Beware of the delicious moral treat of righteous indignation

Thoughts on the limits of peaceful protest

Regular readers may know I have a rather idiosyncratic love for Chinese fantasy dramas (xiānxiá and wǔxiá) and historical dramas. It all started three years ago, when I had COVID, and I lost hearing in one ear.¹ I ended up watching Love Between Fairy and Devil. That was my gateway drug. I have now watched enough of dramas to make an observation. In a substantial number of these dramas, there is a scene where the mob turns on a character. Often, prior to this, the person who is targeted was very popular and was feted by the crowds. However, now everything has changed and they’re derided by the same people who once feted them.

A scene from Episode 5 of Moonlight Mystique 白月梵星) , where a mob turns on their formerly beloved Governor Bai Xun.

My Chinese friends were a little taken aback by my fascination with this phenomenon. “It’s just a very typical trope,” said one.

I said, “Is it one you have ever seen in a Western drama?”

We had to stop and think. No, in Western dramas, the hero is not set upon by mobs. Nor is stoicism and humility in the face of the mob used to signal heroism.

Unlike in Western dramas, the main division in Chinese dramas is not between Good and Evil. It is between Order and Chaos. Order may be either good (keeping things peaceful) or evil (overly constraining and blind to its own injustice). The same is true of Chaos. Sometimes it’s necessary to have disorder and to shake things up, particularly when order becomes overly constraining and blind to its own injustice. However, too much Chaos is usually evil. The mobs represent Chaos, generally not of a good kind.

The lack of mobs in Western dramas doesn’t mean that we’re unaware of the violence mobs can do. In GCSE English, many moons ago, I had to read Lord of the Flies by William Golding. Below, I quote a scene that from that book that has haunted me ever since I first read it. It’s a large chunk, as that’s really the only way I can get the cosmic terror of it across to you.

“Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood!”

The movement became regular while the chant lost its first superficial excitement and began to beat like a steady pulse. Roger ceased to be a pig and became a hunter, so that the center of the ring yawned emptily. Some of the littluns started a ring on their own; and the complementary circles went round and round as though repetition would achieve safety of itself. There was the throb and stamp of a single organism.

The dark sky was shattered by a blue-white scar. An instant later the noise was on them like the blow of a gigantic whip. The chant rose a tone in agony.

“Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood!”

Now out of the terror rose another desire, thick, urgent, blind.

“Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood!”

Again the blue-white scar jagged above them and the sulphurous explosion beat down. The littluns screamed and blundered about, fleeing from the edge of the forest, and one of them broke the ring of biguns in his terror.

“Him! Him!”

The circle became a horseshoe. A thing was crawling out of the forest. It came darkly, uncertainly. The shrill screaming that rose before the beast was like a pain. The beast stumbled into the horseshoe.

“Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood!”

The blue-white scar was constant, the noise unendurable. Simon was crying out something about a dead man on a hill.

“Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood! Do him in!”

The sticks fell and the mouth of the new circle crunched and screamed.

The beast was on its knees in the center, its arms folded over its face. It was crying out against the abominable noise something about a body on the hill.

The beast struggled forward, broke the ring and fell over the steep edge of the rock to the sand by the water. At once the crowd surged after it, poured down the rock, leapt on to the beast, screamed, struck, bit, tore. There were no words, and no movements but the tearing of teeth and claws.

Then the clouds opened and let down the rain like a waterfall. The water bounded from the mountain-top, tore leaves and branches from the trees, poured like a cold shower over the struggling heap on the sand. Presently the heap broke up and figures staggered away. Only the beast lay still, a few yards from the sea. Even in the rain they could see how small a beast it was; and already its blood was staining the sand.

Now a great wind blew the rain sideways, cascading the water from the forest trees. On the mountain-top the parachute filled and moved; the figure slid, rose to its feet, spun, swayed down through a vastness of wet air and trod with ungainly feet the tops of the high trees; falling, still falling, it sank toward the beach and the boys rushed screaming into the darkness. The parachute took the figure forward, furrowing the lagoon, and bumped it over the reef and out to sea.

