Soft vigilantes

Anyone who maintains even a cursory interest in current affairs must be aware of how passionate some people are about their beliefs; particularly middle class people. In our prosperous world this amounts to many people and much passion.

It adds up to a vast swamp of emotional no-go areas around all manner of causes from animal welfare to gender politics to recycling, social justice, diet, education, environment, transport and many many more. So many issues and causes seem to grab some people so firmly by the throat that they simply cannot let go.

They might almost be called vigilantes, yet most are not physically active, they don’t go in for direct vigilante type action. They are not prepared to wave placards in the street, lie down in front of trucks, shout, swear, throw eggs at public figures or physically challenge burly police officers.

Perhaps they make a more dramatic stand in their dreams but in reality they don’t. What they do is to use modern media to attack those they see as their ideological opponents from a standpoint of obsessive, often supercilious conviction which may well dribble into social relationships. A clue to social class perhaps.

To some extent we all do this if we take even the most moderately active part in the public arena. Many of us are not obsessive though, we don’t press our cause at every opportunity, squeeze it into every debate whether public, private, relevant or not.

Maybe the armchair obsessives could be called soft vigilantes because there is always a sense of rallying to the cause and even a hint of thuggish intolerance. There is the vigilante’s righteous determination to defend the cause, to defeat all opposition plus a definite contempt for the conventions of civilised debate. This is not to claim that soft vigilantes are a new social pest, merely far more widespread and that seems to be due to the enormous scope of social media and the enormous size of the middle class.

At its lowest level, any comment thread linked to any contentious cause is liable to be hijacked by soft vigilantes who cannot bear the possibility that others may oppose their cause and may even oppose it with integrity and eloquence. That seems to be particularly unbearable. We’ve all seen them. I once counted over 140 comments by the same person on a single comment thread. That was a one-off by the way - I don’t make a habit of counting comments hem hem.

Stepping up from obsessive comments we have soft vigilantes who try to disrupt debate and free speech via a variety of approaches from attempting to have websites shut down to legal action to more or less abusive hijacking of comment threats. The point about soft vigilantes is not so much the techniques employed but the causes which attract them. On the whole these seem to be what one might call progressive causes revolving around totalitarian politics which is never admitted to be totalitarian, but there are never any boundaries to the reach of central power.

To tie the thing together and see if it floats, one might also suggest that both traditional vigilantes and soft vigilantes are an indicator of totalitarian politics. A kind of litmus test for extreme politics. The flies around the dung hill.

Maybe a few examples are worth noting. The catastrophic climate narrative certainly attracts large numbers of soft vigilantes, although numbers are admittedly difficult to estimate. However, to my mind the presence of soft vigilantes in and around the climate debate is good evidence that the issue is essentially political and totalitarian in nature.

Gender politics offers another field where one has to tread carefully to avoid the attentions of soft vigilantes. There are many others, but where does it all come from? It feels like a general trend towards intolerance, a narrowing of social norms, like a grim rebound from the tolerance many of us once felt was an established fact of life.

Are we seeing the moulding of the global citizen in all this? In which case the activities of soft vigilantes might provide some kind of outlet for aggression. The cause may be unworthy but feel the aggression and enjoy it. It is okay to hate the haters – that kind of thing.

It seems to me that there is also a class element as suggested earlier. Soft vigilantes seem to be essentially middle class and apparently fearful any future which is not fanatically regulated on their preferred terms. There seems to be a deep desire to be part of a universal family where there are no outsiders, where all outsiders have been eradicated, expunged, cast into outer darkness.