Shortly before white men began occupying this country, London was consumed by riots against Catholics.  These were the Gordon Riots of 1780.  Night after night, many substantial buildings, including the home of Lord Mansfield and his library beyond price, were burnt down, and hundreds were killed when the military established law and order. 

Charles Dickens told the story of those riots in his novel, Barnaby Rudge (1841).  It is an epic tale full of sound and fury, but an idiot is the hero, and this story is full of significance.  In the words of his mother, Barnaby, with the soul of innocence, ‘has been led astray in the darkness of his intellect.’  It must have taken real courage to write a novel so constructed, and having now read it for the third time, I regard it as the most powerful novel that this author has left to us.

It was not in my view an accident that led Dickens to write about the actions of the London mob with an idiot in the central role.  In words that will ring true for those who experienced the march against migrants that was patronized by neo Nazis in Melbourne in the beginning of Spring 2025, Dickens spoke of ‘this vast throng, sprinkled doubtless here and there with honest zealots, but composed for the most part of the very scum and refuse of London.’ 

One thing the novel is clear on.  People in a mob can be divided in two groups – the puppeteers, those who do the manipulating, and the base, those who are content to be manipulated.  It is an unholy marriage.  In the novel, one of the mob calls a puppeteer ‘so awful sly.’

Reading the novel again has prompted reflections on aspects of the Melbourne disturbances compared to the riots in London.

Selfishness

Even hermits may feel the need to call a plumber, night carter, or doctor.  If you wish to live with, or at least have access to, other people, you will not be able to act as if you were one person standing alone.  You would have to contradict Richard III expressly when he said ‘I am myself alone.’  (And he is the archetype villain.)  If you want to be able to take, you must be able to give.  In the vernacular, you must pull your weight.

This is too much for too many.  We saw it during the Covid emergency.  In an emergency, the need for cooperation and cohesion is increased.  Yet many selfish people asserted a right to opt out.  They sprouted ideological claptrap about ‘liberty’, or doubts about vaccines.  They were more concerned about their alleged rights than the vulnerability of others.  They were selfish. 

Some even claimed to be ‘sovereign citizens’.  Sovereignty is a tricky notion at best, but this looks like a contradiction in terms that makes as much sense as ‘powerless monarch’.  There is a term for such people.  ‘Bush lawyers’ are serial pests.

Then, after two police officers were murdered, and all available police were involved in a search for a dangerous killer, some decided to go ahead with a public event that they knew would take up police time and cause serious trouble.  They generated division and loathing, and some confronted and attacked police at the worst possible time. 

They seemed to be equally opposed to recent migrants and those who had been here for many thousands of years before any white people arrived in their boats.  (A lecturer of colour at Cambridge said the British Empire was spread by ‘water-borne parasites’.  It was a great line about ‘boat people’.)  The flag they purported to celebrate features a foreign flag – the one that was run up by those white migrants who first arrived here in 1788.  These marchers were in large part as nasty as they were selfish.

Prejudice

Truth matters.  Or it used to matter. 

We arrive at it, or try to arrive at it, by thinking.  There are many ways that process can be corrupted.  The most common is prejudice.  We tend to prejudge issues based on insufficient evidence and to arrive at an opinion that suits our world view.  Antagonism between people of different race, religion, sex, or sexuality typically starts this way.  It is harmless in sporting competitions, but poisonous elsewhere.

That is one way we fail to arrive at truth and risk being lost in Fantasyland.  But truth as a whole has been undermined by what is called ‘social media’, so that the man who was called the leader of the free world looks to have lost all connection with truth.  There is in play a catatonic movement in how people at large think – or, rather, don’t think.

Laziness

Too many people are too loose in their language.  We all have our prejudices – about religion and sport for example – but we are insulted if someone says we are prejudiced against people on the grounds of race, sex, or sexuality. 

The relevant terms of abuse include ‘anti-Semitic’, ‘misogynist’, and ‘homophobic’.  They have all been used so loosely that none has scarcely any useful content left.  If John the footballer is said to be ‘homophobic’, the relevant emotion is not fear.  Rather, the charge is that John dislikes gay people; that his dislike is irrational; and that he regards all gay people as being in some way inferior.  John is in truth endorsing a form of branding – something we normally reserve for cattle.

