The middle of Erewhon: and where, exactly, is that?
PHILOSOPHY. JUSTICE. THOMAS MORE. MOB JUSTICE. UKRAINE.
Erewhon is the title of Samuel Butler’s 1872 satire, in a genre inspired by the 1516 work Utopia by Thomas More (below). It stands for “nowhere”, spelled (almost) backwards.
This article was first published in LinkedIn on 25 May 2022.
In 2019, two French tourists, young men in their late teens or early twenties, captured a wild animal in Australia and set fire to it. They were arrested for their offence against the law, tried, fined approximately 4,000 Australian dollars, and required to leave the country. They were set to return home to France. And that was that. The animal victim of their crime was beyond recovery and Justice had meted out her justice to the two miscreants, from which, it was hoped, they had learned a lesson in life, that being the purpose of punishment.
Someone within my “friends” circle on Facebook saw a report of the incident and highlighted it in a post, drawing attention to these “despicable French tourists.” I commented: “Why does it matter where they came from?” I received the courtesy of a reply: “So that people know where they are.” She called upon all and sundry to compound the judicial punishment administered to the two men with social ostracism once they had arrived back on French territory. My retort — that justice had already been done by the Australian courts — was not happily received, and the person in question maintained that it was only right and proper that the men should be made to feel the disdain of society at large back in their home environment. This provoked a comment by a hitherto uninvolved party to the discussion, that “Injustice can be a feature of justice as administered by the courts; when administered by the mob, it always is.” And that, to repeat the phrase, was, and is, that.
In a civilised western society, in which the rule of law is vaunted as a mainstay of the way we go about things — with its standards of decency, conduct, responsibility and accountability — we pride ourselves on the principle of due process, insisting that those against whom a criminal accusation is levelled be tried, given a fair hearing and then punished according to the gravity of their offence — if proved to have occurred as alleged. We sneer in disdain at the witch-hunts of Salem as captured in Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, the justice meted out on Edward II of England for his supposed homosexuality, the death penalty that was at one time ordained by England’s law for causing damage to Westminster Bridge, or the torture measures ingrained in the law that Thomas Cromwell shunned to extract from Thomas More the oath that would have salved Henry VIII’s conscience and committed the oath-swearer to purgatory for his offence against God.
And, yet … and yet the entitlement that is often assumed by members of the general public to level judgment on offenders — actual and supposed — is never far from hand: in the distant past, mostly exercised in the throwing of rotten eggs or through the columns of the printed press; in the present day, exercised through the virtual columns of Internet websites. In the transition, however, the eggs have lost nothing of their rottenness.
The rotten egg was once lampooned by Monty Python’s Flying Circus, as an officious law-enforcer endeavours in vain to discover the identity of the person who threw it; that is its virtue — it metes out a sort of justice that makes plain the anger of the inflictor, causes a modicum of inconvenience to the accused (nay, convicted) and evinces hilarity from those observing the act, in the act. But it is not justice in the sense of criminal justice as we know it, though civilised systems will nevertheless sanction the infliction of punishments far more extensive in their reach than a rotten egg, such as long years in a penitentiary or even the life of the accused. Not, however, without due process.
It is estimated that, during the Duterte presidency in the Philippines, upward of 40,000 persons were killed extrajudicially by police officers and others who were baited to hand out the punishment of death to those having any involvement in the drugs trade there — essentially, anyone from small-time corner dealers to high-living moguls cashing in on the trade in style. Without question, drugs are a serious problem in the Philippines, and action needs to be taken to bring it under control; but a carte blanche mandate issued to all and sundry to take the life of anyone accused without due process or even due evidence caused surprise, especially when issued by the highest authority of the land; it did in me, at any rate.
