answer suggests itself when we take seriously the fluvial metaphor that is the root of our word ‘influence’, and which pervades our language of ‘mainstream’ media, the ‘flow’ of news, internet ‘streaming’, and even the ‘current’ in ‘current affairs’. Le Bon understood crowd mentality by means of a fluvial metaphor. When the individual’s psychology is submerged in the mass mind (as opposed to being merely one among a ‘number of individuals finding themselves accidentally side by side’), it is submerged, he says, by some ‘influence’ of ‘certain predisposing causes’. Recalling Shakespeare’s image of the flowing stream which creates, carries, and corrupts the crowd, we can conceive of the mainstream media as the current or flow of news within which the popular mass of people is congregated and carried along. Baudrillard’s view was that information streaming from the media did not inform the masses, but that it merely ‘produces even more mass’.⁷³ Putting his own spin on Marshall McLuhan’s famous assertion that ‘the medium is the message’, Baudrillard writes that ‘[t]he mass and the media are one single process. Mass(age) is the message.’⁷⁴

What was Le Bon’s wisdom on the activity of crowds, and in what ways did Hitler apply similar thinking to his own propaganda and performative oratory? Christian Borch suggests a number of possibilities.⁷⁵ One is that ‘Le Bon pinned his faith neither on education nor on enlightenment’ but advised rather that ‘one should apply seductive measures and try to appeal affectively to the crowd through rhetorical techniques’.⁷⁶ Hitler believed similarly that effective political propaganda must be emotionally affective rather than intellectual and ought to be levelled as directly as possible at the mob (‘addressed always and exclusively to the masses’, and not to the ‘scientifically trained intelligentsia’).⁷⁷ Another rhetorical technique recommended by Le Bon was the device of repetitio. Hitler held that ‘all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan’.⁷⁸ He advised, as Borch summarizes it, that one ‘should make blunt, simple statements and repeat them over and over again; this would gradually mould the mind of the crowd’.⁷⁹ According to this moulding metaphor, the mind of the crowd is made up by repeated impressions, as clay is moulded through the repetitive manipulative printing and pressing of fingers. Today such repeated pressing home of a single point or short slogan is a staple of modern news reporting that goes by the name of the ‘sound bite’. It is also a staple of bite-sized social media platforms, of which Twitter is exemplary. So it was that Donald Trump’s election slogan ‘Make America Great Again’ was able, through repetition in various media, to mould a mass in its own image. When that mass moved on the Capitol Building on 6 January 2021, it may be that Trump did not foresee that this would be the outcome of his manipulations, but his was undoubtedly the influence – the flow – which made and moved the mob.

11 Faking News

They can make anything bad, because they are the fake, fake disgusting news.

Donald Trump¹

All news is fake news. By this I mean that all reports of current events are to some extent ‘made up’ by the time they are received by a mediated consumer distanced from the original source. Recall that ‘fake’, from the Latin facere (to make, to do), is a member of the family of making words that includes fact, factory, fashion, artificial, and face. Also in that family is the name of one of the main players in the realm of fake news: Facebook. One study found that in the final three months of the 2016 US presidential campaign, ‘the top-performing fake election news stories on Facebook generated more engagement than the top stories from major news outlets’.² With all these facere words in mind, it is ironic that the standard test for whether news is ‘fake’ is to subject it to ‘fact-checking’. Facts themselves are things – artefacts – that we make through artificial processes of Creation and Production. Any ‘fact’ deserving of the name is something established by some process involving human skill and judgment. What matters is not whether news or facts are made up – they always are – but how they are made up and what relation there is between the thing at source and the thing as made up for public reception. Public reception also plays its part in the broadcast of fake news. Whereas an electronic radio receiver is passive, the human receiver of a message ‘is an active producer of meanings’.³ We therefore need to think in terms of what I call ‘Receiver Responsibility’, from the case of the journalist who receives the factual grain of a promising story, to the editor who publishes journalists’ copy, to the online user who retweets a tweet.

The UK’s Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee concluded that the term ‘fake news’ is ‘bandied around with no clear idea of what it means’ and that it ‘has taken on a variety of meanings, including a description of any statement that is not liked or agreed with by the reader’.⁴ The committee recommended that the government should reject the phrase and instead adopt a ‘definition of the words “misinformation” and “disinformation”’.⁵ The government agreed, and reported in its response that its latest practice is to define disinformation as ‘the deliberate creation and sharing of false and/or manipulated information that is intended to deceive and mislead audiences, either for the purposes of causing harm, or for political, personal or financial gain’ and to define ‘misinformation’ as ‘inadvertent sharing of false information’.⁶ This definitional distinction between the deliberate and the accidental might produce an improvement in discourse in relation to misleading news, but the word ‘fake’ – derived as it is from facere ‘to make’ – does at least have the merit of bringing to the fore the Making Sense that human agency is at work at every stage in which headlines are made. I have therefore chosen to retain the contentious term ‘fake news’ as a catch-all for processes of making news.⁷

Objections to the use of the phrase ‘fake news’ are also mindful of the fact that the phrase itself has been used as a method of faking. When ‘fake news’ was chosen as the ‘word of the year’ by the Macquarie Dictionary in 2016 and by both the Collins English Dictionary and the American Dialect Society in 2017, it was largely down to Donald Trump’s use of the phrase to accuse the mainstream or established professional media of publishing falsehoods. The quotation from Donald Trump at the top of this chapter shows that the accusation ‘fake news’ can itself be ‘fake news’. When Donald Trump objects to fake news, we often find that the news in question isn’t objectively falsifiable but is simply news that he dislikes. Trump’s technique is an example of a rhetorical strategy by which a person implies their own creditworthiness by calling out the falsehood of others. A similar phenomenon has been observed when politicians disparage rhetoric, even as they use it. Former BBC Director General Mark Thompson has cautioned that we should not ‘make the mistake of confusing anti-rhetorical “truth-telling” with actually telling the truth’:

One of the advantages of noisily rejecting any notion of rhetoric is that, once listeners are convinced you’re not trying to deceive them in the manner of regular politicians, they may switch off the critical faculties they usually apply to political speech and forgive you any amount of exaggeration, contradiction or offensiveness.⁸

We are quite rightly suspicious of allegations of ‘fake news’, especially when levelled against professional news media, but there is also a danger in rejecting out-of-hand the possibility that mainstream news is ‘fake’. The danger is that the public, knowing full well that the business of the mainstream media is to Create and to Produce news, might see defensive resistance to accusations of ‘fake news’ as a denial of the role that professional media undoubtedly play in making news. It would be better to acknowledge that all news is made up, so that by attending diligently to the fabrication process the public might discern where the source (the seed) stops and media creativity starts. The danger, otherwise, is that a cynical public will reject the whole thing, and in the process throw out the grain of truth.

Media as Fakers

That all news is fake news does not mean that news should never be believed, but it does mean that we should be attentive to the ways in which, and the extent to which, the news as we receive it has been manipulated by human intervention, whether by accident or design. Respecting the difference between different Etymologies of Making (i.e. between Invention, Creation, and Production) will shine a light on the difference between creditworthy and uncreditworthy reports. Take the common case where there is a grain of truth at the source of a news story. If we consider this grain to be the seed of the news story, we can say that the reporter did not Invent the seed, except in so far as they made a choice in the very act of identifying the seed as a potential story. A news story in its seed form is essentially a found thing rather than a fabricated or faked thing. On the other hand, the stages that follow in bringing the story to public attention are active processes of making that generally afford the maker time to consider their own responsibility for the role they play in the making process. Those stages, which we normally refer to as ‘developing’ and ‘publishing’ the story, correspond respectively to the Etymologies of Making that I call ‘Creation’ and ‘Production’. We can quibble about the difference between making headlines and faking news, but the pejorative sense in which the word ‘fake’ is employed is a distraction from the point that even creditworthy news is to some extent made up. In her book Making the News, political scientist Amber E. Boydstun acknowledges that the ‘news-generation process’ is a ‘craft’.⁹ A news reporter might not Invent the seed of the story, but they will always have a hand in cultivating it Creatively and Producing it to the public.

How often have we read a news story and thought to ourselves, ‘well, it might be true, but this outlet is making the most of it’? Sometimes a private or obscure event only becomes a matter of public concern through the very act of its publication, so that the news outlet can in such a case be said to have made the story in terms of Creation and Production so far as its public impact is concerned. For example, it is not uncommon to read that some lout in a small town has desecrated or disrespected a war memorial. This is certainly liable to cause public outrage, but probably only a small section of the public would have been outraged if the press hadn’t given the incident the oxygen of publicity. In quantitative terms, the activity of the press is the source of more public outrage than the activity of the offender. It is true that the news outlet didn’t make the story out of nothing, but it did make the seed grow and it made a market for its product. This observation is not intended to advocate suppression or censorship of the press, but merely to highlight that the media are far from passive in the activity of news Production. The very word ‘media’ can misleadingly suggest that the press, television, and so forth are passive conduits, but it is more accurate to regard news as always being to some extent media-made. There are few spectacles more unedifying than the performed indignant outrage of a media outlet when, in the very act of reporting an antisocial occurrence (often with a view to titillating its own readership), it does more to spread the stench and smear than the original perpetrator would ever have achieved without the media’s co-Productive assistance. The very best professional journalists can sometimes overlook the part that they play in generating stories. A fairly innocuous example appears from a BBC news comment made in response to a 2019 judgment of the UK Supreme Court. When the court held that the UK government had acted unlawfully in seeking to prorogue Parliament in the midst of the Brexit dispute,¹⁰ the BBC’s assistant political editor, Norman Smith, announced that ‘[t]he chorus of voices calling for Boris Johnson to quit will now grow louder’.¹¹ The rhetorical apostrophe to the ‘chorus of voices’, as if they were ‘out there’ somewhere, distracts us from the fact that the reporter’s own voice is one of the loudest and most influential in raising the possibility of the prime minister’s resignation. Mr Smith wasn’t reporting news; he was making it. In predicting events and passing judgment, he was acting as a co-Producer of the news of Mr Johnson’s possible resignation.

On the subject of journalists being complicit in making news, a pronounced problem in the age of online news reporting is journalists and their editors resorting to lazy ‘clickbait’ headlines to draw readers in. The phenomenon is partly attributable to the fact that the news flow on social media has increased commercial competition in an already highly competitive online market for reader attention.¹² A glaring example of this clickbait phenomenon can be found in the sports section of the Liverpool Echo, a local newspaper in the UK that has been subsumed within a media group that now controls more than 200 regional newspapers with a significant online presence. My suspicion was aroused when I read the headline ‘Liverpool Manager Jurgen Klopp Has No Sympathy for Departing Manchester United Boss Jose Mourinho’.¹³ It struck me as being inconsistent with Mr Klopp’s famously fair treatment of sporting opponents. True enough, the main body of the article contained the line: ‘Asked if he had sympathy for the ex-United boss, Klopp said: “100% … ”’. The headline baited with the promise of zero sympathy, but in the bite the substance revealed 100 per cent sympathy. When professional journalism stoops to such blatant window dressing to sell its wares, what hope is there that members of the public using social media will put forward an accurate picture of current affairs?

Among the British tabloid ‘red tops’ few offenders are more infamous for producing dubious headlines than The Sun, and no instance is more notorious than the appalling lies it published in the aftermath of the 1989 tragedy at the Hillsborough football stadium in Sheffield, England, which caused the deaths of ninety-seven fans of Liverpool Football Club. The deaths were caused by the failings of officials responsible for crowd management, but a few days after the tragedy The Sun, under the editorship of Kelvin MacKenzie, carried the bold front-page headline ‘The Truth’. The headline was followed by the following bullet points: ‘Some fans picked pockets of victims’, ‘Some fans urinated on the brave cops’, and ‘Some fans beat up PC giving kiss of life’.¹⁴ Each of those statements was an unsubstantiated lie, which The Sun eventually retracted on its front page in 2012 (twenty-three years after the tragedy). On 26 April 2016, an inquest confirmed that the fans who died had been unlawfully killed and that no misbehaviour by the fans had contributed to their deaths. The day after that inquest there was no mention of the jury’s verdict on the front page of The Sun. The Sun’s more respectable sister paper, The Times, which was guilty of the same omission, was shamed into correcting the error in its second edition. The sheer sensationalism of the original headline would have made it seductive to the minds of many who, having not been there in person, were ignorant of the very different reality of that tragic event. And this is the nub of the problem. Remote consumers of news weren’t there when it happened, if indeed ‘it’ happened at all. Remote consumers see the current of affairs when it happens to flow past them but are seldom present at the source. Accordingly, our responsibility as members of the mass to which mass media market their wares is to stand against the flow of false news; to dam damn lies. If The Sun had published its original Hillsborough headline in the internet age, we must hope that the jury of the public, including eyewitnesses, would have countered the dishonest news with its own true account of that terrible event.

In 2018, the presenter of a BBC radio show observed in a general way that the British newspaper readership has become desensitized to the sensationalism of its tabloid press, saying, ‘I suspect that most of us are not too alarmed by this manner of adding dramatic lustre to routine news stories. It’s what the tabloids do … get over it!’, but he wonders if this complacency might ‘be a little bit more dangerous when such dramatization is applied to political stories and political information; and, when we live in an era when such representations receive hugely increased audiences via all those various digital platforms?’¹⁵

Law-makers in Germany, ever mindful that the Holocaust (Shoah) was fuelled by political propaganda, have contemplated the possible criminalization of fake news.¹⁶ Something must be done, of course, but how is criminalization to be achieved without making judges the arbiters of the difference between the illegitimate ‘fake’ and the legitimate ‘fact’? In a liberal democracy, that judgment ought ideally to be left to individual readers or consumers of news. If the aim is to prevent a nation state from turning totalitarian, it must surely be counterproductive to concentrate enlarged powers of censorship in official hands. A related problem is the need for an objective assay of the difference between ‘fake’ and ‘fact’. Computer science researchers in the UK have observed that ‘[r]egulatory or other mechanisms that might be introduced to disrupt, interdict or remove “fake news” from social media will confront serious challenges in robustly identifying what is or is not “fake news”’.¹⁷ Those researchers identify ‘fake news’ as a serious threat to consensus building on political issues, but that merely pushes the question back to asking, ‘whose consensus, and what type of consensus?’. There are many worthwhile political aims (preventing totalitarianism being chief among them), the pursuit of which requires that certain forms of consensus should be broken down rather than built up.

