It’s an outrage! The dictionary definition of ‘outrage’ in this sense is ‘something that is grossly offensive to decency, morality or good taste’, or resentful anger caused by this. The frequency of outrages these days seems to have gone up by multiples. But is that really the case?
It often feels these days that there is simply too much mad stuff going on, day in day out. Let’s have a look at the last few weeks. As usual, something crazy happened every couple of hours. Jews were assaulted by a racist mob in Leicester Square, and the police took half an hour to show up, after ten 999 calls. This is in central London, where you’d think a conspicuous police presence would be handy. What else? A man called Darren Collins related via X the nightmarish story of how he was unable to locate his 86-year-old dementia-suffering mother after she had a fall and was admitted to hospital. A long chain of NHS functionaries refused to confirm her whereabouts because of ‘patient confidentiality’.
There is now a sense of a society falling apart, the end of the liberal postwar settlement
Then there’s the school in Waltham Forest which is on the point of a lockdown-style closure because of threats made to staff after the banning of pupils wearing political symbols and flags. And what’s this? An employment tribunal in the case of Roz Adams vs the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre has shone light on the fact that the CEO of this centre, Mridul Wadhwa, is a man.
It’s a never-ending silly season, and it’s gradually getting less silly and more sinister. It’s also exhausting. This word is often used by people on the internet when they actually mean ‘tedious, repetitive and annoying’ – but eventually real exhaustion does set in. It’s made worse because it is low status to notice any of this, and even lower status to object to it. We fear becoming the crank with steam blasting from the ears who is forever shouting ‘I shall write to the papers!’ or ‘somebody do something!’.
Part of this resultant exhaustion is wondering: was the world always like this but we don’t remember, or is it that we didn’t notice? Are those of us who can recall the world before the internet and the rolling news cycle guilty of rose-tinting a time when we didn’t have media rolling and scrolling right in front of our eyes all day every day? Before the algorithmic reward for outrage that is the business model of social media? I’m sure I remember things like former Labour MP Hazel Blears’s resignation from the cabinet as being big news, a media firestorm. It now seems positively quaint – she wore a cheeky badge and mocked Gordon Brown for using YouTube. The horror!
You also start to worry about the undoubtedly delusional people who boil permanently about totally imaginary things: chemtrails or flat earth or the Conservative party being fascists. Are you joining their ranks, albeit on a different team?
But no. I just had a quick check on the news of January 2004 and January 2014, and it was all rather dull. There are big important news stories, yes, but there is also a sense that society is functioning, muddling along, more or less.
The coming of the ‘mad times’ is often framed as being the inevitable outcome of gradual institutional decline and decay. I’m not entirely sure about this. My memory is that it all seemed to kick off very quickly around 2015. Undoubtedly social media has played a part. The crazy ‘intersectional’ ideology that’s at the root of so many of the outrages was fairly safely contained in the universities until then, but Twitter let it out.
On top of that we’ve had a constantly blundering and buffeted government since then, blasted about even further by their shock at Brexit and Covid, and undermined by the continually slow economy. Their attempts at pushback – issuing easily ignored ‘guidance’, launching reviews, hatching daft plans like Rwanda that never come to fruition – have been pathetic. It seems like nobody is on top of anything. Labour’s direction of travel is pretty much exactly the same, only worse. Nobody is riding to the rescue; to draw inspiration for Aesop’s Fables, we are about to replace King Log with King Even Bigger Log.
There is now a sense of a society falling apart, the end of the liberal postwar settlement. What with the weekly pro-Hamas demonstrations, the consequences of mass immigration making themselves felt, the slow and dismal death of the NHS, distant war rumbling getting louder. On top of all that, the outrages are coming thick and fast – there will be another bucket of them this week, I guarantee.
I will be very glad if I am proved wrong and everyone has a good old laugh at me in a few years for being Chicken Licken. But I don’t think I am. Buckle up!
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