Jesus once encountered a crowd who were excited over someone who’d acted in a criminal manner and whom they wanted to punish by stoning him. “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone,” Jesus railed, and thereby at least forestalled that particular act of mob justice. In some way it is odd but nevertheless fitting that a man can be guilty of sins against God and still administer justice to those proved to have committed other offences under the state’s law but against whom evidence is taken on a Bible, the panoply of whose precepts is rarely taken into account in its entirety. Justice is thereby devolved as a responsibility owed by process, not by the judge personally, who is but its instrument. This process is a quid pro quo in the social contract that we each undertake with society at large — societies abrogate a part of their law-creation and enforcement prerogative to government, which institutes systems and rules to ensure that each one of us who abrogates these rights and obligations shall be judged appropriately in terms of the offences committed against society. And, in all but a few exceptional cases, we abrogate completely. We retain no residual right of assault against criminal elements. Not in terms of rotten eggs; only in terms of invective, and, even there, in due measure. We may incite others to repugn a prime minister proved to have offended against his own Covid measures; we may not incite others to attack him with bullets and bombs.
And yet … and yet we do; we repugn and incite others to repugn with impunity in the virtual world of the Internet; a world that is virtual only in its operation, but is otherwise an only too real part of our otherwise all too real world.
The transition from the real world of courts of law to the virtual world of mob justice doesn’t mean that the virtual communication of vitriol remains ensconced in the virtual world; its effects, its intended effects, are very real in the here and now and take the form of physical hurt, attempted revolution, loss of employment, suicide and murder. Some people, in full knowledge of the facts, or in possession of what they deem to be facts, deploy the Internet as a means of division, inciting hatred and disharmony. They no doubt have a purpose, and any tool is, after all, but a tool, just like any ploughshare; until it be fashioned into a weapon, that is.
The Robb school killer, who mowed down 21 people in a recent shooting spree, is condemned for having sprayed a hail of bullets around him indiscriminately; the Russian army in Ukraine is condemned for launching hypersonic missiles into urban areas and indiscriminately killing ordinary citizens whose only offence was to be in the missile’s path at the wrong moment.
And, yet … and yet the division sown in some virtual portals affects not just the participants to the discussion a quo but in fact cross-pollinates in a surreptitious spread of divisiveness whose true extent is difficult to measure but whose overall result is nonetheless perceptible, over the time in which it has occurred (by one estimate, since the period 2011-2015). Hate invective on the Internet creates multiple pieces of shrapnel, and the extent of their consequential damage is even starting to be the subject of research.
I dissolved my Facebook account; I had concluded that, pleasant though many exchanges were, some even interesting or informative, one experience above all others left me cold enough to take the step of shutting down. It stemmed from the fact — my own perception — that I am WASP, and cannot deny it – a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant. I could confound the appellation by changing faiths (although, as a device, I’m unsure what I would be changing), but of the place I was born and the colour of my skin, I can change nothing. What I can model, and have over a lifetime modelled, is the way in which, as a WASP, I see those who aren’t, who hail from other parts of the world, have another skin colour, and practise other religions, have other views and loves — and hatreds. The goal of this is not to make friends, though I’ve made some I wouldn’t have otherwise. The goal is rather something simpler and less agenda-driven, even, than making friends. It is to treat the world right. To treat it fairly; to take from it that which I need, without paying a price too harsh; to restore to it what I am able, without imposing a price too steep. To take its rule of law and adopt it at a personal level: no criminal is beyond redemption; there is no wrong side of the tracks; there have been no CV-driven career moves; no edifice has been created of my life; when it falls, few will feel the ground shudder beneath their feet. It’s a place called the middle ground. And it’s a place that has no place in social media.
During the Covid-19 restrictions, many I knew criticised people who gathered in social groups whose numbers were not allowed under the then rules, who attended illicit raves, who went on holiday to Spain, who failed to wear their mask over mouth and nose (I pointed this out to some in the supermarket, adding that the mask is intended, after all, for their own protection, not mine; they complied, however temporarily). Still, the criticism was widespread on Facebook and, after a while, I reached a conclusion that has since been confirmed by research into matters such as these: the polarisation that algorithms have nurtured on social media has left the middle ground an indefensible territory. Rather than pouring oil on troubled waters, the middle ground has become the target of attack from both warring sides, who devote a good part of their energies toward rooting out sympathisers among their own ranks who put in a good word or two for their opponents. And that was no place for me.