The Public as Fakers: Receiver Responsibility

Alongside journalists and other members of the professional news media, the public must take some responsibility for making false news through propagation. It is significant that the Dictionary.com ‘word of the year’ for 2018 was ‘misinformation’ – a synonym for a species of fake news – and its ‘word of the year’ in 2017 had been ‘complicit’. We are all complicit in misinformation whenever we propagate it or act upon it. It is a mistake to suppose that a story is only made by the original author. It is remade every time it is shared, for the act of passing on the story to others contributes to the Creation of the story in the etymological sense of in-creasing its influence and impact. Sharing a story also contributes to making the story by Producing it to a new audience. It follows that the consumer of ‘fake news’ becomes a co-Creator and co-Producer of falsehood whenever they pass it on, for example by retweeting it or even by the simple act of ‘liking’ a social media news report. It would be regrettable enough that this should occur when the consumer personally believes the falsehood, but journalism scholar Alfred Hermida notes that ‘[e]ven if some don’t quite believe it, they will share an article with the aim of entertaining, exciting or enraging friends and acquaintances’.¹⁸ Neither can we rule out the possibility of the innocent and mistaken propagation of false news. Not everyone has the time and skill to check the available evidence behind a news story. A BBC news feature about the spread of stories about false Covid-19 cures contained the following conversation between the reporter, Sima Kotecha, and her mother:

Sima Kotecha: This video you’ve sent me mum, where’s it come from?

Mother: Someone called Chetna Ben sent me this video.

Sima Kotecha: You don’t believe it do you?

Mother: No, I don’t believe it.¹⁹

Such conversations are no doubt very common. They suggest that online sharing is sometimes a banal, almost automatic action; one that isn’t calculated to harm but is employed merely as a convenient vehicle for maintaining contact with friends and family.

To err is human. Even well-intentioned experts sometimes make mistakes. For all my best efforts to check my sources, there will no doubt be a word or two out of place among the many thousands of words in this book. An example of an innocent error appears, with some irony, in a recent piece on fake news written for an Oxford University Press publication. The academic author mistakenly claims that ‘fake news’ was the OED’s ‘word of the year’ for 2016, whereas it was actually ‘post-truth’. An understandable slip, but the weeds of fake news can grow from misplaced seeds.

Much more alarming than the commission of an innocent error is the possibility that the propagator of fake news knows that the story is fake and simply doesn’t care. One of the problems with fake news in political contexts is that ‘politicians no longer care about telling the truth, but only about the “optics” – how a given situation will play out in the media and the likely “narrative” that will be constructed around it’;²⁰ and also that the public – the ones responsible for construing the optics and constructing the narrative out of politicians’ words – don’t care either. Dorothy L. Sayers identified this aspect of the problem as long ago as 1941 in her study The Mind of the Maker, when she observed that ‘[t]he Press and the Law are in this condition because the public do not care whether they are being told truth or not’.²¹ Politicians must take their share of the blame for promoting and exploiting this truth-casual behaviour. A blatant example of ‘the ends justify the means’ reasoning occurred in November 2017 when President Trump retweeted videos purporting to show violent behaviour by Muslims. The videos had originally been tweeted by an officer of Britain First, an extreme right-wing organization. When reporters challenged President Trump’s then press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, regarding the veracity of the videos, she replied: ‘Whether it’s a real video, the threat is real’, adding that Trump’s ‘goal is to promote strong border security and strong national security … the need for national security and military spending – those are very real things, there’s nothing fake about that’. She could hardly have relied more blatantly on the fallacy that real ends justify phoney means.²²

Politicians as Fakers

Before we turn to consider politicians as fakers, we should recall the point made in earlier chapters that the very essence of statecraft is to fabricate the idea of the nation state, to build political consensus, and to make social peace. Rhetorically constituted democracies have always been deeply reliant on the Making Sense, and this has often entailed the recognition of ideals that do not – or do not yet – correspond to present empirical reality. No modern nation state has been more consciously, deliberately, and artificially created through rhetorical performance than the United States of America, and at the heart of the performance is a call to accept the show and to suspend disbelief. Consider that the US Declaration of Independence was declared, as its opening paragraph says, out of ‘decent respect to the opinions of mankind’; in other words, to appeal to the judgment of an audience of critical public spectators. The second paragraph begins with those famous words:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

The transcendental truth that human beings are equal in the eyes of God is not, and never has been, in any proper sense ‘self-evident’ to human eyes as they have looked over the state of their societies. What we actually see is a great deal of inequality in the starting points from which citizens commence their social existence. Human equality is not at all evident in practice, but on a closer reading we find that the framers of the Declaration didn’t say that it was. What they said was, ‘we hold these truths to be self-evident’ (emphasis added). They admit to a sort of manual handling of the truth – an activity that sometimes goes by the name of manipulation or manufacture. In other words, the framers of the Declaration expressed their commitment to maintaining as true a fact that is inconsistent with the preponderance of available evidence. Evidence of social, racial, and sexual equality is scarce enough today in a United States which, at the time of writing, has had just one Black (and not one female) president. Evidence was even harder to come by in the days when a group of white men (many slave-owners among them) first framed the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration was never intended to report the state of things then present, but to utter words with the rhetorical power to bring an ideal state into being. As a matter of logic, the framers were committing the mistake of turning an ‘ought’ into an ‘is’. As a matter of rhetorical performance, there was no mistake at all. It was a solemnly and dramatically performed commitment to realize a hoped-for future. I will not say that the Declaration of Independence was fake news, but neither was it reporting the evident state of the nation or the people within it. It was an aspirational document that stated and performed a set of political ends and left until another day the identification and the perfection of the means to achieve those ends.

Pretending comes in many forms, and by no means all of them are morally bad. The Declaration of Independence was a pretence in the etymological sense of idealistically reaching forward (pre-tenere) to achieve something (social justice) that in practice is always just out of reach. Other species of pretension are not so idealistic, and among these we can include the behaviour of putting forward a front designed to distract the viewer from the substance behind the show. During his term as president, Donald Trump was deeply committed to this type of pretension. That commitment was evidenced in the earliest days of his presidency when his aides responded to the publication of photographs of the crowds that attended his inauguration ceremony. The problem for Trump was that images of those crowds were published in the press alongside images of the much larger crowds that attended Barack Obama’s first inauguration. In response to this perceived threat to Trump’s prestige, the then White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, asserted in his first ever White House press conference that Trump had commanded ‘the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe’ (21 January 2017). The main thrust of Spicer’s press conference was to berate the mainstream media for propagating fake news, and yet his statement was itself a bold lie. Far from being the biggest ever, the crowd present in person on the National Mall for Trump’s inauguration wasn’t even the biggest that decade. Spicer’s outlandish claim is one he subsequently confessed to being ashamed of.

The day after it was made, Spicer’s assertion was put to Kellyanne Conway, counsellor to the president, in a ‘Meet the Press’ feature with NBC News.²³ In that television interview, she made the now notorious suggestion that Spicer had merely stated ‘alternative facts’. The interviewer Chuck Todd interrupted her by saying: ‘Wait a minute. Alternative facts? … Alternative facts are not facts. They’re falsehoods.’ One can see his point, but the absolutist language of true and false, while seductive, is not particularly helpful here. References to true and false are meaningless without express explanation of the basis on which true and false are distinguished. Not all ‘alternative facts’ are ‘falsehoods’, as we can clearly see from the widespread use in politics and elsewhere of different analyses of the same statistical data to establish widely diverging versions of factual reality. Instead of equating all alternate facts with falsehoods, it would have been more accurate if Chuck Todd had said that Sean Spicer’s reading of the images of the inauguration crowds case was patently falsifiable, but journalists and presenters engaged in live, short-format media have neither the time nor the inclination to be accurate at the expense of impact, and even if they did, most members of the public wouldn’t have the time or inclination to attend to it.

Kellyanne Conway’s claim that Spicer had merely presented ‘alternative facts’ inadvertently reveals the reality that ‘fact’ and ‘fake’ involve closely related modes of making it up. The practical problem (which became a political problem) was simply that Sean Spicer’s making process didn’t make sense. It was too blatant a bluff and too easily falsifiable. Like badly applied make-up or botched cosmetic surgery, it ended up making its subject appear more grotesque than the original. The reason that Trump’s public relations people went to such a patently falsifiable extent to manipulate public perceptions in this context is clear. For a populist, reality TV president, audience size (ratings) is the ultimate measure of success. Sean Spicer’s use of the word ‘audience’ instead of ‘crowd’ was a small clue to the fact that political theatricality was dominating Spicer’s – and by implication Trump’s – mindset. (This theme was the focus of Chapter 7, ‘The Acting President’). The fabricating possibilities that reside in the close connection between fact and fake are a goldmine for a canny politician, but Trump’s team of Spicer and Conway somehow managed to turn the goldmine into a minefield. Previous presidents have employed all the same tricks with impunity . Back in 2004, a reporter for the New York Times reported a conversation with a senior aide to President George W. Bush in which the aide had boasted that politicians’ capacity for creating news was superior to that of journalists:

We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.²⁴

There, in the language of ‘actors’ and their ‘judicious’ audiences, speaks the hubris of the public relations practitioner self-consciously putting on a show.

Spin: Press, Politicians, and PR

Public relations experts don’t peddle lies; they peddle home-spun truths. As Richard Edelman, president and chief executive officer of the public relations company Edelman, puts it: ‘there is no truth except the truth you create for yourself’.²⁵ Commenting on that quotation, Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber observe that ‘[w]hen there is no truth except what you create for yourself, lies become unnecessary, even irrelevant’.²⁶ Rampton and Stauber criticize the ‘public relations worldview’ that ‘envisions truth as an infinitely malleable, spinnable thing … not a thing to be discovered but a thing to be created, through artful word choices and careful arrangement of appearances’.²⁷ It may disappoint Rampton and Stauber, but the practical reality is that social ‘truths’ are not discovered things. Unless one is talking about Divine or absolute truth, all truths are human made. (This is the main argument of Chapter 4, ‘The Truth Factory’.) The solution to the problem of deceit is not to deny that social truths are made up, but to demand higher standards in the processes by which truth and fact are manufactured. Indeed, what is required is a set of manufactory standards approximating as closely as possible to the rigorous standards of courts of law and even of scientific experiment, according to which a ‘truth’ only qualifies as such when it is potentially falsifiable and has been refined in the fiery crucible of expertly conducted trials and tests. The stakes are high. The Sun’s reporting of the Hillsborough tragedy shows how a single page of lies – just twenty-four false words on a newspaper front page – can blight an entire community. In politics, the effects of false stories can change the course of whole nations. In the United States, a survey found that people who had voted for Barack Obama in 2012, but who in 2016 defected from the Democrats to vote for the Republican candidate Donald Trump, may have been influenced by fake news stories. When a sample of the ‘defectors’ were presented with three widespread fake news items about Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton, it was found that only 17 per cent of those who believed two or all three of the false stories voted for Clinton in 2016.²⁸

It is possible that public trust in politicians is even lower than public trust in journalists. In the UK, Peter Kellner reports that the March 2012 YouGov survey Democracy on Trial: What Voters Really Think of Parliament and Our Politicians found that ‘newspapers score relatively well’ compared to politicians, a fact which, he says, ‘might raise some eyebrows’ given that ‘other YouGov research shows that few people trust the red-top and mid-range tabloids to tell the truth’.²⁹ He concludes that it ‘is a sign of how unpopular our political system is that parties and politicians score even worse than journalists, when people are asked to compare their performance side-by-side’.³⁰ In practice, the lines between politicians and journalists can become somewhat blurred. Staying with the UK, Tony Blair’s government (1997–2007) was renowned for turning political ‘spin’ into a journalistic art form in which it sought to micro-manage public presentation of its policies, right down to rebranding its party as ‘New Labour’. By the time of David Cameron’s period as prime minister (2010–2016), the journalistic style of government had become so blatant that Cameron went so far as to hire Andrew Coulson as the government’s communications director even though he had previously resigned as editor of one of the least reputable red tops (News of the World) when one of its reporters was convicted of illegally hacking phones. Coulson was subsequently jailed for his involvement in the phone-hacking scandal. Cameron was himself employed by a media company before becoming an MP and remained a consultant to the company when in political office. Before he became prime minister (2019–2022), Boris Johnson was a journalist and editor of the weekly current affairs magazine The Spectator.

We can’t hide from the fact that political freedoms require us to run the risk that the press will make mistakes (misinformation) and even tell lies (disinformation). We run similar risks in relation to the behaviour of our politicians and for similar reasons. It is indicative of this that the UK’s Electoral Commission concluded its report on political advertising by recommending that it should be regulated voluntarily and not under the official scheme that regulates advertising standards in commercial contexts. According to the House of Commons Library website, electoral law ‘doesn’t require claims in political campaigns to be truthful or factually accurate’, although ‘it is a crime to make or publish a false statement of fact about the personal character or conduct of a candidate’.³¹ (A similar rule applies during House of Commons business in the UK Parliament to prohibit MPs from accusing their fellow MPs of lying.)³² A crowd-funded attempt to prosecute Prime Minister Boris Johnson for allegedly false claims made when campaigning for the UK to leave the EU ultimately failed on various grounds, including the fact that:

In a referendum there are at least two sides with competing arguments, both of which are highly likely to be contested to some degree. Even official data can, and will, be presented by campaigners in a way that favours their argument – that is the nature of political campaigns. It will not always be possible to establish the truth about campaign claims in an independent, truly objective sense.³³

This, it might be thought, sets the bar pretty low for assessing political honesty; and yet this, it might also be thought, is the price we have to pay to enable political free speech. It is an example of the courts’ traditional and quite proper reluctance to interfere in political processes. Another example is demonstrated in the courts’ traditional disavowal of any capacity to impeach an Act of Parliament, even when ‘its introduction or passage through Parliament, was attended by … irregularity’ and ‘even on the ground that it was obtained by fraud’.³⁴ In theory, courts retain the authority to ‘prevent an unconscionable use of the power to apply to Parliament for the enactment of a new private statute’, but UK courts have shown great reluctance to exercise that authority.³⁵

The 2012 YouGov survey referred to earlier found that nowadays in the UK, ‘it is the monarch who commands political respect by the general public, while Parliament is regarded with something approaching contempt’.³⁶ If that was the public attitude to politicians in 2012, one wonders how low politicians’ public standing must be after the parliamentary goings-on since the 2016 UK referendum on membership of the EU. Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II’s strict political neutrality was no doubt a major reason for her popularity (which is to say that much of that popularity might have evaporated if she had become politically outspoken on contentious political issues) and makes one wonder if mainstream newspapers are missing a marketing trick when they align themselves strongly with one side or the other of the party-political divide.