You do not compliment John by describing him in that way.  On the contrary, you are attacking him by denigrating his humanity.

There are then these problems.  This charge is far too often made with no adequate foundation.  And in circumstances of strife where prejudice and malice too often are manifest.  And the person making the charge is indulging in a form of branding, and so engaging in something like the vice he or she is attacking.

Stupidity

This ‘branding’ commonly involves its own kind of stupidity.  Do I have the right to call John a loud bigot just because he barracks for Arsenal or Collingwood?  Or can I call Ivan uncivilized just because he is Russian?  Or can I say that no Irish man can be trusted to pay tax because of the attitude of Irish government to tax? 

In each case the available premises do not support the conclusion.  The Latin phrase is non sequitur.  And in each case, there is an insult to the humanity of the target. 

Insult weighed very heavily in the Roman law of civil wrongs.  And you can find authority for a very large proposition of Roman law that any affront to the dignity of the individual was actionable for the wrong of inuria.  The common law knew nothing of the kind.

Victimhood

You know you are in Lala Land when Donald Trump claims that he and Vladimir Putin, and, for that matter Benjamin Netanyahu, are victims of some undue process.  (He is happy to pass over the fact that he is so far at least the only member of the trilogy to have been convicted of a serious crime.)  Nigel Farage claims the right to stand up for victims.  He says that ordinary English people are victims of excessive migration.  That claim was being aired in the marches against migrants here in Australia.

This is I suppose an example of what some people in the press call ‘identity politics’.  The problem is that to claim each member of a group should be regarded as different to the rest of the community, and therefore dealt with differently, can lead to the most pernicious consequences in the history of mankind.

Naivety

If you watch programs like American Greed, you will wonder at the stupidity of victims of con men.  You may wonder if you could be so vulnerable.  ‘There is one born every minute’ is a truth that comes from the fact that the promise of wealth distorts, or blows, people’s minds.  They forget one maxim of investment: the greater the return, the higher the risk.  At best, the victims look naïve, and when the scam is uncovered, they feel shame that they allowed themselves to be taken for a ride.  (I speak from experience of having been scammed.)

Recently, people marched in Melbourne protesting, they said, against migration.  Very few would acknowledge that all white people in Australia – the nation of the infamous White Australia Policy – are migrants, or descendants of migrants going back to 1788, but we can put that to one side.  We are assured that many of these people were decent people exercising their democratic right of protest in an event that was taken over by neo Nazis. 

That takeover was foreseeable, if not inevitable, and those decent people must be naïve to a level that makes them dangerous.  They were after all participating in the inevitable replay of an historical process.  Children fight hard to gain control of the tree house, and then fight like hell to lock out other upstarts threatening to dilute their power or wealth.  Try for example The Lord of the Flies by William Golding.

Jealousy

If you look at western democracies that embody the welfare state – and the U S is not one of them – you face the same problems.  People want to receive the same benefits from government, but they don’t want to pay for it.  Those at the top get cross at the increasing demands made on them, and those at the bottom are incensed at the lack of fairness in the distribution of income and wealth.  And they resent newcomers who look to them to be here to get their heads in the trough.  They fear that their own standing is being debased.

You know you have a problem when both ends are whingeing, but it is hard to persuade a bank teller that the system is fair and reasonable when her boss gets paid one hundred times what she gets, and when some professional people are charging north of thirty thousand dollars a day.

Righteousness

This term is not often used favourably now.  It is downright obnoxious when claimed for one’s self by the speaker – usually by implication.  It is implicit in the bearing of the victims.  The self-righteousness of some victims – actual or alleged – can be revolting, especially with those who look like anything but victims, when they seek to benefit from the suffering of others.  (A droll observer, might offer, from a safe distance, Collingwood supporters as a good example.  People of wealth and standing posing as victims.) 

