The publication this week of the authorised biography of the great American novelist Philip Roth has occasioned some excitement. It turns out that during the time he wasn’t writing or hanging out with Saul Bellow, he was soliciting, indulging in and recovering from myriad affairs. Which is pretty much exactly what, from reading his books, you would have expected.
But what struck me more about Blake Bailey’s biography was Roth’s anticipation of something that’s blighting our culture. From the 1980s onwards Roth detected a movement towards a new puritanism. As we moved away from censorship, we gravitated towards censoriousness. In 1998, he believed, this culminated in the Lewinsky affair, when he saw Bill Clinton — a much lesser sexual aggrandiser than, say, Jack Kennedy — as the victim of an “ecstasy of sanctimony” from the religious right.
But right-wing puritanism (so often undone by the revelation that its greatest exponents were themselves generous employers of rent boys and girls) was not the only threat. Which is why his great late novel, The Human Stain, begins with an apparently white college professor being falsely accused of racism.
The fiction was based on fact. In 1985 Professor Melvin Tumin, an acquaintance of Roth’s, had been teaching at Princeton University. Taking the attendance register in a sociology class one day he saw that two students whom he had never met were once again absent. “Does anyone know these people?” he asked the class. “Do they exist or are they spooks?” Tumin didn’t know this, but both students were African-American. “Spooks”, though, is a pejorative term often used in the US to insult black people.
It is obvious from the context what Tumin meant. But a complaint was lodged and the professor, who had been the director of a mayoral commission on race relations in Detroit, spent the next six months clearing his name. As he did so friends deserted him, colleagues failed to support him and students denounced him. It was, wrote Roth of the character based on Tumin (who was eventually exonerated) “a heinous, needless persecution”.
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These days there’s a Tumin event of some kind practically every week. Actually, given the horrid abundance of social media, it’s probably every minute. For this is a time of denunciation; a period when someone somewhere is getting it in the neck for their ideological or personal failings.
For example, on my Twitter account I follow people who are journalistically useful. During the pandemic many of these have been scientists and statisticians. This week I was struck by the anguished thread of a young data scientist from Oxford University. An infographic that he produced showing the recent decline in global poverty provoked the ire of a radical anthropologist, who wrote in The Guardian that the data scientist “takes the violence of colonisation and repackages it as a happy story of progress”. This accusation was then repeated by dozens of others online. Since being a “colonialist” has become a sin as great as being an apologist for slavery, this accusation could have serious consequences. It was, in effect, a denunciation.
There are plenty of examples of the employment of this kind of language, often linked to a demand that this or that person should lose their jobs and be replaced by someone who has the correct mindset. But we had another instance of it last week when the government’s commission on race and ethnic disparities brought out its report.
The way it was published over two days was suspect, but it was possible for people of good faith to find plenty in its pages to debate about. As Trevor Phillips wrote here on Monday, however, the denunciation of the chairman and the commissioners stopped short of any debate.
I was interested partly because one of the most vehement denouncers of the chairman, Tony Sewell — she slyly linked him to Joseph Goebbels — is a serial offender in this respect. In 2018 I described Cambridge’s Professor Priyamvada Gopal as the “Torquemada of the New Woke Inquisition” after she described the classicist Mary Beard as guilty of “bad, racialised behaviour” and Professor Nigel Biggar, who takes a different view of empire to both of us, as “Dr Bigot”. And when Professor Gopal goes after someone, hundreds of Twitter followers, including some of her students and fellow academics, go after them too.
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Indeed, a significant part of some commentators’ prolific, almost incontinent, output on social media consists purely of denunciation. So-and-so said this, or didn’t say that, and thus should be seen as a transphobe, a racist, a neoliberal, a homophobe.
This taste for denunciation is both worrying and fascinating. It isn’t new of course. During the early Inquisition those who had converted from Judaism to Catholicism (conversos), but who were thought to be backsliding, were reported to the authorities by neighbours and family. In The Crucible, his drama of the Salem witch trials, Arthur Miller has the girl Abigail tell the court: “I go back to Jesus; I kiss his hand. I saw Sarah Good with the Devil! I saw Goody Osburn with the Devil! I saw Bridget Bishop with the Devil!” The practice of denunciation in Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany, or during the McCarthy era in America, shows common features in which people get satisfaction of some kind from the act.
So what is this all about? I put the question to a psychoanalyst friend of mine. What is the peculiar pleasure here? He sees it as a way of emptying yourself of shame and projecting it on someone else. Shame is one of the principal weapons used by poor parents. They regard it as a deterrent to what is seen as bad behaviour in children. That sense of being ashamed is then carried with us into adult life, together with a resentment of the authority figure who shamed us. So what could be more pleasurable and a more effective expression of anger that to turn the tables, and to shame another?And if that other is an authority figure — an academic, a teacher, a politician, the BBC — then so much the better.
This desire is not limited to the left or the right. The pleasures of denunciation are available to all of us and in the right circumstances many are susceptible. Look at the recent nonsense of calling out “sneering” BBC presenters for the crime of finding a minister’s super-patriotic office Union Jack funny.
But my friend added a discomforting thought gleaned from many years in the therapist’s chair. “People are often cruel and mean,” he reminded me. “It can be very gratifying.” Given that, he added, it is surprising sometimes how good we are. Or, at least, how humanly messy.