When the public spreads fake news out of ignorance, or a well-intentioned academic spreads fake news inadvertently, it is certainly not so blameworthy as politicians spreading fake news for political gain. This is a mode of making news that has traditionally gone by the name of propaganda – a word which, by analogy to the propagation of plant seeds, expressly alerts us to the fact that its purpose is to broadcast the politician’s story in the hope that it will take root and grow. The most blatant example in recent times must surely be Russian President Vladimir Putin’s crass attempt to justify Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on the pretence that he was seeking to ‘denazify’ it. Less extreme, but not without danger to life, was the fake news perpetrated by populist French President Emanuel Macron at the height of the Covid-19 vaccine crisis at the start of 2021 when he cast doubt on the efficacy of the British designed Oxford-AstraZeneca (ChAdOx1) Covid-19 vaccine. Aesop told a fable about a fox which, because it couldn’t reach some grapes, broadcast the lie that the grapes were sour and told anyone who’d listen that it hadn’t really wanted them. This is pretty much what happened when Macron’s government couldn’t get hold of supplies of the ChAdOx1 vaccine. Speaking on 29 January 2021, Macron resorted to the fox’s trick and spread the fake news that the AstraZeneca vaccine was ‘quasi-ineffective’ in people over 65 years old:

We have to be realistic: the real problem with the AstraZeneca vaccine is that it doesn’t work in the way we expected. We’re waiting for the EMA [European Medicines Agency] results, but today everything points to thinking it is quasi-ineffective on people older than 65, some say those 60 years or older. What I can tell you officially today is that the early results we have are not encouraging for 60 to 65-year-old people concerning AstraZeneca.

‘Sour grapes’ produce a bitter whine. Soon after this, the EMA approved the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine for all age groups in the EU. It is true that there was a relative shortage of statistical data for over 65s when the UK started to roll out the Oxford vaccine, but a deficiency of positive evidence is not positive evidence of a deficiency. British scientists were confident in the efficacy of the Oxford-AstraZeneca and that confidence was subsequently vindicated.³⁷ The motive for Macron’s decidedly negative spin on the data might have been to reduce French citizens’ vaccine demand at a time when his government was struggling to meet it. If so, it worked. We can note in passing that Macron used the rhetorical trick of employing the term ‘quasi’ to give his comment a spurious scientific veneer in the very act of twisting the scientific evidence (‘everything points to’). Writing a month after the incident, BBC correspondent Hugh Schofield noted that the French medical profession, ‘which had no political axe to grind – said early on that the [ChAdOx1] jab was a welcome addition’, before adding, ‘[b]ut politicians set the tone’ and ‘must surely take some of the blame for the slow uptake of the vaccine since its launch in France last month’.³⁸

Swallowing Lies

The previous sections have been dominated by the horticultural analogy – ‘the seed of a story’, ‘grain of truth’, ‘dissemination’, ‘broadcast’, ‘propaganda’, and so forth. Another vivid way to appreciate the presentation of news is through the analogy of cuisine. The cuisine analogy is used in numerous contexts in which falsehood is at issue. We talk, for instance, of ‘cooking the books’ in relation to dishonest accountancy. More generally, lies are frequently described as things that are ‘fed’ to us, and as things that we ‘swallow’ or might find ‘hard to swallow’. It is therefore an unfortunate coincidence that mainstream news is delivered through ‘newsfeeds’. The image of the public as a hungry devourer of the newsfeed goes back a long way. In his 1625 play, The Staple of News, the dramatist Ben Jonson described news as ‘a weekly cheat to draw mony’, ‘wherin the age may see her owne folly, or hunger and thirst after publish’d pamphlets of Newes, set out euery Saturday, but made all at home, & no syllable of truth in them’.³⁹ The public is hungry for news, but whether it is persuasive in the sense of being palatable comes down to a matter of taste. This has two aspects: first, the ‘good taste’ or critical judgment of the potential consumer; and second, the savour of the morsel as it is served up. Both aspects – the work of the consumer and the work of the purveyor – go together to make up the persuasiveness of the news item. Together they exemplify participatory co-Production. The cooking analogy has a long historical pedigree in relation to the rhetorical arts of persuasion. Sincerity has often been put in issue by portraying successful rhetoric as the addition of pleasing sauce to increase the flavour of the underlying substance of the matter. In Plato’s Gorgias, he gives Socrates the somewhat tongue-in-cheek (or deliberately argumentative) complaint that rhetoric gives a merely cosmetic impression of the justice that is essential to political health (462b–66a). Socrates likens his claim that ‘self-adornment personates gymnastic’ to the claim that ‘cookery is flattery disguised as medicine’ (465b).⁴⁰ The complaint can be read as a tacit admission that rhetoric works in practice. That pragmatic view is made express by the early modern rhetorician Thomas Wilson in his manual The Arte of Rhetorique, where he praises the pleasing effects of enhancing meat with a good sauce:

[H]im cunne I thanke, that both can and will ever, mingle sweete among the sower, be he Preacher, Lawyer, yea, or Cooke either hardly, when hee dresseth a good dish of meate.⁴¹

Adding that:

[W]hen a mannes stomacke is full and can brooke no more meate, he may stirre his appetite either by some Tarte sawce, or elles quicken it somewhat by some sweate dishe.⁴²

Despite Wilson’s praise for the rhetorical art of dressing the dish, it matters if we are tricked into swallowing lies. According to Cicero’s account, the Roman actor Polus enhanced his performance of Electra mourning her brother by bringing onto stage an urn with the ashes of his own dead son. Brecht called this ‘barbaric’, and resorted to the cuisine analogy to object specifically to the way in which apparently true emotions can be employed to obscure the truth of the play:

[T]he object is to fob us off with some kind of portable anguish – That’s to say anguish that can be detached from its cause, transferred in toto and lent to some other cause. The incidents proper to the play disappear like meat in a cunningly mixed sauce with a taste of its own.⁴³

Elsewhere Brecht uses the term ‘culinary theatre’ to decry drama that pampers to the audience’s tastes and which seeks to feed them through feelings rather than provoking them to think.⁴⁴ This talk of emotional veneer being applied at the performance stage to obscure the underlying truth of a matter surely speaks to us in our present post-truth times, in which news and political views frequently present the sober meat of events in sensationalized and emotionally charged terms. Lawyers reading this might consider themselves to be enthroned above the sway of such vices, but they also know the rhetorical art of seasoning a story, and occasionally they make the error of seasoning the matter too strongly. As Bassanio says in The Merchant of Venice, ‘In law, what plea so tainted and corrupt, / But, being seasoned with a gracious voice, / Obscures the show of evil?’ (3.2.75–77). When Peter Goodrich noted that ‘law and sauce’ are ‘rather directly related’,⁴⁵ he was referring indirectly to the suggestion made by Horace in his Satires that ‘it is worthwhile to study well the nature of the compound sauce’ (est operae pretium duplicis pernoscere iuris naturam),⁴⁶ by which Horace meant a sort of vinaigrette or salad dressing. Goodrich was referring more directly to Charles J. Darling’s punning observation that Horace’s aphorism applies as well to ‘the kind of jus served out in our courts of law’.⁴⁷ Judge Learned Hand employed the same metaphor when he described judicial craft in terms of Confectionary Performance (as to which, see Chapter 8):

[T]he good judge is an artist, perhaps most like a chef. Into the composition of his dishes he adds so much of this or that element as will blend the whole into a compound, delectable or at any rate tolerable to the palates of his guests. The test of his success is the measure in which his craftsman’s skill meets with general acceptance.⁴⁸

Shows of Truth

There is no doubt that dramatic interest lies at the heart of much that makes news stories appetizing to consumers. The UK government’s definition of disinformation describes it as information ‘that is intended to deceive and mislead audiences’.⁴⁹ If we want to be effective in the way we critique what Shakespeare termed ‘shows of truth’ (Henry V 1.2.72), we need to take seriously the theatrical modes of making and rhetorical performance by which truth is represented in media. We might begin by taking seriously the possibility that the public now consumes news, and construes news, from the perspective of an audience to an entertainment. Observations made by James W. Carey in 1978 seem eerily prescient of the internet age of Web 2.0:

[T]he public exists now largely as a statistical artifact: as the concatenation of individual judgments expressed through opinion polls, but most critically, not as a sphere of rational discourse. Our system of communication is not addressed at the public but at private individuals. We have evolved a radical form of mobilized privacy: the individual hooked into long lines of communication from remote sources. This transformation involved the displacement of the reading public – a group who spoke to one another about the news in rational and critical ways – into a reading and listening audience.⁵⁰

If mass media have had the effect of constituting the public as audience, it is correspondingly true that the public has constituted mass media as a form of entertainment. Communications scholar Vincent Price writes in his book Public Opinion that:

The political power of an attentive public is on occasion exercised directly (e.g., in an election), but it also operates indirectly and more continuously through the perceptions of the political actors who play to the audience and who gauge their own efficacy in the political world by indicators of public response.⁵¹

The relationship between mass media and public audience operates as a two-way process in which each confirms the identity of the other through misleadingly simple labels – ‘public’ on the one side and ‘mass media’ on the other. The reality is much more complex. On one side, the so-called public is not unitary and neither do its members share any unitary, identifiable opinion. On the other side, journalistic standards and modes of dissemination vary greatly among the media. ‘Media’ is, after all, a plural word. There is in fact such variation within the crowd of television and radio broadcasters, print press, and online professional media that they together constitute more of a ‘mess media’ than a ‘mass media’. We ought also to be cautious when we purport to find a neat line between media and the public as if it corresponds to a tidy distinction between actor and audience. The mess of mediating communication between them is one reason why the dividing line is never static and is certainly never neat. Price notes that although Walter Lippmann set up a distinction between ‘actors’ (officials and citizens who try to influence politics directly) and ‘spectators’ (interested observers who constitute an audience for political performance), Lippmann also acknowledged that very often ‘the actors in one affair are the spectators of another’, so that ‘there is often a mixture of the two types of behavior’.⁵² Crossover between passive and active roles also informs Augusto Boal’s term ‘spect-actors’, which he used to describe participants in his public forum style of theatre. His ‘spect-actors’ are those ‘who observe (spectare, in Latin – to see) in order then to act’.⁵³ More recently, Susan Bennett reprises this idea of the empowered audience in her book Theatre Audiences,⁵⁴ where she focuses on the ‘productive and emancipated spectator’⁵⁵ and the audience that ‘emerges as a tangibly active creator of the theatrical event’.⁵⁶

Falsehoods and half-truths sometimes flourish in the mainstream press, but in social media they can reproduce virally to pandemic proportions. Not that it is possible to draw any definite line between the professional and the amateur press nowadays, given that the traditional tabloids publish much of their content free online and allow members of the public to gloss it via the ‘comment’ sections of their web pages. When a newspaper article appears online together with readers’ commentary, the whole becomes a new artefact co-Produced through the joint activity of journalist with commentator and the joint activity of commentator and commentator. One of the factors that lends authority to mainstream media is that we know the names of the authors and can therefore research and assess their level of expertise. In contrast, members of the public who comment on the story are generally shielded by whole or partial anonymity and have limited or non-existent personal accountability for what they post.

Our response to fake news ought to acknowledge the active part played by the audience in the Production of stories. We need to work towards a notion of Receiver Responsibility, in which, by analogy to theatre, the audience of fake news is considered a co-Producer of the artefact. There is no show without the audience, and without a public the media cannot perform their mediating role between news source and consumer. In a traditional theatrical context, the audience is expected to suspend its disbelief. If a playgoer is for some reason duped into believing that the fabrication is fundamentally real, the fault lies with them. Their co-Productive participation has made the performance into something it isn’t and something it wasn’t intended to be. A competent spectator must, says Keir Elam, have ‘the ability to recognize the performance as such’.⁵⁷ He adds that:

Every spectator’s interpretation of the text is in effect a new construction … It is the spectator who must make sense of the performance for himself, a fact that is disguised by the apparent passivity of the audience. However judicious or aberrant the spectator’s decodification, the final responsibility for the meaning and coherence of what he constructs is his.⁵⁸

The same ‘final responsibility’ falls upon members of the public when they consume the spectacle of a news report. It falls to receivers of a news report to recognize that they are witnessing not the truth itself but a show of truth, and it falls to them to discern where the performance lies.

In comparing the responsibility of a consumer of news to that of a theatre audience, I am mindful that outside of traditional and self-evidently theatrical contexts, it will not always be fair to expect the consumer to be alert to fabrication, still less to falsehood. With the modern development of ‘deep fake’ digital fabrications the task of discernment is almost impossible to discharge. It is not, though, a wholly recent challenge. Nowadays digital technology can be employed to fool the masses, but for so long as there have been technologies for telling truths the same technologies have been turned to telling lies. Consider the well-known instance of Orson Welles’ radio adaptation of H. G. Wells’ novel The War of the Worlds, which was presented in the form of fake news bulletins aired on 30 October 1938. The bulletins announced that aliens from Mars had invaded the US state of New Jersey and this is said to have led to widespread panic among listeners who took the reports at face value. Assuming for now that mass panic did indeed ensue, should listeners to the show have been responsible for their credulity in believing that the broadcast was a real news item? The broadcast had been framed from the outset by an announcement introducing a presentation by Orson Welles and Mercury Theatre on the Air, complete with a classical music overture (Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat minor) of the sort that might accompany the raising of a curtain in a physical theatre space. This should have given the theatrical game away, but listeners coming late to the show might have missed the very clear framing of the fabrication. They might have tuned in late but in time to hear the narrator, Orson Welles, declaring in hyper-realistic mode that ‘[o]n this particular evening, October 30, the Crosley service estimated that thirty-two million people were listening in on radios’; or just in time to hear a standard format weather report; or perhaps their attention was first grabbed by lively Latino music and a new voice saying ‘[g]ood evening, ladies and gentlemen. From the Meridian Room in the Park Plaza in New York City, we bring you the music of Ramón Raquello and his orchestra. With a touch of the Spanish.’ One can imagine listeners turning up the volume to hear that music, only to have it interrupted with the following sober announcement:

Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt our program of dance music to bring you a special bulletin from the Intercontinental Radio News. At twenty minutes before eight, central time, Professor Farrell of the Mount Jennings Observatory, Chicago, Illinois, reports observing several explosions of incandescent gas, occurring at regular intervals on the planet Mars.

And with that, the alien invasion began. There were so many frames within frames, so many falsehoods wrapped in truths and truths in falsehoods, that it would hardly be surprising if a radio audience were taken in. At one point, the fictional head of the radio station even says, ‘believing that radio has a responsibility to serve in the public interest at all times, we are turning over our facilities to the state militia’. Orson Welles might have argued in his defence that this was indeed public service broadcasting; a sort of mass lesson in being alert to propaganda.

