Ross Douthat's column this weekend was excellent (as always). I wanted to highlight and expand upon one bit toward the end, however.
Douthat (more or less) argues that in an age in which traditional group ties are being destroyed—ties to the family, ties to the church, ties to one's nation—individuals are desperate for something to cling to, something to give their life a sense of unity and purpose. He cites Robert Nisbet's Quest for Community in explaining how such a sentiment leads folks to give in to the totalitarian temptation:
In the increasing absence of local, personal forms of fellowship and solidarity, [Nisbet] suggested, people were naturally drawn to mass movements, cults of personality, nationalistic fantasias. The advance of individualism thus eventually produced its own antithesis — conformism, submission and control.
You don’t have to see a fascist or Communist revival on the horizon (I certainly don’t) to see this argument’s potential relevance for our apparently individualistic future. You only have to look at the place where millennials — and indeed, most of us — are clearly seeking new forms of community today.
That place is the online realm, which offers a fascinating variation on Nisbet’s theme. Like modernity writ large, it promises emancipation and offers new forms of community that transcend the particular and local. But it requires a price, in terms of privacy surrendered, that past tyrannies could have only dreamed of exacting from their subjects.
This is all true, of course. I'd just like to focus on people being "drawn to mass movements, cults of personality, nationalistic fantasias." Because we see that sort of thing online all the time, especially on Twitter.
We see it in the Two Minutes Hates, whipped up against those who dare crack the wrong sort of joke or offer the wrong sort of argument. The most celebrated (and feared) of these mass movements is likely "Black Twitter," which can tear down an individual and a career in no time flat. Twitter's cult of personality rears its head when the fans of celebrities such as Chris Brown mindlessly attack those who would denigrate the girlfriend-beating hit-machine or when the president implores his millions of followers to do his bidding. Conformism, submission, control: This is the goal of the transgendered and their allies when they do their damnedest to silence and shame journalists for committing the crime of practicing journalism. A special level of anger is reserved for the apostate, for people who dare disagree with the sacred tenets of the in-group—consider, for instance, the way that Michelle Goldberg was attacked following her eminently sensible piece on the toxicity of Feminist Twitter. There's nothing more dangerous to the totalitarian regime than the ally who disagrees ever so slightly.
I sometimes like to think of Twitter as a series of slightly overlapping totalitarian regimes, a place where in-groups viciously defend their ideals from outsider and insiders alike. While the right does this sort of thing as well, Twitter is disproportionately comprised of groups—the young, minorities—who lean left. So it's no surprise that their ideals dominate, their mobs are stronger and quicker and more vicious.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a little blue bird pecking your tongue and your eyes out—forever.*
*I'm so sorry for that. I couldn't help myself and I needed a way to close this post. I promise to read Homage to Catalonia over the weekend to make up for it.