Joseph Bevan
With the proliferation of electronic media there has arisen a powerful force within society which is instantaneous and deadly in its effect. This is known as popular opinion or, more accurately, mob rule. It is fear of the mob which is governing almost every facet of our human existence, and which has given rise to an elaborate defence mechanism, and that is ‘political correctness’ or ‘wokery.’ Wokery is resorted to in order to neutralise the threat of adverse popular opinion and it affects almost everything we do, say or think. There is little doubt that there now operates a ‘herd mentality’ which is driven by the internet. Definitions of ‘political correctness’ or ‘wokery’ have proved elusive simply because it is something we accuse others of, and rarely do we admit that we ourselves may be guilty of it.
If enough people gang up and assert some opinion or fact, then that opinion or fact often becomes infallible truth and it would take an extremely courageous person to contradict it, even in private. The mob which bayed for the death of Our Lord in front of Pontius Pilate has its modern equivalent in the ‘Twitterstorm’ which bays for the ‘cancellation’ of a certain individual who perhaps made an ill-advised remark 10 years ago on Facebook. Politicians, even here in the United Kingdom, fear mob rule because it can put them out of business faster than you can say ‘Twitter.’ On the other hand, with careful manipulation using marketing men and image makers, politicians can harness public feeling, as evidenced in electronic media, and achieve positions of unchallenged power.
Long before the arrival of internet-based communications, whipping up mass hysteria had been the speciality of many political leaders in the 20th and 21st centuries. Once the politicians have achieved power, they use the mass media to ensure that they stay in power and are able to do this by adopting a ‘drip-feed’ campaign of vilification of their political rivals.
We often find nowadays that the law, far from protecting our citizens and preventing wrongdoing, is more concerned with following the loudest voices in public opinion. The expansion of the concept of ‘Hate Crime’ is very worrying because it is utterly ruthless in its operation. The law is not designed to take account of individual circumstances and now we can be punished by the state for our thoughts, when translated into words. The recent incarceration of a housewife in her 60’s, who had never been in trouble with the law, because of some ill-judged and hastily deleted comments on the internet, shows mob rule at its most virulent. No one sane supports slavery any more, but I guess that it will not be very long before a law to come might make it a criminal offence not to criticise slavery when called upon to do so.
This may sound a little outlandish, but I am reminded of the time a few years ago, during the height of the COVID pandemic, when we were all encouraged (ordered) to stand outside our houses and clap for the heroic warriors working in the National Health Service (NHS). I refused to indulge in this ostensibly harmless activity and was made to feel very awkward, even unpatriotic. I refused to cooperate not because I had any reservations about the NHS, I had none whatsoever, but I felt very strongly that no government has the authority to demand a course of action which has nothing to do with the positive law and which, rather, smacks of the encouragement of mob rule. In any case, to stand outside my front door and clap for the passing cars seemed to be madness in the extreme. This is only a whisker away from a common situation in Nazi Germany when many people were arrested for failing to toast the Führer on his 50th birthday. Might we eventually see the arrest and detention of anyone of whom the state disapproves, such as in Stalinist Russia and many other dictatorships?
With the current atmosphere of mob rule, or ‘social censorship’ as others have termed it, one has to be very careful in expressing opinions, even in the privacy of one’s own home, especially when entertaining people who are not very well known. At dinner with friends I sometimes feel that some things are better left unsaid, not because I have particularly outrageous opinions, but because one may be misunderstood, and the wrong impression may be given during the ebb and flow of conversation around the dinner table. Thus, we have to leave off controversial subjects such as homosexuality, transgender, Israel, Ukraine, the holocaust, the Nazis and anything to do with religion. So, what else is there to talk about? The weather, holidays and money! One can discuss politics, of course, but only bland statements are acceptable, such as, ‘we need more women in parliament.’
So wokery has led to the founding of a huge mass of unwritten rules, the breaking of which leads to consequences which can be far more extreme and far beyond the powers of our courts. This unwritten law uses certain powerful adjectives which, when applied to a particular individual, can have a devastating effect. Such words are: racist, homophobic, misogynist, xenophobe, far-right, the list goes on and new words emerge every day. We hear about a university lecturer, for example, who had been suspended for making inappropriate remarks during a tutorial. The vagueness is chilling because it reminds us of the dictum, ‘give a dog a bad name.’ If this lecturer was called to account in a court of law, what could he possibly say in his defence? He would be unable to defend himself because the accusation is so vague yet, at the same time, deadly enough to ruin his career.
