We’re accustomed, by now, to Catholic priests having eccentric hobbies. Even so, 57-year-old Father Mark Rowles turned out to have a humdinger. At the end of last week, he admitted in court that while, by day, he was a sad sack of a man in late middle age with thinning hair and specs who ministered to a congregation in Cardiff, by night he took on the persona of ‘skinheadlad1488’ in a series of neo-Nazi chatrooms, claiming to be a 16-year-old race warrior who fantasised about bombing mosques and shooting black people in the head.
Father Mark Rowles admitted to taking on the persona of ‘skinheadlad1488’ in neo-Nazi chatrooms
What are we to make of this? It’s hard, isn’t it, to take at face value that someone could combine a career as an armchair genocidaire with a full-time lifelong vocation in the ministry of the Catholic church? It’s not impossible, but it seems a stretch. What seems less of a stretch is that the psychological dynamic here is that the former plays off the latter. Our man adopts a persona that allows him secretly to break every rule of decency that constrains him in his ordinary life.
He told the police officers that he was ‘lonely and had a sexual fetish for roleplay’. That probably tracks. The actual content of a taboo is far less important, I suggest, than the libidinal release of breaking it. I’d go so far as to say that the politics are distinctly secondary. If everyone in polite society disapproves of Nazis and racists, and the Holocaust is an event inscribed in sacred horror, the quick thrill is to identify with the first two things and make fun of the third. Ma’s out, pa’s out, let’s talk rude: pee, po, belly, bum, drawers.
You feel, perhaps, a thrill of transgression. You are a brave edgelord. You own the libs. The breaking of the taboo at once distances you from the out-group and affirms your membership of the sniggering in-group. Online anonymity enables it. It’s sad stuff, but it’s the stuff of curdled psychology before it is the stuff of ideology.
The same thing, parenthetically, seems to me to apply to sex. For all our well-intentioned disapproval of ‘kink-shaming’, if people weren’t just a tiny bit ashamed of their kinks their proclivities wouldn’t be kinks in the first place. Even the most bizarre sexual practices, stripped of shame, would be about as transgressive and as exciting as a nice game of tennis. Woody Allen’s dictum – if sex isn’t dirty, you’re not doing it right – holds.
James Ball, an acute writer on tech and politics, has described how, as a teenage regular on the 4chan message board, he ‘spent an inordinate amount of the early 2000s calling strangers ‘fags” – while James even then knew that he was himself gay. As I say, the content of the taboo is almost irrelevant to the identitarian thrill of breaking it: ‘that’s how everyone spoke in the corners of the internet I frequented at the time.’
You can now see the same dynamic all over our politics, turbocharged by a social media environment in which people are getting off on shock; and the people who do get off on shock are (which is properly shocking) coming to dominate public life.
What two decades ago was a minor internet sewer is now the main artery of the world (and if you trace the connection from Gamergate through the rise of the Alt-Right and the Groyper movement, you can see it’s not quite a coincidence). The official White House communications strategy – to say nothing of their policies – these days resembles nothing so much as a bad-taste Reddit thread. The president of the United States responds to protests against his desecration of the constitution by posting memes showing himself showering his own electorate with shit. We are living, in some sense, in the age of the troll.
Take the logs leaked, the other day, of text chats between various eminences of the Young Republican movement. In them, they talked of black people as ‘monkeys’ and ‘watermelon people’, and joked about raping their political enemies and sending them to gas chambers. I’m optimistic here in one respect. I am less prepared to believe that significant numbers of young Maga republicans are genuine neo-Nazis than I am to believe that a really large number of them are just absolute raging dickheads. Not unlike Elon Musk, with his hilariously edgy salute.
Here, I suspect, is something more like the behaviour, in a previous generation, of Alan Clark calling his dogs Leni and Eva and collecting Nazi memorabilia: a callow and tedious attempt epater la bourgeoisie. I don’t say that no harm comes from normalising that sort of talk. I do say, though, that what we’re looking at is not so much evil values as the absence of values altogether.
If the best of what the internet can do for us is encapsulated in Wikipedia’s three-word mantra ‘assume good faith’, the worst of it is captured by the rampant bad faith and adolescent solipsism of the troll – for whom the only thing that matters is the ‘lols’ to be had from causing strangers grief and offence without any accountability.
Back to Mark Rowles. Is this loser, typing messages one-handed on sites called things like ‘Aryan Reich Killers’, really in prospect of bombing a mosque or starting a local race war? You’d have to suspect not. Does the presence on those sites of many cosplayers like him give encouragement to the sort of loony who might? You wouldn’t bet against it. Does the presence in positions of real institutional power of people who never outgrew the thrill of using the N-word on 4Chan bode ill for the world? Yeah. Yeah. It really, really does.
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