The ‘I was alerting the public’ defence was run by Channel 4 television in the UK when it broadcasted a ‘deep fake’ message to the nation on Christmas Day 2020 through the medium of a hyper-realistic computer-generated avatar of Queen Elizabeth II, at precisely the time that the real monarch was delivering her annual Christmas message on the BBC and ITV channels. Do we believe that Channel 4 was genuinely acting in the public interest with its fake royal message, or was this merely self-serving sensationalism under the pretence of public service? In other words, could this be an example of the Trump-like technique noted earlier by which an apostrophe to fake news is itself faked for the purpose of enhancing the faker’s own credibility? As things turned out, Orson Welles’ public service defence was more apt than he could have anticipated at the time. Less than a year after his War of the Worlds stunt, the same American radio audience would be tuning in to hear real reports of the outbreak of World War II. And yet, as it also turned out, reports of mass panic in response to Welles’ radio production might have been the real ‘fake news’ story in The War of the Worlds affair. Scholars have questioned the veracity of contemporary news reports of panic (e.g. The Boston Daily Globe’s front-page banner headline ‘Radio Play Terrifies Nation’), and even of recent documentary style retrospectives on the panic (e.g. Desert Penguin Pictures’ production for PBS’s American Experience series).⁵⁹ We shouldn’t forget that, like Orson Welles, makers of broadcast news and makers of documentaries are working in show business.

‘If You Have the Truth, Rest Quiet’

The statement with which I opened this chapter – ‘all news is fake news’ – is deliberately provocative. Maybe it is sensational. It is, of course, a rhetorical technique for alerting the reader to a surprising and hitherto unseen truth. In other words, I took a seed of truth – the fact that news is always in some sense and to some degree made by human craft – and I developed it and published it in a way calculated to make the truth more tantalizing. It was a journalistic move. Actual journalists, who may be working under commercial or partisan political pressures, will rarely have the freedom (even supposing that they have the time and inclination) to be so transparent in revealing their rhetorical methods. Many journalists work under the same sorts of pressures that entertainers are under. Their role is to put on a show and they rely upon a critically discerning readership to understand that journalism rarely presents the naked seed to public view.

We might lament the fact that all news is fake news, but an unadorned news story is no guarantee of naked truth. The problem with the naked seed is that it is seldom as unambiguous as we might think. Unlike actual biological plant seeds, the seeds of stories can be grown into a species quite different from the original. It is also possible that a member of the public, receiving the naked seed of a story, might, like an unskilled gardener, plant the seed in the wrong soil at the wrong temperature and with the wrong fertilizer. They might produce something stunted, deformed, and unattractive from a seed that was originally sound and full of potential. It is therefore sometimes a good thing that a professional journalist has taken hold of the seed of a story and sought to grow it in such a way that it resists rot. Indeed, we might say that the very essence of good professional journalism is that it takes responsibility for cultivating the seed of a story in such a way that it becomes bigger and better, yet undeniably of the same species as the original. It will be recalled from Chapter 10 that this quality of being the same (*sem-) despite growth (crescere) is the etymological meaning of the word ‘sincere’.

Professional journalists and editors do what they are vocationally accustomed to do. Our role as audience and critics is not to dismiss their work because it is a work of make-believe, but to appreciate it as such. Judgment is left to the public as audience and reader to decide if the making was fairly or unfairly done. We are called to critical judgment, and that (as the etymology of ‘criticism’ informs us) is a process of sifting. We need to sift the grain of truth from the chaff. We are the audience to the journalists’ show and the responsibility falls on us to sit as critics and not as passive recipients. As I said earlier, we have Receiver Responsibility. It is not inconsistent with that responsibility for us to suspend disbelief, but we should be knowing and responsible in how we suspend it. Ben Jonson’s Prologue to The Staple of News urged his theatre audience to exercise their own critical judgment in relation to the cozening (a good old synonym for ‘deceiving’) effect of news stories. Immediately following his assertion quoted earlier in this chapter (that the Saturday newspapers are ‘made all at home’ and have ‘no syllable of truth in them’), he continues:

[T]here cannot be a greater disease in nature, or a fouler scorne put upon the times. And so apprehending it, you shall doe the Author, and your owne judgement a courtesie, and perceive the tricke of alluring money to the Office, and there cooz’ning the people. If you have the truth, rest quiet, and consider that Ficta, voluptatis causa, sint proxima veris.

What he is saying here is that it falls to the audience to discern where the seed of truth in a news report has been corrupted by mercantile and self-serving interests. Jonson’s Latin motto ficta, voluptatis causa, sint proxima veris is from Horace’s Ars Poetica.⁶⁰ It means: ‘fictions meant to please should be close to the truth’. In other words, just as a made-up face can enhance the natural beauty of the original, so a made-up story can enhance the truth. What we must be alert to is the sort of make-up that disguises the truth and stories that render the original more beautiful – or indeed more ugly – to such an extent that the original is lost in the telling.

12 Making Mistakes Trial by Twitter and Cancel Culture

‘Cancel culture’ is a new variant of an old phenomenon. When Ben Jonson cautioned his playgoers each to ‘exercise his owne Judgement, and not censure by Contagion’,¹ he was alerting them to the fact that passing judgment on others can pass from person to person like a plague. If we ask why the infection starts and why it spreads so fast, we will find that the answer to both questions is the same: ‘everyone’s a critic’. The growth or spread that we associate with the contagion of cancellation has ‘making’ at its heart. The initial judgment plants the germ in Inventive mode. Causing the judgment to increase in consequence and extent makes it grow in Creative mode. Giving the judgment the air of publicity makes something new of it in Productive and co-Productive mode. Making a mistake triggers a whole series of making processes, and our language reflects this. We talk of a person making a mistake and of others making a judgment; critics make assumptions about the suspect’s character and motive, and seek to make an example of them. In response to all this, the suspect might make an excuse, or make an apology, and might even seek to make amends. Might the dominance of ‘making’ language in relation to individual errors and collective responses to those errors indicate that an individual’s fracture of the social fabric is made up for by the fabricating impulses of society at large? If so, the pathological metaphor of contagion might one day be supplanted by a more positive metaphor of healing in which the clustering of criticism against infractions is comparable to the cells of a body that rush to heal cuts in skin and breakages of bone – sometimes making the recreated tissue stronger than it was to begin with. If as a society we are to encourage criticism that is truly constructive in this way, we must begin by identifying and addressing some of the common errors that have given cancel culture a bad name.

What Is ‘Cancel Culture’?

Cancel culture is a performative phenomenon characterized by collective action directed at individuals in ways that result in them being punished through shaming, silencing, boycotting, or banning their work, and sometimes through loss of employment and career opportunities. An example of the last of these is the no-platforming of speakers who are deemed too controversial to be heard, for example the no-platforming of academic feminists who hold views offensive to many transgender women.² In the UK, the cancellation of academic speakers risks infringing the Education Reform Act 1988, a statute which enables academics to ‘question and test received wisdom, and to put forward new ideas and controversial or unpopular opinions, without placing themselves in jeopardy of losing their jobs or privileges they may have at their institutions’.³ No-platforming also risks a breach of the Education Act (No. 2) 1986, which protects the freedom of speech of visiting speakers.⁴

No-platforming can even strike at the public personas of the dead, as occurs for example when historic statues and memorials are literally removed from their platforms – perhaps because of an association with slavery or another colonial-era offence. Iconoclastic protests of this sort are included in this chapter as part of a broad concern with performative modes of passing judgment. Alongside cancellation by online or physical gatherings, and often as a result of it, there are numerous examples of cancellation carried out by commercial companies – frequently in the form of commercial sponsors cancelling their contracts with celebrity endorsers who have been shamed. Donald Trump is a notable celebrity casualty of corporate cancellation, having been banned from Twitter and Facebook in response to the violent storming of the Capitol Building by a mob of his supporters on 6 January 2021. Trump’s Twitter account was ‘permanently suspended’ two days after the assault on the Capitol Building. The reasons given ranged from those that were entirely plausible (e.g. to stop Trump from denying the legitimacy of the vote to elect President Biden) to those that were far less so (e.g. Twitter’s speculation that Trump’s ostensibly innocuous tweet, ‘I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th’, might ‘serve as encouragement to those potentially considering violent acts that the Inauguration would be a “safe” target, as he will not be attending’). Perhaps Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey felt pressured to support the ban by the prevailing mood and by the implications for the company’s financial bottom line. After all, the share price of a commercial corporation is the product of the mob we call the market (for the meaning of ‘mob’, see the conclusion to Chapter 10). Outraged or offended shareholders have their own small-scale power to cancel a company by selling their shares in it. The corporation itself is a sort of refined legal distillation of the indirect and imperfectly expressed mood of a mass of people (the directors, shareholders, and customers of the company) and as such is susceptible to being caught up and carried along by the social swells and tides of cancel culture.

‘Cancel culture’ is, then, a broad catch-all label for modes of collective judgment and punishment. It is almost too loose a label and too wide a phenomenon to be definitionally useful – it might even encompass the imposition of economic sanctions against individuals (e.g. oligarchs) associated with pariah states (e.g. Russia). In the face of such a broad cultural phenomenon of collective judgment and punishment, my aims here must be modest. It is not my intention to cancel ‘cancel culture’, but to caution against the phenomenon of collective judgment when it strays into error and excess. Since our subject is the Making Sense, we will seek to make sense of the art of making judgments in the court of popular opinion by looking to the time-honoured arts of making judgments in courts of law, and to the wisdom of those who have reflected upon the difficult task of making critical judgments on works of creative art. Courts of law and professional critics of art and literature have in common a cultivated capacity for judging persons and performance, and this sort of criticism has the potential to cut to the core of the phenomenon we call ‘cancel culture’. We will not go far wrong if we approach the performative art of making social judgments as a craft which, like the craft of law, demands a slow and bespoke process entailing attention to detail, respect for the material at hand, and respect for the contingencies of the relevant context.

The US-based website Canceledpeople.org, which maintains a database of cancelled people, employs the following elements in its definition of a cancelled person: first, they are ‘targeted for behavior that falls within the boundaries of “reasonable expression”’; second, they have ‘lost their job or position (this includes forced resignations)’, their ‘professional opportunities have been limited’, or ‘they have suffered financial losses from a boycott or sabotage of their company’; third, they have ‘faced a coordinated effort to silence them’, which ‘seeks to render their person or their ideas unfit to discuss’; and fourth, they have ‘faced a coordinated effort to shame them and destroy their reputation’, which ‘seeks to damage their self-worth and will likely target their personal or professional relationships’. These characteristics set helpful definitional parameters, but for the purposes of the present chapter I broaden the discussion to people who are accused of behaviour that goes beyond ‘reasonable expression’ – even to the extent of being accused of criminal acts – where the allegation has not yet been proven by a judicial or other expertly, professionally, and fairly conducted due process.

Let us consider an example, which happens to be one of the entries on Canceledpeople.org. In May 2019, English journalist and radio presenter Danny Baker made a much-publicized mistake on Twitter when he was at that time employed by the BBC as the presenter of his own Saturday morning radio comedy show, The Danny Baker Show. The mistake had racist implications and as a result he was swiftly sacked from the BBC. Mr Baker is a white English male from a working-class background who at the time of the mistake was more than sixty years old and had been a journalist for four decades. In that long career he had apparently never been accused of racism and no historic accusations of racism came to light following his Twitter mistake. Every element of this biographical sketch is relevant to what follows. He might appear to be the very picture of social privilege where it not for those crucial words ‘working-class background’. In the UK today, the young, white, working-class male, far from being a bastion of privilege and opportunity, is one of the demographic groups most deprived of educational opportunity (a recent survey found that in the UK ‘Black Caribbean boys were the only group less likely to go to university than white boys’)⁵ and has been called the most derided demographic in the country.⁶ Older white men like Danny Baker are sometimes scorned as being ‘pale, stale, male’ – an insult that achieves the rare distinction of being racist, ageist, and sexist in the space of just three words. (It seems remarkable that the phrase has apparently become acceptable even in mainstream news reporting.⁷ One can only begin to imagine the furore if a journalist were to trot out equivalent language in relation to females of colour.)

In Mr Baker’s case, it is also important to bear in mind that a large part of his performed persona is that of the quick-talking, cheeky, working-class ‘cockney’ chap – certainly not to everyone’s taste, but in matters of taste there is no ground for dispute (degustibus non est disputandem, as a useful Latin maxim puts it). If Mr Baker’s Twitter mistake had simply been in bad taste or had been outright tasteless – which it surely was (if only because he compared a newborn baby to an animal) – one might hope and expect that the consequences for him would not have ended his BBC career. Satire, after all, almost always offends somebody’s idea of good taste. Unfortunately, his mistake was much more serious in its implications because it was taken to imply racism. In response to an announcement that a child had been born to a member of the British royal family, he tweeted an archive black and white picture from the early twentieth century of a well-to-do man and woman standing outside the entrance to a building either side of a young chimpanzee that was standing in a posh coat, bowler hat, white gaiters, and holding a walking cane. Accompanying the image, Mr Baker added just four words of text: ‘Royal baby leaves hospital.’ Regarded without context the image is comically ridiculous and Mr Baker is reported to have said subsequently that ‘[m]y go-to photo when any posh people have a baby is this absurd chimpanzee in a top hat leaving the hospital. I didn’t know which of our royal princesses had given birth.’⁸ Having apologized and deleted the offending tweet, he wrote in a further tweet that it ‘[w]as supposed to be joke about Royals vs circus animals in posh clothes’ (8 May 2019). If Mr Baker is to be believed, the tweet was, thus far, a tasteless gag at worst. What made it fundamentally flawed was that the baby in question had been born to Prince Harry and his wife Meghan Markle. Ms Markle is the daughter of a Black mother and a white father, and Mr Baker’s choice of a chimp to depict the royal baby therefore evoked a disgusting racial slur.

So, should Mr Baker have lost his job for this single hasty and ill-judged tweet? My own answer is ‘yes – probably’. The qualifier ‘probably’ is crucial here because the word brings in a process of probation or trial. The decision to cancel a person’s contract or career should not be made lightly, but ought to be based on a process in which evidence (the stuff we see) is probed deeply in search of its substance and in which both sides ought to have an opportunity to present their case. The need for a reflective process is all the more necessary when the error and the judgment in reaction to it are performed in a hasty fashion. It is precisely when the preponderance of evidence appears to point all one way that someone needs to point the other way. Someone has to play devil’s advocate. After all, even the Nazis on trial at Nuremberg were afforded advocates and due process. It seems that the process by which the BBC decided to terminate Mr Baker’s employment was a summary one. Whether there was anything like a fair trial, giving adequate opportunity to present and prove (probe) reasons for dismissal, seems doubtful. My conclusion that Mr Baker should probably have been dismissed by the BBC is not based on the offensiveness of his motivations in sending the offending tweet – there is no corroborating evidence to suggest that he was motivated by racism – but on the fact that a quick-talking presenter of a popular radio show ought to be better attuned to popular culture than to employ the image of a chimp in a context where racism might be inferred. To be that ‘tone deaf’ might be said to go to the root of his fitness to present a popular call-in radio show. The BBC would have been justified in sacking Mr Baker for that reason alone if they had first given him a chance to present his side of the story. If Mr Baker had produced evidence of a non-racist motivation (say, by demonstrating a past pattern of using chimps in posh clothes to depict upper-class people of all races), a case might be made for clemency on the basis that this was a one-off error causing accidental offence. Of course, and perhaps better still, Mr Baker might have voluntarily resigned when he appreciated the offending nature of his mistake.