In 2023, an English sports commentator and ex-national team captain was suspended by the BBC from his commentary job because of alleged racist remarks overheard in the team dressing room in 2009. He was one of the lucky ones and the complaint was not upheld but one can only imagine how he felt as he contemplated his long and distinguished career in ruins. One might ask why and how an overheard unguarded comment in a remote cricket changing room resulted in such a public outcry. It all started from a leaked report by a casual eavesdropper who, no doubt, was keen to assert his own political credentials.
As an avid cricket fan and listener to cricket commentary on the radio, I often wonder what the fate of a commentator would be who used the word ‘batsman’ rather than the preferred new word, ‘batter’ (why do I always think of cod and chips?). We would probably never hear from him again. In another example, a well-known historian who was a media personality and a personal acquaintance of mine, made an ill-judged remark during an interview and was summarily ‘cancelled.’ It was the resulting Twitter tempête that lost him his publishing contract, he was also deprived of his fellowship of a Cambridge college and was no longer welcome as a guest on public service television and radio. Such extra-judicial penalties are worthy of the Nazis, yet it was all the result of mob rule leading to such unconfined and universal rage that it almost seemed as though only a public hanging would have satisfied it. One can be confident that none of these people would ever, ever repeat such remarks knowing, as they now do, the probable consequences.
One of the features of ‘cancellation’ is that apologies are useless and often counter-productive. Mob rule, by its very nature, is a national sport and nothing is allowed to come between the mob and its prey. People who participate in this sport, and there are millions of them, are often motivated by schadenfreude which is the pleasure derived from observing the discomfiture and downfall of others. ‘Cancellation’ is also a national sport in which the participants are, on the one side, public or semi-public figures and, on the other side, a baying bloodthirsty mob of idle mobile phone addicts. This has many similarities with the Roman amphitheatres which staged public one-sided pitched battles for the entertainment of the population. In times of economic hardship these events were a useful diversion which, at least for a short time, stopped the citizens from thinking too hard about their own deprivations. In George Orwell’s famous novel, 1984, where the party whipped up hatred against an imaginary enemy, the effect was to unite the population behind the oppressive government.
The running down and persecution of sportsmen, politicians and historians is bad enough, yet history tells us that there are certain people who ‘tick all the boxes’ in terms of public vilification, and they are the Roman Catholics. Just to be clear, I am talking about the modern post-Vatican II Church here. The corruption of the Church after the council and the attempt to modernise it will cut no ice with its future persecutors and this is because the persecutors are doing what they do out of blind prejudice. When the time comes, to admit that one is a Catholic will be sufficient to attract deprivations, which may include imprisonment and death, just as it has throughout the whole of history. It will be no use claiming that, although one is Catholic, one believes in freedom of conscience, religious liberty and ecumenism as this will probably infuriate one’s persecutors to greater outrages. The only escape will be as it has always been, and that is to deny Christ openly and without the possibility of contradiction.
The tragedy is that few Catholics will be prepared to suffer persecution, a great grace and a gift from God, having been softened up over the last 60 years on a diet of the New Mass and accompanying errors. We are well on the way to open persecution of the Catholic Church in the West. This persecution is getting closer because already we hear strident anti-Catholic views from all corners of society, loudly proclaimed by the likes of Professor Richard Dawkins and Mr Steven Fry, both of whom are brilliant anti-Catholic orators whose tub-thumping ‘no-popery’ orations are in popular demand in televised public debates. For those who are less quick off the mark intellectually, there are also the outpourings of Mr Ricky Gervais, who says that he believes in science rather than religion.
All these speakers can be found on Youtube, if one can be bothered to have a look, but it is worth mentioning that Mr Fry’s debate on the Catholic Church nine years ago has attracted over 6 million views. Anti-Catholicism has been described as the last permitted prejudice and one clever way the Church gets persecuted is by the media putting up its favourite anti-Catholic rabble-rouser to have a debate against some thick and ill-informed Catholic who is unable to defend his position. I know a number of priests and laymen who could easily send Messrs Dawkins, Fry and Gervais packing, but nothing of the kind is ever allowed to happen.