Not many of these standard-bearers of the downcast are surgeons or silks.  But we see it now from those at the very top to those at the very bottom when they seek to assert some moral right in what is otherwise a sterile argument about wealth and power – underwritten by the green-eyed monster called jealousy. 

These claims on righteousness lead people into melodrama, and claiming a significance that life has otherwise denied them.  For a change, they mean something, and they have a cause.

And white Australians baiting migrants and people of colour, when all white Australians are white migrants or their descendants, are about as nasty as you can get.  Among other things, apart from our migrant past, you would have to shut down every hospital in Australia if you were to exclude migrants, especially those from Asia and Africa.

Insecurity

Insecurity is no more a vice than anxiety, but it plays a fundamental role in much of our communal unrest.  You do not see many professional people or leaders of business at MAGA or Nazi rallies, and you rarely hear complaints or fears about migrants from those whose position or status is secure.  The trouble often comes from those who are insecure, and therefore feel anxiety, a form of fear.  This then disfigures thought.  The great Dutch philosopher Spinoza said:

‘Men would never be superstitious if they could govern all their circumstances by set rules, or if they were always favoured by fortune …. The human mind is readily swayed this way or that in times of doubt, especially when hope and fear are struggling for the mastery, though usually it is boastful, over-confident and vain.  Superstition, then, is engendered, preserved and fostered by fear.’

Some cannot tolerate doubt, and along with superstition, they go after any conspiracy theory that they think might justify their world view.

It is, I suppose, a fact of life, if not language, that the weak are prey to predators.  And stupidity and insecurity lead inevitably to gullibility, as Spinoza observed. 

People become suckers for those who have the answer.  They are vulnerable, and when the aggrieved unite behind a leader, their communal belief and self-righteousness warps their minds, and strife and violence become more incidental than accidental.  On a bad day you get the Proud Boys.  Here it is the so-called neo Nazis – forget the neo, they are Nazis properly so called. 

Macaulay said:

‘We daily see men do for their party, for their sect, for their country, for their favourite schemes of political and social reform, what they would not do to enrich or avenge themselves…. virtue itself may contribute to the fall of him who imagines that it is within his power, by violating some general rule of morality, to confer an important benefit on a church, on a commonwealth, on mankind.’

Ambition

This does not sound like the people we are looking at.  ‘Ambition should be made of sterner stuff.’  Big hitters like Alexander, Julius Caesar, Napoleon and Hitler all had ambition and were brought down by it, leaving millions of dead behind them, but it does not seem the appropriate epithet for our protesting marchers.  They do not want to join the ‘elites’ – they loathe them.

Intolerance

Attaching headings to these traits should not give these labels any more force than traits to look for in trying to work out how we go off the rails.  They are all out there to combine to undo us.  But we may have left the worst to last.  Intolerance.  Sir Lewis Namier knew as much about history as anyone I have read.  He said what we miss is ‘tolerance with the restraint it implies.’  If you look at the flare-ups currently being encountered in the U S, the U K, or Australia, they arise from or are driven by intolerance and a lack of restraint.

Venom

The result of these vices can be a loathing that cannot be dismissed as irrational, and a form of vitriol that is anything but rational.  Such as Nazis or police killers who call themselves ‘sovereign citizens.’  These people are cancers on the common weal, and in looking at dealing with them, we should bear steadily in mind the forces for evil that were unleashed in Paris in 1789, in St Petersburg in 1918, and Berlin in 1933.  Those explosions led to catastrophic losses of life and human dignity.  It is curious that two are still celebrated in some parts.  But what we do know is that when revolution comes, the scum rises to the surface – and we can already see the scum before our eyes.

Dickens had at least two things in common with Shakespeare – the ability to depict precisely those at the bottom of the barrel, and an unholy fear of the mob.  In this Dickens novel, the hero was sentenced to death for his part in the riots.  He got a full pardon in the end, presumably on the ground of some kind of diminished responsibility.  Medicine may need to refine its views on insanity, and the law may need to do so on criminal liability, but it would be as well to remember the insistence of Hannah Arendt that:

‘The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.’