I am not focusing on Mr Baker’s case because I disagree with the decision to cancel his contract, but because the manner in which judgments were made in response to his mistake exemplify shortcomings that a great many offences and cancellation reactions have in common. These are, first, that the judgment was made in an imprudently swift and succinct manner (so too, it must be said, was Mr Baker’s offending tweet); second, that the error was judged on face value – by which I mean not only that the tweeted image was subjected to superficial scrutiny, but also that both Mr Baker and the royal baby were regarded (a seeing word) according to just one aspect (another seeing word) of their beings – namely, that Mr Baker is white and the royal baby is of mixed race; third, whereas some online respondents to Mr Baker’s error were willing to imagine a disjunction between the error and Mr Baker’s private character (to paraphrase, ‘the tweet can be read as racist, but it doesn’t mean Mr Baker is racist’), many respondents refused to admit the possibility of any gap between Mr Baker’s erroneous act and his underlying attitude to race (to paraphrase, ‘I think the tweet is racist, I assume it was motivated by racism, that makes Mr Baker a racist’).

On Criticism

I now turn to consider each of these three characteristics of ‘trial by Twitter’ leading to a cancellation verdict under the headings ‘fools rush in’ (dealing with the problem of speed), ‘face values’ (dealing with the problem of superficiality), and ‘mind the gap’ – (dealing with the problem of censoriousness and hypocrisy). Working outwards from the Danny Baker case, I identify principles that will assist us to make better sense of – and to make better judgments in – the court of popular opinion. Each of the three sections begins with a quotation from Alexander Pope’s 1711 ‘Essay on Criticism’, every one of which is now a well-known common-sense maxim that urges caution and ethical restraint on those who judge the expressive work of others. Thus, we have ‘fools rush in where angels fear to tread’ for the section on imprudent speed; ‘A little learning is a dang’rous thing’ for the section on superficiality; and ‘To err is human; to forgive, divine’ for the section on hypocritical judgment. In its original context, Pope’s essay was intended primarily as a salutary treatise on the art of judging art, and was directed specifically at critics of literary art. It is a long essay, and in his manner of writing the author exemplifies the very qualities that are promoted in it. His was no rushed reaction but a deeply reflective critical analysis running to almost 800 lines – rather more than a standard tweet and considerably more sophisticated and extensive than a mere retweet, ‘thumbs down’ emoji, or any other cursory online gesture. As to face values, the quality of Pope’s work defies any surface judgment that might be made against him on the basis of his being a young man aged only twenty-two when he wrote it. As to the third issue, hypocrisy: Pope was an author who through his own competence as an artist was well-qualified to judge art and to judge those who judge art.

‘Fools Rush in’

[F]ools rush in where angels fear to tread.

Alexander Pope, Essay on Criticism

Danny Baker was foolish when he rushed to post his offending ‘Royal baby leaves hospital’ tweet, and many of the responses to Baker’s error were as foolishly swift as the error itself. Cancel culture is characterized by a rush to judgment. Sometimes a judgment will prove to be justified in retrospect, but the instant nature of the mob reaction makes it flawed even if the ultimate judgment is shown on reflection to have been justified. In any rushed judgment, the rush is always objectionable even when the ultimate outcome is not. Haste is a feature of cancel culture that is exacerbated by the inherent high speed of the various media through which online mistakes and online judgments are made. In the past, textual methods of expressing civic outrage, such as posting a handwritten letter to the editor of a national newspaper, to one’s democratic representative, or to the head of a commercial corporation, were inherently slow and as such opened space for reflective consideration, thoughtful drafting, and even for changing one’s mind. In legal negotiations, the last of these is sometimes termed the ‘cooling off’ period. Another legal term for it is ‘locus poenitentiae’, meaning ‘a space for repentance’. Online communication rarely allows or encourages such a space. Before the internet, there was also a small transaction cost of time and money for the sender of a complaint (if only the cost and effort of posting a letter) which served to suppress any misguided sense that making a complaint might be cost-free. It never is. There is always a social cost to conflictual communication, and it is no bad thing that there was once a small financial price to pay at the threshold to filter out frivolous complaints and those which – to express it in economic language – aren’t ‘worth it’. Today, the person who joins an online mob suffers very little in the way of threshold deterrent cost, still less any sense of the price to be paid long term through increased social conflict. This is especially so where the complainant participates anonymously. Instead of having to overcome a threshold cost before making a complaint, the anonymous complainant is given an instant incentive and reward in the gratification they receive from expressing outrage and from the Making Sense that they are participating with others in the co-Production of a social performance that will ‘make a difference’. The famous tagline #MeToo speaks expressly to the sense of value associated with feeling that one’s voice has been heard in chorus with others. It is of course right that everyone should have a voice, especially when it comes to calling out criminal acts, and online outlets can be valuable and powerful democratic media of expression. The problem we are primarily concerned with here is not the problem of freedom of speech but the problem of speed of speech. If a technological solution cannot be found to that problem, we should at least acknowledge the cost.

The speed of online cancellation reactions is one of the problems highlighted by the group of 153 cultural and intellectual figures who wrote ‘A Letter on Justice and Open Debate’ to Harper’s Magazine in 2020.⁹ Among their number were scholars (including Francis Fukuyama, Noam Chomsky, Deirdre McCloskey, and Steven Pinker) and such household names as J. K. Rowling, Garry Kasparov, and Salman Rushdie. This is no ‘mob’ in the original sense of mobile vulgus (i.e. the moveable or malleable mass of common people), but a sophisticated caucus of scholars and expert practitioners in various fields. Some argue that the flaw in the group was not that they were members of the popular mass, but that they were members of a powerful and influential elite.¹⁰ Despite this, their objection stands to be judged on its own terms. The core of their complaint was expressed as follows:

We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought. More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms.

The signatories place the element of speed – ‘swift’ social reactions and ‘hasty’ institutional responses – at the heart of the problem, alongside the ‘severe’ and ‘disproportionate’ extent of the response. Their sought-for alternative to excessive haste is ‘considered reforms’. In a similar vein, the online Urban Dictionary’s definition of cancel culture attributes the cultural phenomenon to ‘a critical mass of people who are quick to judge and slow to question’. Sound judgment, especially in matters of performance – whether on the theatrical, legal, or social stage – ought to be slow. This is an argument that is beautifully made by Julen Etxabe in his book The Experience of Tragic Judgment, where he cautions against the wrongheaded notion that judgment is a single act in a single moment like the falling of an axe. He argues that judgment ought to be understood as a process which brings conflicting human interests and human relations into a sophisticated conversation. Etxabe writes that the judge in a court of law ‘must tune into the complexities of the case without making interpretative decisions that would foreclose any real consideration of the issues’.¹¹ The point applies as well to judges in the court of popular opinion. A hallmark of sound judgment is that we should be swift to judge ourselves and slow to judge others. One obstacle in the way of achieving this is the troubling fact that unsophisticated and unskilled judges tend to be poor judges of their own shortcomings and vociferous judges of others. As Bertrand Russell once said, ‘in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt’.¹² He was describing a phenomenon that psychologists have demonstrated experimentally and labelled the Dunning–Kruger effect. David Dunning, in an article written with Erik G. Helzer, summarizes the effect by saying that ‘poor performers are not in a position to recognize the shortcomings in their performance’.¹³

Celebrated Australian actor Geoffrey Rush might have thought that his very name was cursed when he was the subject of a rush to judgment after incidents alleged to have occurred with a young actress on and off stage. He was playing the title role in King Lear and the actress was playing Lear’s daughter Cordelia. It was alleged that Rush had on more than one occasion touched the actress inappropriately after being asked by her to desist, and that he had sent her suggestive text messages. The truth of her allegations was never tested at a full trial, but there was a trial in Rush’s lawsuit against the newspaper that first published the allegations (including under the headline ‘King Leer’).¹⁴ In this trial, the judge criticized the newspaper for rushing to judgment. Justice Michael Wigney accepted Mr Rush’s contention that the newspaper’s conduct was ‘unjustified and improper because they were reckless as to the truth or falsity of the defamatory imputations conveyed by the articles and had failed to make adequate inquiries before publication’.¹⁵ This case can be put down to poor journalistic and editorial standards, but it prompts the question whether those standards are more likely to slip when there is a wider (including online) culture of passing knee-jerk judgments against figures in the public eye. The key argument of this section, I stress again, is that regardless of the possible validity of the complaint and the resulting cancellation, the ‘rush’ element is a procedural defect that strikes at the heart of due process.

The error of haste can also be exacerbated by insufficient attention to history. If we rush to judge a person on the basis of an isolated act there is a danger that we will pay insufficient attention to the accused’s exemplary history prior to the incident and to their efforts to reform since it occurred. The defining success of the #MeToo movement in establishing an individual’s offending behaviour is the fact that it does so by establishing a history of offending. A complainant is within her rights to come forward on the basis of a single incident, but that incident must be placed in the context of the accused’s whole history. Favourable conclusions should be drawn when their history shows no pattern of offending, just as surely as unfavourable conclusions should be drawn when a pattern of offending emerges.

‘Face Values’

A little learning is a dang’rous thing.

Alexander Pope, Essay on Criticism

In the previous section we considered the ‘rushing in’. Now it’s time to consider the fools. It is foolish to rush to judgment on the basis of superficial knowledge of the events on which a person is being judged, and on the basis of superficial knowledge about the person who is being judged. Both aspects – knowledge of the events and knowledge of the individual – bring in the danger of judging on shallow facts, or (which is to put the same point another way) of judging on face values. As regards superficial knowledge of the person being judged, we would do well to bear in mind the point, well made by lawyer Joanne Cash, that ‘[e]ven the most privileged person will have gone through life with suffering of some sort’, that ‘[e]very single individual has a private story’, and that ‘one of the dangers we’re seeing in the dialogue at the moment is that we lump people together in a very unsympathetic way’.¹⁶ As regards superficial knowledge of the issues, we need to bear in mind the danger of indiscriminate reliance on the internet. The Web has given us the most immense and extraordinary repository of facts and resources for research, but the breadth of a library is no guarantee of the depth to which it is read. One of my own methods for whittling out the rotten wood of a Google search is to prioritize resources on Google Scholar and Google Books and to click through until I find books and articles written by people whose expertise has been established through professional or practical experience. This is seemingly in contrast to the prevailing current practice in which ‘many citizens no longer trust the traditionally authoritative sources of evidence (scientists, academics, nonpartisan government agencies, and the “elite” press)’.¹⁷ My method of scraping down to the sound, heartwood of a subject serves, I hope, to prioritize opinions that are not only better informed but also expressed with better balance. Ideally, the author will have no personal axe to grind, but there can be no objection to a biased author who is self-critical and fairly grinds both sides of the axe even when they are seeking to show that their side has the sharpest arguments. Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur, is rather one-sided in his critique of the internet and at times more polemical than scholarly, but – as his surname promises – he makes several points that cut to the core of the problem. The essence of the problem, as he sees it, is the superficiality of online opinion. In his opening chapter, ‘The Great Seduction’, he contends that:

The Web 2.0 revolution has peddled the promise of bringing more truth to more people – more depth of information, more global perspective, more unbiased opinion from dispassionate observers. But this is all a smokescreen. What the Web 2.0 revolution is really delivering is superficial observations of the world around us rather than deep analysis, shrill opinion rather than considered judgment.¹⁸

One of the most pernicious forms of superficial judgment is judgment based upon the racial appearance of a person’s skin. We rightly condemn the racism inherent in assuming that a person with non-white skin must have a character conforming to certain stereotypes – not least, but not only, where those stereotypes are patently negative. We should likewise condemn the racism inherent in making stereotypical assumptions about the character of a person who has white skin. In his most famous speech, the Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr said, ‘I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character’.¹⁹ Sadly, the skin-depth persecution that he objected to has been replaced with skin-depth prejudice of other sorts. We are nowadays in danger of achieving equality only by treating people of all colours equally badly. The long walk to racial justice is in danger of becoming a race to the bottom. I’m aware that Martin Luther King’s quote has been used by conservatives as a basis for resisting affirmative action, but that is not my intention here. I am not discussing efforts to treat people more favourably on the basis of their background – that is, I think, something to be encouraged in relation to people of all races. Institutions in the USA, in light of that nation’s distinctive historic debt to African Americans, must make their own decisions on how to achieve distributive and symbolic justice without causing undue social division.²⁰ My concern here is not with passing positive judgment, but with the phenomenon of passing negative judgment on people because of surface appearances. This is precisely the sort of poor judgment that Martin Luther King Jr was determined to remedy.

Earlier in this chapter we discussed online public reactions to Danny Baker’s offending tweet about the baby born to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. It must be obvious that if Mr Baker had been Black no racist intent would have been inferred. Mr Baker was in that sense judged by the colour of his skin. That observation may be banal, but broadly related to it is the fact that some respondents were willing to imagine a disjunction between his error and his private character whereas others were seemingly unable to imagine the possibility of any distance between Mr Baker’s erroneous act and his underlying attitude to race. The former ‘minds the gap’, the latter doesn’t. An example of the former is the anonymous online commentator (identified only as ‘jcm’) who wrote the following response to Mr Baker’s tweet:

I don’t necessarily think he’s a racist. I do think he must be quite thick not to have realised this wasn’t sensible. Our public discourse is better off without this stuff. I think people who think this stuff is OK once are likely to think it’s OK again and are thus not well suited to jobs where they have to make jokes in real time in public.

(9 May 2019)

An example of the latter is a tweet by Joseph Ejiofor, a Labour Party councillor for Haringey Council in London, who tweeted:

RACIST RACIST RACIST Danny Baker @prodnose should be given today to resign and clear his desk. If he is still there at 16.59 @bbc MUST FIRE HIM! I’m disgusted by the hate and racism inherent in his Tweet Unforgivable He’s not fit to be a broadcaster employed from the public purse.

(9 May 2019)

Councillor Ejiofor’s tweet exhibits the standard sequence of ‘making’ processes by which social judgments are frequently formed and performed. The councillor made an assumption about Mr Baker’s character (‘hate and racism inherent’), then made a judgment (‘I’m disgusted’), and then sought to make an example of him by cancelling him (‘He’s not fit to be a broadcaster employed from the public purse’). This is an unreasonably extreme reaction, but racism is extremely unreasonable and reactions to racism, actual or perceived, can therefore be forgiven for being emotive and at times unreasonably extreme in the way that they are expressed and performed. ‘Forgiven’ is the crucial word here and must be our focus if any progress in social discourse is to be achieved. Accordingly, it is the councillor’s use of the word ‘unforgivable’ that is hardest to forgive.