And yet … and yet, some say that it’s an over-simplification, that I over-think things. Maybe. Yes, it’s a simplification, but over-? Over-thinking is, I guess, where we think so deeply about something that we draw unconventional conclusions, until, that is, others involved in the same thought process arrive at like conclusions. The conclusion is presented by those who deploy ostensibly innocent means as unwilled, though one is left thinking they cite that whilst muttering frustration at the fact of having been outed (e.g., Foxy and Tommy who tell Pinocchio to bury his treasure after attacking him the previous night to steal it out of his mouth. Pinocchio had bitten off Tommy’s finger. “One of the brigands had a finger missing, just like you Tommy.” “One of my fingers missing? Oh, so it is. Fancy that! Just a coincidence.”)
So, I guess I also over-thought, until I read an article in The Atlantic, which I recommend. The problem will work its way into many spheres, but if we limit ourselves to the simple world of geopolitics, where does it leave us? Will it be that one day no problem is solvable? We can test that by taking a geopolitical problem and seeing whether the middle ground is in any way defensible. The special military operation in Ukraine.
Its solutions distil into three scenarios: (i) Russia is repelled back beyond the borders of Ukraine as they were in 1991; (ii) Russia assumes all of Ukraine as Russian territory; (iii) Russia keeps Crimea and the Donbas region, with Ukraine extant as the remainder. Of these, (i) and (ii) are diametrically opposed stances; (iii) is the compromise middle ground. Passions are running immensely high and the invective is being hurled with almost the same regularity as the missiles. Compromise, the level playing field adored by arbitrators and mediators, is difficult to attain for one reason above any other: unlike victory, it requires sacrifice — the unwilled readiness to give up something that one is otherwise able in some measure to defend and fight for — not by one, but by both parties. Effectively, both parties lose: it’s a lose-lose situation, with the half-empty glass simply being reformulated as a half-full one.
In the 19th century, the Portpatrick and Wigtownshire Joint Railway was formed out of an amalgamation of the interests of the Midland Railway, the London and North-Western Railway, the Caledonian Railway, the North British Railway and the Portpatrick Railway: it’s an esoteric, distant fact of mercantile history to most, but its principal negotiator was lauded at the time for having “held an umbrella over five disparate parties, none of whom in the end got a drop of water on them.” If such a feat is achievable with five parties, then surely it can be attained with two? In the case of Ukraine, we must first see whether such a compromise is needed, but there are already voices being raised over the fact that any resolution bar number (i) means the ultimate end for Ukraine; (i) is not only diametrically opposed to (ii) but also to (iii). Compromise is something that the party proposing it has to have formulated in his own mind, even before he attempts to formulate it in his opponent’s.
The middle ground is getting scarcer in our modern times, and such of it as remains is becoming barren. In the field of climate change, it’s being embraced by many, who then eschew it in their dealings with others; in terms of migration, there is frequently a sub-text of but not in my back yard. Whereas our rule of law strives for the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, however laughably it may go about realising that in fact, we are doing battle for the mere existence of the planet and are unable to face telling corporate shareholders that they’re going to have to temper their dividend rights a tad; and armies are doing battle for a chunk of eastern Europe, with no sign yet of tempering their mutual claims.
Sir Thomas More went to the block, prepared to lose his head before he would relinquish his faith, for which he was declared a saint by the church. When I played the man in Robert Bolt’s play A Man For All Seasons in Brussels in 2019, I searched high and low for a glimmer of compromise in his stance against Henry VIII, a compromise that would have saved him from his condemnation as a traitor and kept him close by his family’s side for the rest of his days. I found it, and it was in the form of his refusal to swear the oath, the very refusal cited as proof of his treachery, for in refusing to swear he also forbore from condemning the king. He had, in that, already achieved the middle ground; his execution came as a result of the king’s own inability to compromise; and the king’s ability to pay no heed to his own lack of indulgence.
The middle ground was a hard place to defend in England in 1535; no less so in Ukraine in 2022. And the Internet? Will the middle ground survive the mudslinging of today’s radicals? For myself, it’s a fray I don’t feel strong enough to re-enter; so I cheer for no one, from non-committal sidelines. And observe; just observe.