The reason Catholicism comes in for so much prejudice has not changed since the Church’s foundation: it is the fact that the Church is, by definition, in a state of enmity with the world. In fact, Catholics believe that if they are approved of by the world then they are not being proper Catholics. As Sebastian Flyte maintains in Brideshead Revisited, what is important to Catholics is not important to the world and what is important to the world is not important to Catholics. It is this feature of Catholicism which gives it an impression of ‘not-people-like-us’ to outsiders, almost as though Catholics do not really belong in the world — which they do not!
It is the fear of persecution, electronic or otherwise, which is probably behind the words and actions of Pope Francis and the Catholic clergy in general. The Holy Father must know how he has to keep on the right side of the media and how quickly it could destroy him. If this is the case, then how on earth can he possibly preach true faith and morals? Imagine if he stated the true teaching on the sins crying out to heaven for vengeance, or any other teaching for that matter. He and his fellow bishops are now in an impossible position as having to sideline or even deny authentic Catholic teaching simply out of self-preservation. The tragedy is that this attempt to popularise Catholic teaching can only end in tears, as we know how fickle the world is.
We are now living in the world of Wokery, where true opinions are smothered in favour of bland neutrality. One only has to listen to any political debate on the airwaves to notice how dumbed-down the standards have become. In fact, it is so bad that one can almost predict everything which is said and the temptation to switch off the radio is overpowering. There is no doubt that most people are terrified into silence or meaningless clichés to such an extent that debate about the real problems facing the world is stifled. The synod of synodality and the resulting ‘flannel’ at its press conferences is entirely the result of terror of the mob.
Is Pope Francis going to reach a point where he says, “enough is enough” and start the fightback? I doubt it. In any case, let us hope that God will intervene before there is a final confrontation. We, as Catholics, have our part to play if God is going to put things right, and that is to perform our simple duties of state and be in a state of Grace. Humanly speaking, the situation is hopeless as we cannot ‘un-ring the doorbell’ and return to some kind of sanity on our own. History has shown us that when civilisations become corrupt, they never turn back from the course of self-destruction. That is because the crisis in the Church and the world, from which we are now suffering, has a supernatural cause and therefore requires supernatural remedies. Only God can supply those.
Joseph Bevan has just published his memoirs, Two Families: A Memoir of English Life During and After the Council (Os Justi Press, 2024), available from the publisher or from Amazon.
If enough people gang up and assert some opinion or fact, then that opinion or fact often becomes infallible truth and it would take an extremely courageous person to contradict it, even in private. The mob which bayed for the death of Our Lord in front of Pontius Pilate has its modern equivalent in the ‘Twitterstorm’ which bays for the ‘cancellation’ of a certain individual who perhaps made an ill-advised remark 10 years ago on Facebook. Politicians, even here in the United Kingdom, fear mob rule because it can put them out of business faster than you can say ‘Twitter.’ On the other hand, with careful manipulation using marketing men and image makers, politicians can harness public feeling, as evidenced in electronic media, and achieve positions of unchallenged power.
Long before the arrival of internet-based communications, whipping up mass hysteria had been the speciality of many political leaders in the 20th and 21st centuries. Once the politicians have achieved power, they use the mass media to ensure that they stay in power and are able to do this by adopting a ‘drip-feed’ campaign of vilification of their political rivals.
We often find nowadays that the law, far from protecting our citizens and preventing wrongdoing, is more concerned with following the loudest voices in public opinion. The expansion of the concept of ‘Hate Crime’ is very worrying because it is utterly ruthless in its operation. The law is not designed to take account of individual circumstances and now we can be punished by the state for our thoughts, when translated into words. The recent incarceration of a housewife in her 60’s, who had never been in trouble with the law, because of some ill-judged and hastily deleted comments on the internet, shows mob rule at its most virulent. No one sane supports slavery any more, but I guess that it will not be very long before a law to come might make it a criminal offence not to criticise slavery when called upon to do so.