Let’s play along with Mr Ejiofor, and for the sake of argument assume, as he assumes, that Mr Baker’s tweet was deliberately racist and that it was the product of ‘hate’. What sort of world does Mr Ejiofor envisage in which a one-off error in a forty-year career is not susceptible to forgiveness? The Black cricketer Michael Carberry, who played in six Test matches for England between 2010 and 2014, was equally forthright in a radio interview with the BBC when a current England player, Ollie Robinson, was revealed to have sent racist and sexist tweets between eight and nine years earlier when he was a teenager. Carberry said that, ‘if it was down to me, honestly, Ollie Robinson wouldn’t be playing Test cricket, because for me … I don’t believe this is a problem where you can rehabilitate someone’.²¹ If that were true, it would make a mockery of efforts to promote education on matters of race and gender. Prince Harry, who now spends a great deal of his time seeking to educate people in matters of social justice, is living proof of the power of rehabilitation. This is a man who in his youth wore a Nazi uniform at a fancy-dress party, and during his army career was recorded casually using the racist epithet ‘P*ki’ to describe a Pakistani colleague as well as saying that another colleague looked like a ‘r*ghead’.²² Even the sustained systemic racism of South African apartheid was healed, or is on the way to being healed, by attempts to forgive past wrongs. Nelson Mandela did not receive the Nobel Peace Prize because he adamantly refused to forgive others, or because others refused to forgive him for his own youthful resort to violent resistance. Forgiveness is key to unlocking the riches of racial justice in South Africa. For all its practical flaws, the commission established by Mandela to record the wrongs of apartheid South Africa at least got the political performance right in so far as it defined its role in terms of seeking not only ‘truth’ but also ‘reconciliation’.²³ Our society is obsessed with making judgments, when what is required, as Michele Mangini argues, is the sort of education that will refocus society’s attention on ‘the main goal of judging’ which is ‘making justice’.²⁴ Forgiveness is the attribute which more than any other enables us to move beyond making judgments to making justice.

If I were to read too much into Councillor Ejiofor’s brief and hasty tweet on the Danny Baker affair, I would run the risk of judging him too harshly and of committing the very act of hypocrisy that in this chapter (and especially in the next section) it is my aim to caution against. Maybe, on reflection, Mr Ejiofor would remove that word ‘unforgivable’. Perhaps, after more considered rumination on Mr Baker’s error, he would even admit the possibility that it was just that – an error – rather than an expression of racial hate. Mr Baker says that it was an outpouring of comic contempt for the privileges of class and wealth. I wouldn’t expect Mr Ejiofor to concur with that, still less to change his verdict that Mr Baker should have been sacked. What we can expect of Mr Ejiofor, and of all elected politicians, is that they should not spark up their flaming brands and rush in with the mob. They should rather perform, through the example of their own behaviour, a model of reasonable and considered judgment of the sort that they would want to see performed whenever judgments are made by people with political power. After the Danny Baker incident, and unrelated to it, Mr Ejiofor was deselected by the Labour Party and barred from standing for re-election as a party candidate. Ironically, his reported response to his own cancellation was to complain of a lack of due process: ‘I feel I have been targeted by my own party in a Kafkaesque process resulting in an unjust ruling. After all, how can it be right that someone is asked to submit their defence before even hearing the charges?’²⁵

So, how do official judicial institutions approach the sensitive issue of suspected racist behaviour and speech? In the UK, there is a definite effort within judicial officialdom to emphasize the possibility of a gap between an individual’s particular behaviour and their underlying character. The Judicial College, which has responsibility for formal aspects of the professional training of judges in England and Wales, publishes an Equal Treatment Bench Book which is regularly updated and is available free online. The February 2021 edition defines racism as follows:

‘Racism’ is a term defined more by effects/outcomes than by motives: A racist action, or a person who acts in a racist way, is not necessarily racially prejudiced. However, the term is often used to describe a combination of conscious or unconscious prejudice and power to implement action which leads, however unintentionally, to disproportionate disadvantage for BAME [Black, Asian, and minority ethnic] people. People who use the term ‘racist’ to describe the actions of others may or may not mean that the other person is personally prejudiced.²⁶

Something along the lines of this official reading of the term ‘racist’ was applied in a case in which a 49-year-old white cleaner at the end of his cleaning shift at a gym wrote in the handover book that ‘three coloured guys were messing around (i.e. play fighting and not really training)’.²⁷ The three men he was referring to were racially South Asian. A fellow cleaner, a Black man, read the written comment and was so outraged by it that he angrily confronted the writer, who immediately apologized and said he hadn’t intended to be offensive or racist. He explained that he had thought that the word ‘coloured’ was less offensive than ‘Black’ (the fact that he even thought that ‘Black’ might an acceptable description of people of South Asian race demonstrates the cleaner’s ignorance of politically correct terminology). Despite the accused’s immediate and apparently sincere apology, the aggrieved cleaner pursued a harassment claim at law. When the matter was heard, the judge dismissed it on the basis that the cleaner’s mistake was a genuine one committed in a misguided effort to use sensitive language, which he did not realize was outdated. The judge noted that socially acceptable terminology changes over time and that not everybody has the educational and social opportunities to keep up to date with the latest changes. It rather bears out this point about linguistic evolution to note that one of the leading and longest-established civil rights organizations in the USA is still called the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, albeit usually known nowadays by the abbreviation NAACP. No doubt the term ‘colored’ was originally chosen as being preferable to many of the alternatives then employed to describe Black people. Today in the USA, an acceptable generic description of non-white people is ‘people of color’. In a world in which ‘people of color’ is politically correct and ‘colored’ is politically offensive, the judge in this case was surely right to forgive a middle-aged cleaner for not being perfectly attuned to the difference. Again, the word ‘forgive’ is key, and it unlocks another concept – hypocrisy – which is crucial to making sense of popular judgment and cancel culture.

‘Mind the Gap – the Hypocrisy Problem’

To err is human; to forgive, divine.

Alexander Pope, Essay on Criticism

There is a famous biblical anecdote about hypocrisy and mob judgment that has given us a salutary maxim. The anecdote is the quasi-canonical account of Jesus coming to the aid of a ‘woman caught in adultery’ who was about to be stoned to death on religious grounds by a gang of men.²⁸ The maxim is Jesus’ challenge to the men: ‘Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone’ (John 8:7). Perhaps the men in the story were condemning the woman out of a misguided sense of religious duty, or perhaps their motivation was misogynistic delight in their capacity to exert power and pass judgment. Human nature hasn’t changed. When modern stone-throwers ‘call out’ and ‘cancel’, their outrage and judgment is likely to be to some extent hypocritical. As for their motives, these will range as they always have from a sense of duty and a sense of collectively ‘making a difference’ to a sense of pleasure, and everything between. A glaring example of the glee that sometimes motivates the Twitter mob in pursuit of its prey is provided by the case of Justine Sacco, who was senior director of corporate communications for multinational internet and media company IAC. Shortly before a flight to South Africa, she tweeted to her 170 Twitter followers ‘Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!’ (20 December 2014). Sacco, a South African, explained later that she was trying to make a tongue-in-cheek allusion to prevailing ignorance about the true impact of Aids. Had the text of Sacco’s tweet been delivered as a spoken line in a comedy show, contextualized as part of a routine about Western ignorance of African realities, and delivered with a heavily sarcastic tone of voice, it would have been completely uncontroversial and much funnier. Whatever Sacco meant by her tweet, what she couldn’t have foreseen was the turbulence on Twitter that would brew up while she was on the flight. Even her employer chipped in with a tweet while she was still airborne: ‘This is an outrageous, offensive comment. Employee in question currently unreachable on an intl flight’. By the time she landed, she had been fired. (She was subsequently, more discretely, rehired.) The employer’s tweet was motivated by the desire to protect the company’s brand, but a great many of the tweets launched at her had nothing to do with duty and everything to do with delight at the entertainment that was unfolding: ‘All I want for Christmas is to see @JustineSacco’s face when her plane lands and she checks her inbox/voicemail’; ‘We are about to watch this @JustineSacco bitch get fired. In REAL time. Before she even KNOWS she’s getting fired.’²⁹ The hashtag #HasJustineLandedYet trended on Twitter during the duration of her flight.

One wonders if the outrage in the case of Justine Sacco would have been quite so great in the case of a high-flying male executive. The use of the word ‘bitch’ in one of the tweets quoted above reeks of misogyny. In this connection, it may be significant that the biblical story of the stoning of the woman caught in adultery described religious men passing judgment on a woman. Could it be that women are especially at risk of being cast into the flames of social judgment? Guardian journalist Suzanne Moore thinks so. She has written that ‘[a]lmost every week now a different woman is put on the pyre: J K Rowling, Rosie Duffield, Selina Todd. It’s always a woman who is some sort of heretic and must be punished.’³⁰ The examples alluded to in this chapter have been men for the most part – Danny Baker, Ollie Robinson, Geoffrey Rush – but Moore might have a point. After all, the women she mentions, unlike the men just listed, were hounded for expressing honestly held (albeit sometimes intemperately expressed) opinions on the transgender debate that they still hold and see no reason to apologize for. Rosie Duffield MP has tweeted that ‘only women have a cervix’ (1 August 2020); J. K. Rowling has tweeted ‘“People who menstruate.” I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?’ (6 June 2020); and Selina Todd is a supporter of Woman’s Place UK, which argues that transgender women should not have access to women-only spaces. When it comes to witch hunts, women have long been cast as the villains and made the victims, and usually by male authority. Without prejudice to that point, it must be said that Duffield and Rowling made the error of tackling a large and sensitive issue with an inappropriately brief form of communication: the ‘tweet’. It is hard enough to handle a highly controversial issue in a long book chapter. To attempt to do so in a short tweet is doomed to failure. It might make an impact, but it has little potential to make a constructive contribution to the issues.

One very good reason why we shouldn’t censor or cancel or cast stones when someone expresses an opinion that we disagree with is the basic fact that none of us is perfect. That’s the point of the biblical challenge: ‘Let anyone who is without sin be the first to throw a stone.’ A similar maxim against lapidatious lobbing advises that ‘people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones’. The truth is that we all live in glass houses. Where an offending utterance might have been made by mistake or is susceptible to a benevolent construction, we should be especially slow to judge. We all make mistakes – to err is human. The fact that Jesus’ target in the stoning story was a mob of religious leaders should serve to warn online mobs that when they pick up their virtual sticks and stones, they are acting in precisely the way that puritanical hypocrites have always acted. Indeed, a simple and sobering parallel can be drawn between puritanical religiosity and politically correct intolerance of opinions that are considered heretical to the so-called woke agenda. The passing of judgment on the ground that someone is a heretic has always gone hand in hand with hypocrisy, and so too – as the biblical anecdote tells us – has the act of passing judgment on a woman’s sexual promiscuity. Shakespeare, as so often, expresses the point vividly:

Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand!

Why dost thou lash that whore? Strip thine own back;

Thou hotly lust’st to use her in that kind

For which thou whipp’st her

(4.6.160–163)

The point is that the person making a judgment is very often guilty of an offence similar to, if not worse than, the one that they are calling out. In such a case, judgment passed against a supposed offender is not justified by the measure of the judge’s own character but according to a standard that critic and suspect both fall short of. It is precisely this disjunction between inner reality and outer pretence that defines the critic in such a case as a ‘hypocrite’. The word hypokrisis was originally a description of masked actors in Attic Greek theatre and also a description of rhetorical performers.³¹ Hypocrisy later came to describe the error of people who pretentiously put forward a public or social mask that is more heroic or otherwise more attractive than the underlying substance of their private character. The word ‘hypocrisy’ means ‘under critical’ or ‘under separation’ and indicates that the person making the judgment is under critical of themselves and has failed to acknowledge the gap that separates their personal character from their performed social persona.

Brevity Is the Soul of Folly

In the preceding three sections we have discussed the errors of speed, superficiality, and censoriousness. I have discussed these errors in association with bad judgment, but it must be acknowledged that each of them is frequently also an error associated with the original offence against which judgment is raised. If Danny Baker had not rushed to send his offending tweet about the royal baby, and if his joke hadn’t been so superficial and judgmental, he would not have suffered the swift and superficial censorship that he did. Brevity is another error touched upon by Alexander Pope in his essay, where he reproaches critics who ‘[f]orm short ideas’. The same criticism can be levelled at offenders who form short tweets. In the world of online media, alacrity frequently goes hand in hand with brevity. The mission of a medium like Twitter is to promote fast, short-format communication and this creates the perfect breeding ground for the twin errors of speaking too swift and speaking too short. When Shakespeare had Polonius utter the adage ‘brevity is the soul of wit’ (Hamlet 2.2.92) he was being ironic, for Polonius is pompous and verbose – a full rushing stream of speech clogged with clichés. Brevity may be the soul of a quick wit, but it is seldom a hallmark of scholarly analysis, of judicial judgment, or of any species of expert critique deserving the label ‘authoritative’. It is foolish to enter large debates with small texts. Despite a doubling of the original 140 characters limit on the length of tweets, single messages on Twitter are still terse to the point of being cursory. Sometimes an argument (or polemic) is stretched across the span of a series of tweets, but on Twitter one will seldom find anything resembling a developed and structured argument, still less anything approximating the classic format of a scholarly essay in which the writer sets out a thesis and tests it against the strength of an antithesis.

In Danny Baker’s case, all it took to lose his job was a tweet containing four words and an image. Even more brief was a tweet by television celebrity Rachel Riley who simply wrote ‘Good advice’ accompanied by an egg emoji and a labour red rose emoji (3 March 2019). She was retweeting a two-month-old tweet by Guardian journalist Owen Jones in which he had offered this uncontroversial recommendation: ‘if you don’t want eggs thrown at you, don’t be a Nazi’ (1 January 2019). What made Ms Riley’s retweet contentious was the fact that it came on the day that Jeremy Corbyn, the then leader of the Labour Party, was pelted with an egg on a visit to a mosque. Even more controversial was the tweet sent in response to Ms Riley’s tweet by Labour Party activist and Corbyn supporter Laura Murray (shortly before she was appointed – with some irony – to be the Labour Party’s head of complaints). Ms Murray interpreted Ms Riley’s tweet as a criticism of Jeremy Corbyn’s poor reputation on the issue of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party and the intemperate tweet that Murray immediately sent in response contained the lines ‘Rachel Riley tweets that Corbyn deserves to be violently attacked because he is a Nazi. This woman is as dangerous as she is stupid. Nobody should engage with her. Ever’ (3 March 2019). In other words, Ms Murray went full-on ‘call out and cancel’. She called out Ms Riley as ‘dangerous’ and ‘stupid’, and by decreeing that ‘[n]obody should engage with her. Ever’, she invited the tweet-reading public to cancel Riley for life. Clearly Ms Murray was in too great a hurry to respond to Riley’s tweet and she also ran the risk of error by responding so effusively to so brief and open-textured a missive as Riley’s two-word tweet. Ms Riley’s tweet was susceptible to several alternative constructions to the one that Murray put on it. It is foolish to rush to judgment, and especially so where the terrain is too small to afford a secure foothold. Ms Murray’s mistake was not lost on Ms Riley and her legal advisors, who subsequently pursued a successful libel action against her.³² Trial by Twitter in the kangaroo court of popular opinion is a perilously short hop from a real court of law.

