It’s official. The age of reason is dead and the age of sentiment has begun.
Last weekend James Damore, a Google engineer in California, found himself in the eye of a social media storm for writing a memo to his colleagues, arguing that women are biologically unsuited to coding. I have read the memo, in which he said nothing of the sort, but with swift inevitability he has since himself without a job.
As a female engineer who spent most of her working life in tech I have some skin in this game. I didn’t agree with everything Damore said, but he made some good points. Some of his ideas are shared by Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, but his public denunciation by Google’s chief executive prove the truth of his warning of an “intolerance for ideas and evidence that don’t fit a certain ideology” at the firm.
What amazes me is that this happened at Google, a company which sells technology, literally built on logic and code. Perhaps only the machines are allowed to reason there; anyone else with arguments could be charged with sedition.
The triumph of sentiment over reason – of emotion over clear thinking – can give free rein to some of the basest human instincts. The intimidation of candidates at the last general election received prominent coverage but this was a symptom of a much wider malaise. Spare a thought for a local councillor I know who received death threats in the post and once sat through a two-hour public meeting while the man behind him muttered repeated threats to kill him over the closure of a failing school.
This isn’t limited to politicians. I am increasingly concerned about what is happening to front-line public sector workers, particularly in our cities. This month alone there were sadly familiar scenes of rowdy youths squaring up to uniformed police officers in east London; there have even been two acid attacks on emergency service workers while they were trying to help patients. Surely we crossed the Rubicon recently when staff at Great Ormond Street Hospital were called murderers as they walked to work, simply because the mob – and it was a mob – disagreed with a medical diagnosis.
How did we get here? Who is to blame?
Social media is a prime culprit. Online, disagreement is frequently expressed on a spectrum ranging from mere outrage to outright hysteria. The greater the disagreement, the more extreme the language.
Keyboard warriors are thankfully armed only with their laptops and as much invective as their vocabulary permits, but this virtual behaviour is spilling over into the real world. At a hustings this year a 16-year-old boy approached me, trembling and with fists clenched, to snarl about the Conservative Party’s “barbaric” grammar schools policy.
Whatever your feelings about grammar schools policy, barbaric it ain’t. But this teenager’s language equated it to burning men alive in cages like Isil. I was too exhausted to tell him that Jeremy Corbyn sent his son to a grammar.
Other, longer term shifts are also to blame. What began as the demise of the culture of deference has become a general coarsening of behaviour, with many people seeing basic politeness as demeaning them somehow.
Politics, and the highly charged rhetoric that comes with the trade, amplifies these factors. Abusive language and behaviour are defensible if you believe that people who disagree with you are not just misguided but evil. Those — including senior politicians and commentators — who advocate violent protest or believe that words such as “scum” or “Nazi” have a place in political debate bear responsibility for this.
With the rise of identity politics, the expression of naked prejudice against members of a supposedly privileged group has become mainstream. Under the cloak of inclusivity, it is now possible to complain about a film or an organisation being “too white”, while new terms such as “cis” are not useful descriptions but designed to exclude.
What can Conservatives do about all this? Our first task must be to be more confident in calling out both the politics of identity and the rhetoric which surrounds it. Only this way can we rebuild trust between groups who have been encouraged to focus on their divisions rather than what they have in common. Identity politics may claim to defend the rights of individuals, but increasingly it has become a mechanism for undermining the freedom of people to hold and express an opposing view.
The truth is that our freedoms are being subtly eroded in an era where emotion and sentiment are prized above reason and rationality. Everyone in public life should judge ideas on the quality of their contents, not the identity of their proponents. Doing so is the only truly fair way of doing things. But until such common sense becomes the consensus view, let it be we Conservatives who lead the charge, and in doing so defend vital public sector workers – in institutions from the police to schools to hospitals – who face increasing violence and abuse dressed up as human rights.
This article was first published in the Telegraph, 10th August 2017.