This may sound a little outlandish, but I am reminded of the time a few years ago, during the height of the COVID pandemic, when we were all encouraged (ordered) to stand outside our houses and clap for the heroic warriors working in the National Health Service (NHS). I refused to indulge in this ostensibly harmless activity and was made to feel very awkward, even unpatriotic. I refused to cooperate not because I had any reservations about the NHS, I had none whatsoever, but I felt very strongly that no government has the authority to demand a course of action which has nothing to do with the positive law and which, rather, smacks of the encouragement of mob rule. In any case, to stand outside my front door and clap for the passing cars seemed to be madness in the extreme. This is only a whisker away from a common situation in Nazi Germany when many people were arrested for failing to toast the Führer on his 50th birthday. Might we eventually see the arrest and detention of anyone of whom the state disapproves, such as in Stalinist Russia and many other dictatorships?
With the current atmosphere of mob rule, or ‘social censorship’ as others have termed it, one has to be very careful in expressing opinions, even in the privacy of one’s own home, especially when entertaining people who are not very well known. At dinner with friends I sometimes feel that some things are better left unsaid, not because I have particularly outrageous opinions, but because one may be misunderstood, and the wrong impression may be given during the ebb and flow of conversation around the dinner table. Thus, we have to leave off controversial subjects such as homosexuality, transgender, Israel, Ukraine, the holocaust, the Nazis and anything to do with religion. So, what else is there to talk about? The weather, holidays and money! One can discuss politics, of course, but only bland statements are acceptable, such as, ‘we need more women in parliament.’
So wokery has led to the founding of a huge mass of unwritten rules, the breaking of which leads to consequences which can be far more extreme and far beyond the powers of our courts. This unwritten law uses certain powerful adjectives which, when applied to a particular individual, can have a devastating effect. Such words are: racist, homophobic, misogynist, xenophobe, far-right, the list goes on and new words emerge every day. We hear about a university lecturer, for example, who had been suspended for making inappropriate remarks during a tutorial. The vagueness is chilling because it reminds us of the dictum, ‘give a dog a bad name.’ If this lecturer was called to account in a court of law, what could he possibly say in his defence? He would be unable to defend himself because the accusation is so vague yet, at the same time, deadly enough to ruin his career.
In 2023, an English sports commentator and ex-national team captain was suspended by the BBC from his commentary job because of alleged racist remarks overheard in the team dressing room in 2009. He was one of the lucky ones and the complaint was not upheld but one can only imagine how he felt as he contemplated his long and distinguished career in ruins. One might ask why and how an overheard unguarded comment in a remote cricket changing room resulted in such a public outcry. It all started from a leaked report by a casual eavesdropper who, no doubt, was keen to assert his own political credentials.
As an avid cricket fan and listener to cricket commentary on the radio, I often wonder what the fate of a commentator would be who used the word ‘batsman’ rather than the preferred new word, ‘batter’ (why do I always think of cod and chips?). We would probably never hear from him again. In another example, a well-known historian who was a media personality and a personal acquaintance of mine, made an ill-judged remark during an interview and was summarily ‘cancelled.’ It was the resulting Twitter tempête that lost him his publishing contract, he was also deprived of his fellowship of a Cambridge college and was no longer welcome as a guest on public service television and radio. Such extra-judicial penalties are worthy of the Nazis, yet it was all the result of mob rule leading to such unconfined and universal rage that it almost seemed as though only a public hanging would have satisfied it. One can be confident that none of these people would ever, ever repeat such remarks knowing, as they now do, the probable consequences.
One of the features of ‘cancellation’ is that apologies are useless and often counter-productive. Mob rule, by its very nature, is a national sport and nothing is allowed to come between the mob and its prey. People who participate in this sport, and there are millions of them, are often motivated by schadenfreude which is the pleasure derived from observing the discomfiture and downfall of others. ‘Cancellation’ is also a national sport in which the participants are, on the one side, public or semi-public figures and, on the other side, a baying bloodthirsty mob of idle mobile phone addicts. This has many similarities with the Roman amphitheatres which staged public one-sided pitched battles for the entertainment of the population. In times of economic hardship these events were a useful diversion which, at least for a short time, stopped the citizens from thinking too hard about their own deprivations. In George Orwell’s famous novel, 1984, where the party whipped up hatred against an imaginary enemy, the effect was to unite the population behind the oppressive government.