The ‘N-Word’

Even a single word can be enough to ruin a career. Donald McNeil Jr, a distinguished newspaper reporter for more than four decades, found this to his cost. Among his many journalistic awards was the 2002 National Association of Black Journalists award for international reporting, which he and his colleague Rachel Swarns won for a series of articles on the HIV epidemic in South Africa.³³ He was also a leading reporter on the Covid-19 pandemic until a potentially career-limiting error came to light. On 28 January 2021, the Daily Beast reported accusations that he had uttered racist language in conversation with a group of high school students who were attending a New York Times–sponsored educational visit to Peru in 2019. Donald McNeil Jr mentions in a subsequent blog that the trip was ‘arranged by Putney Student Travel in Vermont. They’re expensive, and most of the students are from private schools.’³⁴ Like Mr McNeil, none of the students was Black. The worst offence alleged against McNeil is that he used the ‘N-word’. It is not said that he used it as a description of Black people, but that he uttered it while discussing with the students a case in which a high school student was suspended from school for historic use of the offending word when they were twelve years old.³⁵ The students on the study trip had asked Mr McNeil whether he felt that the student in question ought to have been suspended. In an entry in his personal blog on 1 March 2021, in which he sets out the content of the explanatory email he sent to his employer, McNeil clarifies that he had responded to the question by asking the student discussants whether the twelve-year old had called someone a [at this point McNeil uttered the offending word] or were they ‘singing a rap song or quoting a book title or something?’ The blog entry continues with McNeil stating that throughout the whole episode he had been willing (short of endorsing the Daily Beast’s characterization of him) to apologize for offence caused by uttering the N-word, and with McNeil stating his belief that ‘[i]f the Times had not panicked’ and he had been given the opportunity to clarify and apologize, the Daily Beast might ‘have rewritten or even spiked its story’, adding that ‘[a]lmost undoubtedly, the reaction inside the Times itself would have been different’.³⁶

The last point is a reference to that fact that the New York Times peremptorily sacked McNeil because of the incident and to the fact that 150 of Mr McNeil’s colleagues at the New York Times undersigned an indignant letter to their employer in response to the Daily Beast report. Their letter opened with the lines: ‘[l]ast week’s revelations about Donald G McNeil Jr.’s reported behaviour and the company’s subsequent response deeply disturbed many of us. Our community is outraged and in pain.’ It ended with: ‘[w]e hold ourselves to a high standard. We ask you to do the same.’³⁷ One might think that high in the list of journalistic standards would be a professional commitment to checking sources in relation to what the complainants acknowledged to be merely ‘reported’ behaviour, but their letter was really nothing more than a hasty and sanctimonious cancellation performed in well-crafted journalistic prose. Perhaps the signatories are all faultless, as they claimed to be in their closing lines, but one suspects that in truth they are just a bunch of flawed human mistake-makers like everybody else. For many African Americans, the very sound of the ‘N-word’ coming from a white person’s lips, however innocuous the context in which it is uttered, is understandably resonant of an appalling and long history of systemic racism. Donald McNeil Jr ought to have avoided it at all costs. The question, though, is whether his utterance, which apparently lacked abusive intent, should have been enough to generate such outrage from his colleagues or to have cost him his job.

Suppose that the word hadn’t been spoken but had been written down – perhaps in the context of a scholarly discussion such as this one. Such usage wouldn’t be a spoken utterance of the word, and it certainly wouldn’t be to use the word as a racial slur. We might ask in such a case whether any actual harm has been caused and any offence committed. If an offence were committed, it is presumably the offence of infringing a taboo. The rule that non-Black people cannot write or say the N-word is respected in something like the way that we respect a religious article of faith. Civil society requires, as it requires in the toleration of religious differences, that we shouldn’t wilfully offend others. Many writers, especially white writers, now use the vague code ‘racial slur’ as a way of referring to the ‘N-word’. Dictionaries, encyclopaedias, and Wikipedia are among the few modern outlets in which the word itself is still spelled out in full. Perhaps it is permitted in that context because such outlets have no individual ‘author’ as such and therefore cannot be presumed to have a non-Black author. Such works as dictionaries and encyclopaedias, including Wikipedia, are repositories of communal knowledge and are therefore hopeful symbols or expressions of communal peace. If the taboo against expressing the N-word ever extends to excluding it from works such as these, we will have struck at the very root of our hope to evolve from our history and to have a racism-free social conversation.

As with any religious or mystical totem, the more the word is excluded as taboo the more mystique it garners and the more it takes centre stage. In this respect, it has some of the properties that silence imparts to an actor’s speech. Silence is not empty, it is full – it is a pregnant pause. Silence fills the theatre because it captures the attention of an audience more than any spoken sound does. As we anticipate the utterance of the N-word, we see its shape delineated by the frames that are delicately placed around it. This is no bad thing, for it is appropriate that the national shame of America’s racial history should be performed as a long, drawn-out, and awkward silence at the centre stage of American public life (although this begs the question where we should draw the line between public life and private life, e.g. in the case of a conversation between a journalist and a group of high school students on an educational trip to Peru). The taboo status of that ineffable word should be acknowledged for what it is – a human-made artefact which now makes humans behave in certain ways. It confronts us silently like a law inscribed on a stone which has been set up in the public square for all to look on and despair.

It is perhaps to relieve the tension that emanates from the magnetic totem of the N-word, or perhaps to experience the existential thrill of approaching a taboo artefact, that white comedians have occasionally teased white members of their audience by tempting them to within touching distance of the forbidden fruit. For example, the song ‘Prejudice’ by Australian songsmith Tim Minchin contains the lyric: ‘In our modern free-spoken society / There is a word that we still hold taboo’, ‘A couple of Gs, an R and an E, an I and an N / Just six little letters all jumbled together.’ The red-headed Tim Minchin delivers the punchline: ‘Ginger’. Another example is the South Park episode ‘With Apologies to Jesse Jackson’, which features the white character Randy uttering the N-word in answer to a television quiz question, and consequently being shunned as an object of hate and derision. The episode received a mixed response from Black viewers. Notable and perhaps surprising supporters were Kovon and Jill Flowers who co-founded the Abolish the ‘N’ Word project. They said that the show, ‘in its own comedic way, is helping people to educate the power of this word, and how it can feel to have hate language directed at you’.³⁸ Comedy has become an especially fraught context for politically incorrect speech acts with consequences ranging from judgment in the court of popular opinion to litigation in courts of law. A question raised by the comedy context is whether we need to protect professional fools when they venture where the rest of us fear to tread.

Comic Fools

The comic actor Rowan Atkinson is an outspoken critic of cancel culture, complaining that ‘what we have now is the digital equivalent of the medieval mob roaming the streets looking for someone to burn’.³⁹ He is most famous for his performance in the role of Mr Bean, in which role he has attained a global popularity enhanced by the fact that Mr Bean (following in the tradition of Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp) communicates for the most part in the international language of silent mime. It is therefore to Atkinson’s credit that this silent performer has voiced his support for his fellow artists, including comedians, who have to speak for a living and who therefore risk the ire of censorship and of cancel culture. The BBC seems to be especially sensitive to the risk of causing offence to any social minority, as one might expect from a broadcaster that is publicly funded by a direct tax (the ‘licence fee’) levied on users in the UK. One does wonder, though, if it made the right decision when it refused to rebroadcast a stand-up routine because of complaints from just two viewers. This decision was reached in the case of comedian Jack Whitehall in relation to a comic bit about attending a pop concert with a female friend who has dwarfism.⁴⁰ A couple of years previously, the BBC had carried an article discussing a new law against hate speech in Germany and the case of the German comedian Sophie Passmann who had a tweet deleted for breaching that law.⁴¹ In the tweet she had joked that ‘[a]s long as it’s a tradition in Germany to watch “Dinner for One,” refugees can totally come to Germany and destroy our culture’. Dinner for One is an old British film – virtually unknown in the UK – which has become a staple of German New Year festivities. Sophie Passmann objects to the film because the doddery old lady in it is also called Sophie. Passmann’s reference to refugees is clearly a light-hearted and ironic sideswipe at the stereotype that depicts immigrants as destroyers of the host’s indigenous culture. It is not a very funny joke, but as Passmann puts it: ‘There shouldn’t be a law against bad jokes, because that would mean that half the comedians in Germany wouldn’t be allowed on stage.’⁴²

In this section, I pose the question whether a society which is forbidden to touch taboo subjects needs comedians to touch them on society’s behalf. My own view is that there is indeed a need to approach and address taboo topics and that comedy has a unique capacity to meet that need. Comedy has developed this capacity because it has always been the counterpoint to the greatest and perennial human taboo: death. Death is the essence of tragedy, and every human’s inevitable, irresistible downwards trajectory towards the grave is the great universal taboo of our existence. It is against the compulsion of death that comedy has always set its face. Comedy takes us within touching distance of the tragic, helping us to laugh at things that might otherwise make us cry. Comedy reassures us that not even the finality of death can kill off the never-ending cycle of human folly. Comedy is the last laugh. Cruel mockery that laughs at individuals or vulnerable sections of society is not true comedy and is seldom funny, for true comedy mocks the universal human condition even to the extent of laughing in the face of death – it brings us together through laughing with, rather than by laughing at. That said, it is important that comedians should be permitted to run the risk of laughing at in their quest to bring people together in the experience of laughing with. The quest for true comedy is so important to our common humanity that the comedian must be permitted to take all risks and all necessary steps to undertake it. As audience members, each of us rightly has our own power to cancel a comedic experiment by switching off the television, or refusing to attend the show, or by walking out of the theatre, but to cancel comedy because of a mob reaction is seldom, if ever, justified. As social creatures we must somehow live with the darkest taboos of our shared human experience, and comedy, no less than philosophy and religion, is one of the chief means by which we cope with the human condition.

Perhaps there are topics that can never be the subject of comedy, but it’s hard to imagine what they might be. The test of success depends upon the Making Sense. Comedy succeeds when it makes us smile and when it makes us laugh – even, perhaps, when it makes us cringe in recognition of our shared human foibles – for in that moment of connection it makes a community in which performer and audience participate in their common humanity. Canadian comedian Mike Ward argues that ‘it shouldn’t be up to a judge to decide what constitutes a joke on stage’, for the crowd’s laughter has ‘already answered that question’.⁴³ Ward was sued by disabled celebrity Jeremy Gabriel when Ward lampooned him to make the point that Gabriel, like the singer Celine Dion, has become a sacred cow of Québécois culture. Michael Lifshitz, a Canadian stand-up comedian who jokes about his own disability in order to educate people, agrees that it sets ‘a dangerous precedent when the court says what you can and can’t say – that should be left to the court of public opinion’.⁴⁴ There is, then, a tension for the comedic performer between relying upon popular feedback for critical support while rejecting popular judgment that promotes cancellation. Ward has since said that he wouldn’t do the same routine today because public sensitivities have changed. It seems therefore that his aim is to touch the boundary of the taboo without entering the inner sanctum and getting blood on his hands. As he says, ‘[t]he thing I love most about comedy is when you go, “Oh, f–k, I can’t believe he or she said that, and I can’t believe I laughed at that.” I like it when they [the public] judge themselves.’⁴⁵ This, it seems to me, is the proper mission of a wise fool – to cross the boundary of good taste just enough to show us where the boundary is. When comedy is regarded in this way – as a process of Artefaction in which a joke is made for the purpose of drawing people into a constructive relationship – it is not then unrealistic to regard comedy as in some ways equivalent to law. They both create an artefact – they make a law or make a joke – that makes society look at itself critically. Both law and comedy do their job well when they keep pace with social change and adapt to social evolution by marking the bounds of what is acceptable and necessary in making civil peace in a particular society at a particular time. It’s just that law and comedy look at the boundary line from different sides. Law looks towards the limit and sets out the point beyond which we should not stray. Comedy looks back at the limit having helped us to experience, within a licenced context, what it feels like to cross the line and to live a little beyond the pale.

Sometimes a subject is too recent and too raw to work well as a topic for professional comedy. A daring or reckless comedian might try to take on a topical tragedy – and might even acknowledge the risk by teasing their audience with the rhetorical question, ‘too soon?’ – but the truth is that sometimes it really is too soon. When the blood is still wet, comedy is liable to taint itself by touching on the tragic. Only foolish fools rush in. Wise fools know to wait, for they know that after a sufficient lapse of time no territory is absolutely off limits to comedy. There have, for example, been no shortage of celebrated cinematic and televisual comedic engagements with wars, including World War I,⁴⁶ World War II,⁴⁷ the Vietnam War,⁴⁸ and the Korean War.⁴⁹ There have even been comedic engagements with Hitler, the Nazis, and the Holocaust. The three movies I discuss next were in each case directed by their leading actor and this perhaps indicates the intense artistic control that such projects call for. Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (dir. Chaplin, 1940) was a satire on Hitler and the Nazi party in which Chaplin plays a parody of Hitler. Taika Waititi also plays a parody of Hitler in his film Jojo Rabbit (dir. Waititi, 2019), in which the chief protagonist is a member of the Hitler youth. The celebrated comic actor Roberto Benigni created and starred in a film – La Vita e Bella (‘life is beautiful’) (dir. Benigni, 1997) – set in a Nazi concentration camp, for which he won the Best Actor Oscar at the 1999 Academy Awards. The film won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film and won the award for Best Jewish Experience at the 1998 Jerusalem Film Festival, which is perhaps the strongest testament to the film’s success in navigating the narrow path at the borderline between tragedy and comedy. When a comedy engages with tragic subject matter it is sometimes labelled a ‘black comedy’ or ‘tragicomedy’, but the truth is that all comedy confronts us with tragic or painful aspects of life and death without allowing us to succumb to them.

