SUNDAY, 23 FEBRUARY 2025

This week I’ve been reading a book by John O’Farrell, Global Village Idiot, which is a collection of opinion pieces he wrote for The Guardian at around the time of the Millennium. I want to like these short articles, I really do, since I recognise that they are clever, knowledgeable, witty and well-written. But somehow my response is luke-warm.

One obvious reason for this is that I buy most of the books I read these days at a second-hand sale held by an animal charity here in Gozo where each book costs a euro, so they’re hardly hot off the press. This kind of topical writing which responds to issues which were buzzing at the time suffers when it is twenty-five years old and the topics and the people in them have lost their immediate relevance. But there’s another reason for my tepid response, I think: I agree with most of what O’Farrell says.

Compare this to how I respond to Clarkson or O’Rourke when I read stuff written by them in the same genre. I want to release my inner McEnroe and scream at the words on the page: ‘You cannot be serious!’. In contrast, O’Farrell seems eminently sensible to me, and all I do is nod my head in silent agreement and wonder why some people cannot see it, whereas I engage with the former pair of authors at a much more visceral level.  Occasionally I wonder if they write what they do simply to make money and don’t believe a single syllable of it, but most of the time I take them at their word and spit feathers. They are deliberately and entertainingly provocative, and I quite enjoy being provoked, and generally we are far more passionate in dispute than we are in agreement. Which brings me to the focus of this week’s essay, which is the weird world of online vlogs and their unholy mix of echo chamber and gladiatorial conflict.

People like me who fret about the effects of YouTube tend to focus on its cultish nature, the way social media gathers us together into like-minded groups reinforcing one another’s biases and demonising anyone who thinks differently. The vegans tut at the moral turpitude of carnivores, the atheists chortle at the stupidity of the religious, the misogynists rail against feminism, the right-wing warn us of the evils of Marxists, the left-wing vilify all business and corporations. Then, when we leave our computers and look at the real world around us and see the social and political polarisation, especially in the US and the UK, we blame the online world.

The polarisation in society at large is certainly mirrored on the internet. There is a tendency on sites like YouTube to view everything as a struggle to the death. It’s very common to see a title that says something like ‘Jordan Peterson DESTROYS woke feminist’, or ‘Atheist unable to answer ONE simple question’, but when we click and listen to the videos, no one has been destroyed and the atheist has given a clear answer, but this is only their opinion and has been proved neither right nor wrong: two people have simply disagreed and rarely does one of them seem to be the obvious victor. Another word that is used all the time is ‘debunk’, when the vlogger searches the internet for the videos of opponents and claims to refute what they have found in them, but normally all they have done is restate their own opinion and the final truth, if any final truth exists, remains undecided.

Another favourite trick which is allied to this is to put oneself up against a loony tunes opponent. Hosts scour YouTube for ridiculous exemplars of whatever they want to argue against, as if the person they have found represents everyone on that side of the argument. Vloggers who agree with J.K.Rowling’s opinions on transgender, for instance, find the most ludicrous trans activists with hairy chests, rings in their noses, and half-baked gender ‘theory’ spouting from their mouths. Dawkins has sometimes been guilty of this straw man approach, although these days he does tend to restrict himself to opponents of higher quality and in my opinion this exposes some of the weaknesses in his arguments, which is good, since I thought this testing of ideas was what serious discussion was supposed to be all about.

A genuine debate sometimes happens, but this is relatively rare. Two ‘big names’ are often pitted against each other, but this is less an academic exchange of views than twelve rounds in the ring, and the title of the video will generally make this clear by using words like ‘versus’ or ‘face-off’. Interestingly, the better examples I have seen of these discussions are often those which are set up like a traditional debate, with clear roles of moderator and affirmative and opposing teams, and strict rules about timing and behaviour. These videos are still set up as contests, though, so we rarely get two people trying to reach some kind of common ground, using the discussion as a way of coming to a compromised conclusion rather than a situation where both parties merely reiterate and reinforce their opening position. And to show that it’s all a competition with a winner and a loser, there is often a vote among the studio audience at the end to see which team ‘won’.

But can we really blame YouTube for this, or the hosts of the vlogs? The truth, I suspect, is that we rather like this tribalism in Anglo-American culture, where everything is a zero-sum game (is this a product or a result of our political system of winner-takes-all?). It’s what we want and we vote with our feet if we don’t get it, so that’s where the advertising revenue goes, and reasonable, civilised discussion will inevitably lose out to pistols at dawn. The comments section below the video underlines this: it is often vicious, with people piling nastily into each other, sometimes giving the impression that they haven’t even watched the video but have just come spoiling for a fight. If the public intellectuals in the video sometimes seem unnecessarily aggressive, they come across as doves compared to many of the general public who post below.

This antagonistic approach seems largely cultural to me, and I will detour briefly to describe my experiences as a teacher of English to non-native speakers as my anecdotal evidence for this claim. The first time I taught groups of students from east and south-east Asia, I had to learn a totally different approach in order to engage them. With people from European countries, I simply had to raise a topic for debate – say, euthanasia – go through some of the relevant vocabulary, and then let them loose. The problem wasn’t to get them speaking, but to prevent the exercise descending into chaos and to persuade them to take turns and not speak over each other, as they rapidly split into two opposing, heavily committed groups.

In contrast, I can still remember my first experience with a class that consisted entirely of Asian students. I set the exercise up in my usual way and waited. At first there was an embarrassed silence as eyes glanced down and no one wanted to speak. Eventually, when they finally got going, there was an immediate attempt to reach a collective opinion on the chosen topic. Learning from this, the next time I elicited some common arguments for and against beforehand, split the class into two groups, and gave each group instructions whether they should argue pro or con. Yet still the class soon morphed into a search for group concord. In the end, in my teaching practice, I gave up on this kind of activity and gave them tasks instead which were a collective exercise: for example, designing a shopping mall. For me, as a westerner, this was boring in the extreme, but, in terms of my teaching goals of getting them speaking and using the language, it worked.

I know I am stereotyping, and not all Asian students are like this, especially nowadays (the lesson I have outlined here happened more than twenty-five years ago), but I think there is still some truth in the stereotypes. If most of the vlogs online came from people from Japan or China, I feel sure the online world would be very different and there would be much less ‘debunking’ and fewer keyboard warriors. In general, we welcome conflict in Anglo-American culture because we see it as creative, and I don’t doubt this is sometimes true. The problem, though, is that we westerners tend to think we know more than we do and speak far more than we listen, especially given our recent denigration of experts as made famous by Michael Gove.

The irony is that although we in the UK and the US love to think of ourselves as rugged individualists who would never follow the crowd, we gather together in echo chambers when we are not taking disputatious positions in free-for-alls. We seem to end up with the worst of both worlds: an aggressiveness which sees winning as the most important thing, combined with an unadmitted groupthink. Most of us could do with a lot more modesty and a greater awareness of how little we really know. This is nothing to be ashamed of, and maybe both of these countries would not be the shambolic mess they currently are if we used the internet more frequently to learn rather than to divide into two tribes who simply shout at each other.