The running down and persecution of sportsmen, politicians and historians is bad enough, yet history tells us that there are certain people who ‘tick all the boxes’ in terms of public vilification, and they are the Roman Catholics. Just to be clear, I am talking about the modern post-Vatican II Church here. The corruption of the Church after the council and the attempt to modernise it will cut no ice with its future persecutors and this is because the persecutors are doing what they do out of blind prejudice. When the time comes, to admit that one is a Catholic will be sufficient to attract deprivations, which may include imprisonment and death, just as it has throughout the whole of history. It will be no use claiming that, although one is Catholic, one believes in freedom of conscience, religious liberty and ecumenism as this will probably infuriate one’s persecutors to greater outrages. The only escape will be as it has always been, and that is to deny Christ openly and without the possibility of contradiction.
The tragedy is that few Catholics will be prepared to suffer persecution, a great grace and a gift from God, having been softened up over the last 60 years on a diet of the New Mass and accompanying errors. We are well on the way to open persecution of the Catholic Church in the West. This persecution is getting closer because already we hear strident anti-Catholic views from all corners of society, loudly proclaimed by the likes of Professor Richard Dawkins and Mr Steven Fry, both of whom are brilliant anti-Catholic orators whose tub-thumping ‘no-popery’ orations are in popular demand in televised public debates. For those who are less quick off the mark intellectually, there are also the outpourings of Mr Ricky Gervais, who says that he believes in science rather than religion.
All these speakers can be found on Youtube, if one can be bothered to have a look, but it is worth mentioning that Mr Fry’s debate on the Catholic Church nine years ago has attracted over 6 million views. Anti-Catholicism has been described as the last permitted prejudice and one clever way the Church gets persecuted is by the media putting up its favourite anti-Catholic rabble-rouser to have a debate against some thick and ill-informed Catholic who is unable to defend his position. I know a number of priests and laymen who could easily send Messrs Dawkins, Fry and Gervais packing, but nothing of the kind is ever allowed to happen.
The reason Catholicism comes in for so much prejudice has not changed since the Church’s foundation: it is the fact that the Church is, by definition, in a state of enmity with the world. In fact, Catholics believe that if they are approved of by the world then they are not being proper Catholics. As Sebastian Flyte maintains in Brideshead Revisited, what is important to Catholics is not important to the world and what is important to the world is not important to Catholics. It is this feature of Catholicism which gives it an impression of ‘not-people-like-us’ to outsiders, almost as though Catholics do not really belong in the world — which they do not!
It is the fear of persecution, electronic or otherwise, which is probably behind the words and actions of Pope Francis and the Catholic clergy in general. The Holy Father must know how he has to keep on the right side of the media and how quickly it could destroy him. If this is the case, then how on earth can he possibly preach true faith and morals? Imagine if he stated the true teaching on the sins crying out to heaven for vengeance, or any other teaching for that matter. He and his fellow bishops are now in an impossible position as having to sideline or even deny authentic Catholic teaching simply out of self-preservation. The tragedy is that this attempt to popularise Catholic teaching can only end in tears, as we know how fickle the world is.
We are now living in the world of Wokery, where true opinions are smothered in favour of bland neutrality. One only has to listen to any political debate on the airwaves to notice how dumbed-down the standards have become. In fact, it is so bad that one can almost predict everything which is said and the temptation to switch off the radio is overpowering. There is no doubt that most people are terrified into silence or meaningless clichés to such an extent that debate about the real problems facing the world is stifled. The synod of synodality and the resulting ‘flannel’ at its press conferences is entirely the result of terror of the mob.
Is Pope Francis going to reach a point where he says, “enough is enough” and start the fightback? I doubt it. In any case, let us hope that God will intervene before there is a final confrontation. We, as Catholics, have our part to play if God is going to put things right, and that is to perform our simple duties of state and be in a state of Grace. Humanly speaking, the situation is hopeless as we cannot ‘un-ring the doorbell’ and return to some kind of sanity on our own. History has shown us that when civilisations become corrupt, they never turn back from the course of self-destruction. That is because the crisis in the Church and the world, from which we are now suffering, has a supernatural cause and therefore requires supernatural remedies. Only God can supply those.
Joseph Bevan has just published his memoirs, Two Families: A Memoir of English Life During and After the Council (Os Justi Press, 2024), available from the publisher or from Amazon.