Toward midnight the rain ceased and the clouds drifted away, so that the sky was scattered once more with the incredible lamps of stars. Then the breeze died too and there was no noise save the drip and trickle of water that ran out of clefts and spilled down, leaf by leaf, to the brown earth of the island. The air was cool, moist, and clear; and presently even the sound of the water was still. The beast lay huddled on the pale beach and the stains spread, inch by inch.

The edge of the lagoon became a streak of phosphorescence which advanced minutely, as the great wave of the tide flowed. The clear water mirrored the clear sky and the angular bright constellations. The line of phosphorescence bulged about the sand grains and little pebbles; it held them each in a dimple of tension, then suddenly accepted them with an inaudible syllable and moved on.

Along the shoreward edge of the shallows the advancing clearness was full of strange, moonbeam-bodied creatures with fiery eyes. Here and there a larger pebble clung to its own air and was covered with a coat of pearls.

The tide swelled in over the rain-pitted sand and smoothed everything with a layer of silver. Now it touched the first of the stains that seeped from the broken body and the creatures made a moving patch of light as they gathered at the edge. The water rose farther and dressed Simon’s coarse hair with brightness. The line of his cheek silvered and the turn of his shoulder became sculptured marble. The strange attendant creatures, with their fiery eyes and trailing vapors, busied themselves round his head. The body lifted a fraction of an inch from the sand and a bubble of air escaped from the mouth with a wet plop. Then it turned gently in the water.

Somewhere over the darkened curve of the world the sun and moon were pulling, and the film of water on the earth planet was held, bulging slightly on one side while the solid core turned. The great wave of the tide moved farther along the island and the water lifted. Softly, surrounded by a fringe of inquisitive bright creatures, itself a silver shape beneath the steadfast constellations, Simon’s dead body moved out toward the open sea.

Simon is the gentle boy who tries to reason with everyone and tell them the truth. But “the throb and stamp of a single organism” can’t be reasoned with. They can’t be told that the beast they so feared was actually a dead soldier, trapped in the trees by his own parachute. Instead Simon himself becomes the beast in their eyes and is sacrificed.

Photo by Alex McCarthy on Unsplash

Sometimes, when the people are unhappy, they have a point, and it is important for those who rule to listen. Even mobs sometimes have a point. In that scene from the Chinese drama I picture above, the people have genuine reasons for their unhappiness with their Governor, although their response is disproportionate and unfair, because they do not know the full complexities of the situation. I would also note that the online ecosystem has made modern mobs more complex: online mobs can form very quickly, on the basis of mistaken information, and proceed accordingly.

It must be emphasised, however, that there is a huge difference between peaceful protest and a mob. We allow peaceful protest in Australia because it is important to allow people to express their views and to seek to tell others about matters of concern. Feedback loops matter. Nonetheless, there is always a possibility that a peaceful protest can get out of hand. It’s something we have to guard against, because the mob can’t be reasoned with, and it may mete out revenge unfairly, based only on prejudice. We speak of lynch mobs with fear, because of this history.

My own university has recently had to grapple with the difficult question of when peaceful protest crosses the line. Two students have been expelled and two have been suspended. As I understand it, these disciplinary actions have been taken because they “occupied” the office of a professor.

I have written of these events before, but here is a more detailed account. For some months, a small group of pro Palestinian protesters had singled out a professor—a visibly observant Jew who wears a kippah—because they objected to his views on Israel and his association with joint PhD program between our university and Hebrew University of Jerusalem. They alleged that this made him complicit in genocide.