Mercy

Confronted with a world of human error, Alexander Pope said that forgiveness is ‘divine’. This can sound like an abdication of human responsibility, but Pope was of course encouraging humans to aspire to higher virtues. This book began with the observation that creative making is an aspect of human identity which, according to whether one does or does not believe in the reality of the divine, humans have inherited from the nature of God or have attributed to our idea of the divine. Forgiveness is a feature of human social life in which the aspirational values of divine making can play a powerful part in improving our collective life together, because forgiveness responds to making mistakes not by making judgments but by creating an opportunity for the offender to make an apology and make amends. In the biblical anecdote of the woman caught in adultery (discussed earlier in this chapter), Jesus’ last words to the woman were a prescription for an improved future: ‘Go now and leave your life of sin’ (John 8:11). The rock star Nick Cave, known for his thoughtful, doubt-dominated musings on the nature of the divine, has set down some provocative thoughts on the connection between creativity and forgiveness. Writing in his blog The Red Hand Files in response to a fan’s question, ‘what is mercy for you?’, he expresses the fear that cancel culture stymies creative growth:

Without mercy society grows inflexible, fearful, vindictive and humourless. Frances, you’ve asked about cancel culture. As far as I can see, cancel culture is mercy’s antithesis. Political correctness has grown to become the unhappiest religion in the world. Its once honourable attempt to reimagine our society in a more equitable way now embodies all the worst aspects that religion has to offer (and none of the beauty) – moral certainty and self-righteousness shorn even of the capacity for redemption. It has become quite literally, bad religion run amuck.⁵⁰

Iconoclasm

One of the regrettable features of ‘bad religion run amuck’ is iconoclasm. In recent times we have witnessed the appalling wholesale destruction of cultural artefacts in the Mosul Museum and elsewhere by members of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant intent on wiping out images of ‘false gods’. Puritanical religious doctrine also helps to explain widespread sacrilegious vandalism by Oliver Cromwell’s parliamentarians in the period of the English Civil War, and indeed the Greek word Eikonoklastes (‘iconoclast’) meaning ‘destruction of icons’ was chosen by parliamentarian John Milton as the title of the book he wrote to justify the execution of King Charles I. It was an answer to the book Eikon Basilike (‘the royal portrait’) which was attributed to the authorship of the king during his time awaiting trial and execution (although more likely written by cleric John Gauden, as we noted in Chapter 6). In our own time, protestors – especially those associated with the #BLM (Black Lives Matter) movement and other movements devoted to the eradication of the legacy of European colonialism – have frequently resorted to iconoclasm in various forms. In England, the most famous instance occurred in Bristol, where the statue of slave trader Edward Colston (1636–1721) was torn down and thrown into the waters of the city’s dock. In this case the action seems to have been popular with a large section of the Bristol citizenry and when four of the self-confessed statue-topplers were subject to trial by jury on charges of criminal damage, they were found not guilty. Perhaps the jury appreciated the accused’s performance positively, as being an instance of what Richard Clay calls the iconoclastic ‘transformation of signs’.⁵¹ At the time of the toppling, one of the protestors, Jen Reid, took her chance to stand on the empty plinth and a resin statue of Reid by Marc Quinn was subsequently placed on the plinth where it stayed briefly until the city council removed it. Sir Tony Robinson, the actor best known for playing alongside Rowan Atkinson in the BBC’s Blackadder comedy series, has promoted an alternative to the iconoclastic destruction of unpopular statues. Commenting on the Bristol incident, he says, ‘I would love to see the original statue and the one they put up afterwards [to Black Lives Matter protestor Jen Reid] next to each [other] in the museum. That way they can themselves become part of our culture.’⁵² This approach has the merit of putting conflicting standpoints in constructive opposition to each other. Applied to the case of Colston and Reid it would serve to perform the drama of ideological evolution by means of a symbolic dialogue between iconographic representations of antagonistic standpoints. Bristol-born artist Banksy proposed a solution with similar benefits (in his words, one ‘that caters for both those who miss the Colston statue and those who don’t’): ‘We drag him out the water, put him back on the plinth, tie cable round his neck and commission some life size bronze statues of protesters in the act of pulling him down.’⁵³ Compare this call for an enlarged performance to what President Barack Obama said in an address to the UN General Assembly: ‘In a diverse society, efforts to restrict speech can quickly become a tool to silence critics and oppress minorities … the strongest weapon against hateful speech is not repression; it is more speech’.⁵⁴

The iconoclasm through which we bury or drown out the voices of history serves only to silence and subjugate the past to the prejudices of the present time. It might be said that this is well and good, for power should reside with the living rather than the dead, but simply replacing a snapshot of the past with a snapshot of the present fails to represent the dynamic of social change. A political ‘movement’ properly so-called will speak more powerfully to the future when it maintains connection to the past, for a movement can only be appreciated as such where it conveys a dynamic sense of its trajectory over the distance covered and the journey yet to come. In short, because there is never anything identifiable as the present point of view, sequential images will communicate social change more clearly than any single image can. Consider the range of responses that artists performed to show their support for Ukraine after the 2022 Russian invasion. On the one hand, two university ensembles in Ireland (Trinity Orchestra and UCD Symphony Orchestra) are reported to have removed all Russian music from their repertoires.⁵⁵ On the other hand, Lithuanian conductor Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, the musical director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, continued with a performance of a piano concerto by Russian composer Tchaikovsky but alongside it sang a Ukrainian folk song. Which was the more effective performance – the simplicity of cancellation or the complexity of juxtaposition?

In Washington, DC, there is a powerful example of dynamic and co-Productive cooperation between opposing points of view, for in that city the memorial statue of Martin Luther King Jr looks resolutely out over the waters of the tidal basin towards the Thomas Jefferson Memorial on the opposite shore. In this way, King confronts America’s complex and troubled racial history. Jefferson, as is well known, had an ambiguous relationship with slavery. He signed the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves and made other progressive gestures and statements in his official roles, but he personally owned hundreds of slaves who worked on his plantations. The section ‘Jefferson and Slavery’ on the Thomas Jefferson Foundation (TJF) website for Jefferson’s former home, Monticello, summarizes Jefferson’s equivocation by observing that he called ‘slavery a “moral depravity” and a “hideous blot,” but continued to hold human beings as property his entire adult life’.⁵⁶ It is generally believed that his complex relationship to slavery even extended to taking an enslaved woman as his mistress. Sarah ‘Sally’ Hemings (c. 1773–1835) was seven-eighths white and a half-sister to Jefferson’s late wife. DNA evidence commissioned by the TJF indicates that Thomas, or a close Jefferson relative, probably fathered all six of Hemings’ children mentioned in the Monticello records.⁵⁷ Other circumstantial evidence supports that conclusion. On the other hand, the TJF minority report in response to the DNA evidence rejects that conclusion, and the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society, which includes in its mission statement the resolution ‘[t]o stand always in opposition to those who would seek to undermine the integrity of Thomas Jefferson’, argues that Jefferson’s younger brother Randolph (1755–1815) is a more plausible candidate to have been the father of Sally Hemings’ children.

This kind of considered debate, based as it is upon critical readings of expert evidence, is precisely how the complex controversies of history ought to be engaged with. The solution to past ills is not to erase them but to keep them constantly in view and under critical supervision. Scholar Erich Hatala Matthes has said something similar in relation to the work of writers and artists accused or convicted of offensive behaviour or beliefs. As he says in the blurb to his book Drawing the Line, ‘[r]ather than shunning art made by those who have been canceled, shamed, called out, or even arrested, we should engage with it all the more thoughtfully and learn from the complexity it forces us to confront’.⁵⁸ I visited the Martin Luther King Jr Memorial in 2011, shortly before its official inauguration, and in all the years since then Martin Luther King Jr has had his eyes fixed on Jefferson’s memorial. He stands like a stern supervisor stonily rebuking the errors of the nation’s youthful days. As an alternative to iconoclasm, such silent confrontations between cultural icons can become a new conversation through which mistakes made in the past can contribute to making future peace. Flawed statues, like flawed statutes, are sometimes more profitably amended than repealed entirely.

As we approach our last word on this subject, it is fitting that we should turn to someone who is living out the full potential of improved racial and gender justice and understands well the complexities of the race conversation and the need for nuance. Kemi Badenoch MP was born in London to Nigerian parents and in her childhood lived in the UK, Nigeria, and the United States. She was the first woman to be elected MP of her constituency and in 2022 was shortlisted in the Conservative Party’s internal vote to find a party leader following the resignation of Prime Minister Boris Johnson. On 20 October 2020, in Black History Month, she made a compelling speech in the House of Commons of the UK Parliament in which she stated that ‘we cannot improve history; we can only learn from it. What we can improve is the future.’⁵⁹ Having stressed that the ‘Black History’ of the USA, of Africa, and of the UK, are all very different and ought to be approached with appropriate respect for their differences, she pushed back against racially divisive claims made by so-called critical race theorists, including their claim (in Badenoch’s words) that ‘African history was interrupted by slavery’:

As probably the only Member of this House who actually grew up and went to school in Africa, I can tell the House that that is not what we are taught. Much more is taught about the history of black slave traders who existed before and after the transatlantic slave trade.⁶⁰

She adds that:

[T]he most notable statue in the city of Lagos, where I grew up, is that of Madam Tinubu. It is the biggest one in the equivalent of Trafalgar Square. She was a slave trader, but she was also a freedom fighter and a much-loved icon. Her slave trading is not celebrated, but her fight against colonisers is. In Nigeria, she is recognised as a complex character, as all historical figures are – and heaven help anyone who would try to pull her statue down. There is much that we can learn from Nigeria about how to handle the issue of statues.⁶¹

Oladipo Yemitan’s book Madame Tinubu: Merchant and King-Maker majors on positive aspects of Tinubu’s iconic status, but nevertheless acknowledges that on one occasion she was arraigned on the charge of selling a young boy into slavery and reportedly sought to justify it by saying, ‘I have a large house-hold and I must feed them well. I need money to do that.’⁶² In the mid-nineteenth century, in the context of British efforts to abolish slavery in Nigeria (pursuant to the Slavery Abolition Act 1833, which outlawed slavery in all parts of the British Empire), Tinubu is reported to have had a conversation with fellow slave trader Domingo Martinez in which she said of twenty of her slaves that she would ‘rather drown the slaves than sell them at a discount’.⁶³ Tinubu’s statue is surely a candidate to follow Colston’s into the water, but the decision to tear it down or to leave it standing is a decision for the Nigerian people to make in the light of all their history. For the time being they have chosen not to and have preferred to regard it, warts and all, as a testament to the complex nature of their nation’s historic struggles.

The positive potential inherent in performing both sides to a controversial debate did not commend itself to the crowds of protestors who massed to protest against the statue of colonialist Cecil Rhodes which (at the time of writing) stands prominently on the facia of Oriel College in Oxford. Nor to the 150 or so academics who undersigned to withhold their teaching services from the college so long as Rhodes remains upon it. Resisting calls to tear it down, Lord Patten, the chancellor of the University of Oxford, notes that it would be hypocritical to ‘throw the statue … in the Thames’ while at the same time accepting the philanthropic benefits of Rhodes’ legacy (including the admission of one hundred Rhodes scholar each year, a fifth of them from Africa). He adopted the opinions expressed by Nelson Mandela at a celebration banquet for the Rhodes Trust in 2003, where Mandela acknowledged Rhodes’ controversial record in Africa but also hoped that posterity would remember him. Mandela even concluded with a toast to Rhodes. When Mandela said that the Rhodes celebration helps ‘to remind us of the dramatic changes as well as the themes of continuity in the course of the history of our beloved country’, he was alert to the positive possibilities of performing the drama of social change in contrast to the iconoclasm that would supplant a snapshot of a past historical moment with a snapshot of the present. Mindful of the same performative possibilities, British sculptor Antony Gormley proposed that the Rhodes statue at Oriel College should be left in place but turned around to face the wall.⁶⁴ To make peace we need to perform both sides of the debate, not as snapshots or as isolated statements, but as an ongoing dynamic discourse. As the protestors against Rhodes know well, it is in the nature of civilized human expression to make a drama out of a crisis, and many of the best dramas revolve around a villain or antagonist. A playwright might choose to kill off an evil character to make a moral point but would never dream of excising them from future performances. The irony is that the protestors calling for the removal of the Rhodes statue can only put on an effective performance for their message so long as the statue – the villain of the piece – remains in place. The ideal outcome in performative terms is that they should continue to protest the statue’s removal but never succeed. Making great play of it is the way to make peace with it.

Cecil Rhodes’ fellow Victorian, the Australian-born scholar Gilbert Murray, attributed the success of the Greek drama to the sympathetic expression of both sides to a dilemma or debate:

This power of entering vividly into the feelings of both parties in a conflict is perhaps the most characteristic gift of the Greek genius; it is the spirit in which Homer, Eschylus, Herodotus, Euripides, Thucydides, find their kinship, and which enabled Athens to create the drama.⁶⁵

The Greek idea that truth emerges from, or is expressed in, the discourse of opposites is evident not only in their drama but also in their dialectic philosophy and rhetorical practice. In other words, it lies at the heart of their statecraft, as it did subsequently in the statecraft by which the Roman Republic was made and maintained. Ann Vasaly observes that:

The picture of the world that emerged from Ciceronian rhetoric was never simply black or white but was both black and white. That is, strong statements of the positive aspects of a place are often balanced at other times and in other speeches by equally strong statements in which the negative aspects of the same place are demonstrated. This was to be expected, in light of the varying exigencies of times and subjects, of the training in speaking in utramque partem designed to anticipate the arguments of one’s opponent, and of the existence of commonplaces providing negative and positive positions on the same subject. This was also to be expected when we keep in mind that the orator was attempting to respond to his audience’s prejudices about the world, and when we remember that the Roman audience of the late Republic had no single vision of reality. Like all of us, they were capable of entertaining various, often mutually inconsistent ideas about places and the people in them.⁶⁶

Even today, legal advocates are trained to argue ‘cross-brief’ (that is, from their opponent’s point of view) as a way of testing and refining the strength of their client’s side of the argument. The exercise is a direct successor to the rhetorical exercise of argumentum in utramque partem (arguing both sides of a debate).

When the chancellor of the University of Oxford cited Mandela in defence of Rhodes’ legacy, Oxford City Councillor Shaista Aziz said that Lord Patten’s response was ‘tone deaf’. On the contrary, he was simply advocating that we should hear both sides of the argument. It is a maxim of legal due process and an essential guarantor of a fair hearing that when an accusation is put to a judge, the judge should hear the other side (audi alterem partem) before passing judgment. This should equally be an indispensable feature of judgments made in the court of popular opinion. In other words, conflicts in courts of law and courts of popular opinion should be appreciated and conducted as high political drama. The first quotation in this book was from Plato, and as we near our conclusion it is fitting to recall that ‘[i]n the activity of maintaining the polis, Plato’s Lawmaker is engaged in the finest tragedy – one rivalling those of the tragic poets (Laws 817B)’.⁶⁷ To this Aristotle added his ‘insistence throughout the Poetics that the tragic representation must excite fear and pity in order to fulfill its function’.⁶⁸ Where history is shameful the performance should be tragic. As we heard from Plato at the outset of this book, so we heard early on from Martin Luther King Jr and his ‘I have a dream speech’. There he said: ‘we have come here today to dramatize a shameful condition’. Instead of cancelling the performance on any side of today’s most controversial debates, justice demands that the show must go on.