A few days earlier, Bernard Jenkin, a Conservative backbencher, was lambasting the BBC for asking businessmen and women their views on whether Britain should stay in the European Union during Radio 4’s Today programme financial news round-up at 6:20. That is 6:20 in the morning. The hypersensitivity is as striking as the obsessiveness of a man who monitors the airwaves when the rest of us are asleep and finds a plot. The notion that nearly everyone involved in international trade wants Britain to stay in the single market cannot be tolerated. The fact that they come on the radio in the early morning and say so is not a fact at all, but evidence of a conspiracy against freeborn Englishmen and women.
Last year we had the Scottish National Party organising demonstrations against the BBC and demanding that it sack its political editor for asking a clumsy question at a press conference as reporters occasionally do. With Scotland already looking a little too close to a one-party state for comfort, the SNP makes no secret of its wish to get control of BBC Scotland. When and if it does, I wonder how often we will hear those difficult questions about what currency an independent Scotland will have.
Scientologists call non-believers “suppressive persons”. They are filled with harmful intentions, and must be fought without mercy. Spend too long with them, and they will have you believing that a malign force inspires anyone who speaks out of turn. Every television interviewer has noticed that Corbyn quickly cracks under questioning. He has lived in a far-left world where, whatever its divisions, no one except the corrupt, the “Zionist”, the “tool of neo-liberalism” raises the arguments a broadcaster would put to a left-wing politician as a matter of course. As he emerges blinking from the Left’s version of the Church of Scientology, he cannot accept, or even talk to, the heathens around him.
It is easy to condemn cultishness and easier still to mock, but you had better get used to it. New media technologies allow people to live in enclosed intellectual spaces, where prejudices are not only reinforced but heightened. You only read online newspapers and blogs that tell you what you want to hear. You follow an Owen Jones or a Louise Mensch on Twitter, who never once forces you to question your beliefs, or accept that your opponents are not always liars and frauds. What the American legal scholar Cass Sunstein nicely called “enclave extremism” is an observable psychological phenomenon. Put people together who share a strong view, and the differences between them vanish. Peer pressure pushes people further to the right or left; it makes their nationalism stronger, their religion more fervent. The web allows not a few hundred, in a church or at a political rally, but hundreds of thousands to convince themselves that their cult is the one true path.
The essential task for journalists and writers today is not to fight this or that ideology, but to resist the spirit of an age which proclaims that doubt is profane, and argument the ploy of a malicious conspiracy.
Last year we had the Scottish National Party organising demonstrations against the BBC and demanding that it sack its political editor for asking a clumsy question at a press conference as reporters occasionally do. With Scotland already looking a little too close to a one-party state for comfort, the SNP makes no secret of its wish to get control of BBC Scotland. When and if it does, I wonder how often we will hear those difficult questions about what currency an independent Scotland will have.
Scientologists call non-believers “suppressive persons”. They are filled with harmful intentions, and must be fought without mercy. Spend too long with them, and they will have you believing that a malign force inspires anyone who speaks out of turn. Every television interviewer has noticed that Corbyn quickly cracks under questioning. He has lived in a far-left world where, whatever its divisions, no one except the corrupt, the “Zionist”, the “tool of neo-liberalism” raises the arguments a broadcaster would put to a left-wing politician as a matter of course. As he emerges blinking from the Left’s version of the Church of Scientology, he cannot accept, or even talk to, the heathens around him.
It is easy to condemn cultishness and easier still to mock, but you had better get used to it. New media technologies allow people to live in enclosed intellectual spaces, where prejudices are not only reinforced but heightened. You only read online newspapers and blogs that tell you what you want to hear. You follow an Owen Jones or a Louise Mensch on Twitter, who never once forces you to question your beliefs, or accept that your opponents are not always liars and frauds. What the American legal scholar Cass Sunstein nicely called “enclave extremism” is an observable psychological phenomenon. Put people together who share a strong view, and the differences between them vanish. Peer pressure pushes people further to the right or left; it makes their nationalism stronger, their religion more fervent. The web allows not a few hundred, in a church or at a political rally, but hundreds of thousands to convince themselves that their cult is the one true path.
The essential task for journalists and writers today is not to fight this or that ideology, but to resist the spirit of an age which proclaims that doubt is profane, and argument the ploy of a malicious conspiracy.
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