Their campaign against him began with posters mentioning him by name, ramped up to rallies focused on him outside his building and then culminated in the occupation of his office. At least 20 - 25 protesters, most wearing masks, hoods and scarves, congregated at the professor’s laboratory and waited for him to arrive. They stuck posters and stickers around his office. When he arrived, they chanted that he was a murderer and demanded to talk to him. He asked them to leave and to make individual appointments to speak with him. They refused and kept chanting, surrounding him.

He became worried for his safety and retreated. He fled to a secure area, chased by two individuals, one of whom tried to stop him from escaping by putting his foot in the door. Security then arrived and asked the protesters to leave. When they would not leave, the police were called. The protesters left after being given orders by police, but they said they would be back.

How do I know this much detail? After all, I wasn’t there. I decided to write an opinion piece for the newspaper. I thought I should ensure that I really understood what had happened. I spoke to the professor, but from my time as a judge’s associate, I know that events can often be more complex than people recall (particularly when they are stressed). As it happens, I had an alternative source of events. The protesters had proudly uploaded videos and pictures of their activities to a public social media account associated with their protest group.

I watched the videos several times. And then I felt sick. I had witnessed the “throb and stamp of the single organism” in those videos.

If some students have been either expelled or suspended for participating in this incident, the university’s decision was right. This protest crossed a line.

Of course, I’m sure I’ll get some pushback from at least some on the progressive left, who will say that the actions of the protesters are morally justified. To them, I ask, would you feel differently, say, if the professor concerned had been a pro-choice feminist, and the mob which had confronted her had been comprised of Christian pro-life activists? If you’d see the situation differently, why? Is it simply because you agree with one professor, and not the other?

To all my readers, regardless of where your prejudices lie, if you would treat the two cases according to different rules, you’re failing to follow the rule of law: that is, we apply the same rules, regardless of whether we agree with the person or not and regardless of their identity.

You might respond to me, “Oh, Katy, but that professor with whom I disagree is complicit with wholesale murder. It’s a moral imperative for me to intervene, whereas I don’t believe that’s the case with the other professor.” I don’t care what the cause is, or how righteous or genuine the protesters’ beliefs are.

Also, if you’re going to tell me that I’m complicit with genocide or murder, simply because I don’t accept every single proposition activists demand of me, please save your breath. I am not interested in zero-sum loyalty tests or Jacobin purity spirals.

For the record, as I have stated before, I would equally well stand up for a Palestinian academic or for anyone else who found themselves at the mercy of a protest mob. I would do this as a matter of principle, because I have always known that the mob is not rational, and that it can commit great wrongs in the name of justice.

There are three reasons academics should beware of defending violent protest mobs, particularly one which targets individual academics.

First, if a person cares about the cause, targeting an individual academic is counterproductive, and repels all but the most rusted-on true believers. After my op ed in the paper ran, some people (including Palestinians) wrote to me to say how dismayed they were by the targeting of an individual, because it took away from their legitimate concerns and the issues they wanted ventilated.

Secondly, targeting individuals and mobbing them simply because they have views you don’t like is inimical to academic freedom and freedom of speech. There seems to be a view among some on the progressive side of politics that any kind of “civil disobedience” should be excused in the name of political protest, as long as the protest is righteous. If the protester believes that if their actions are necessary to resist tyranny and genocide, no holds are barred. I call it the von Stauffenberg conceit: everyone likes to believe that they are Claus von Stauffenberg. This view becomes very dangerous, once you begin to target people individually, occupy their spaces and personally intimidate them.

Thirdly, who is to say you will not be faced by your own protest mob, one day, when the political tables flip? This is a beast you do not want to let off the leash. Do not only consider how such tactics might be used against those with whom you disagree: consider how they would be used against you or your allies.

I end again with a quote from another twentieth century author, Aldous Huxley, from Chrome Yellow:

The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior ‘righteous indignation’—this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.

Do not be tempted by that treat. Recall that, sometimes, the worst deeds are committed precisely when we think we are doing good.

1. I have COVID again right now, and yup, left ear is not working…