The Sunday Times - UK (2022-04-24)

The Sunday Times April 24, 2022 25

COMMENT

Matthew Syed

Social media has turbocharged

our worst instincts to rubberneck

Accounts of

suffering are

considered

the highest

form of

therapy

From the Colosseum to Depp v Heard, we have always been voyeurs, and tech is making it worse

I

noticed a story last week

proclaiming that the trial of Johnny

Depp and Amber Heard had

“captivated America”. The dispute

involves two famous but

traumatised people arguing about

who was to blame in a dysfunctional

and violent marriage. Depp is suing

Heard for $50 million, but is being

countersued for $100 million. Some

people are said to have watched the

entire trial on YouTube, presumably

while eating popcorn and cheering for

their preferred protagonist. One

newspaper called it the “ultimate

Hollywood sequel”.

In some ways, the popular infatuation

with this terribly sad human story is

scarcely news. We have become a

voyeuristic species, endlessly

scrutinising each other on social media,

plugged into celebrity culture,

rubbernecking at reality TV, our

children indoctrinated into this

consciousness-altering reality as they

innocently surf their iPads. At Easter

Justin Welby, the Archbishop of

Canterbury, gave a sermon decrying a

loss of “compassion” in the West. I think

he has misidentified the culprit: our

problem is the way individualism has,

through the distorting influence of

technology, morphed into narcissism.

The early signs were, in their way,

disturbing. Jeremy Kyle invited working-

class people on to his show to humiliate

them in pursuit of viewing figures;

programmes like I’m a Celebrity offered

lucrative sums to celebrities to degrade

themselves while being subjected to

crude popularity polls. We looked on as

the Big Brother celebrity Jade Goody

lived her life in what some regarded as a

morality tale of exploitation — although

it was never clear whether she was

victim or perpetrator. The only thing

that was indisputable is that the “hook”

was human misery, edited and

confected into entertainment.

I don’t want to appear pious about

this, by the way. Rubbernecking has a

long history, a point made by Socrates in

Republic. He relates the story of man

called Leontius, who “coming up one

day from the Piraeus, under the north

wall on the outside, he observed some

dead bodies lying on the ground at the

place of execution. He felt a desire to see

them, and also a dread and abhorrence;

for a time he struggled and covered his

eyes, but at length the desire got the

better of him; and forcing them open, he

ran up to the dead bodies, saying, Look,

ye wretches, take your fill of the fair sight.”

We are perhaps all familiar with the

popularity of the Colosseum in ancient

Rome, the “high entertainment” of the

stocks in medieval England, the way that

crowds jostled to get a good view when

Louis XVI was executed in the 18th

century (they also dipped handkerchiefs

in his spurting blood). The German

notion of schadenfreude relates to the

pleasure gained from the misfortune of

others, a concept with corollaries in the

high culture of the Greeks, Persians,

Phoenicians, Carthaginians and

Babylonians. We have never been above

taking vicarious pleasure in suffering,

hence the enduring popularity of misery

memoirs and tabloid exposés.

Today, though, I fear we are seeing a

new, more dangerous phase in this

history, with sophisticated algorithms

gamifying human suffering as a route to

shareholder value. Take cancel culture,

which might superficially be thought of

as a way of demonising enemies or

ideological opponents. In truth, the

astonishing popularity of this

phenomenon can only be understood as

a kind of digitised bear-baiting. We

watch as a new hashtag goes viral, each

successive retweet taking the quarry

closer to reputational evisceration.

Ooh, the excitement! Concepts like due

process and the presumption of

innocence, central struts of the western

moral order, seem almost quaint amid

these online conflagrations.

Underpinning all this, of course, is

what the psychologist Jean Twenge has

called the “narcissism epidemic”. We

have become the centre of our own

universes, celebrities starring in the

biopics of our own lives. Equipped with

a smartphone, anyone can upload selfies

and other navel-gazing ephemera in

search of digital validation. One

philosopher has noted that vanity and

voyeurism are feeding off each other:

the point is that the desire to peer at the

misery of others is exceeded only by the

desire to share one’s own. Tell-all

accounts of suffering are now

considered the highest form of therapy;

it’s as if Big Brother has come into our

lives not via totalitarianism but

invitation.

Twenge doesn’t suggest that millions

of people are becoming narcissistic in

terms of a clinically defined personality

disorder, by the way; rather she notes

the broader cultural change taking place

beneath the radar of awareness. One

symptom is the way the verb “to share”

has undergone transmogrification.

Twenty years ago it was an “other-

directed” concept related to giving a

portion of something to someone else.

Today, it is “inner-directed” or, as the

Merriam-Webster dictionary puts it,

“talking about one’s own thoughts,

feelings or experiences”.

And this brings us back to Depp v

Heard, which combines many of these

ingredients in a toxic cocktail. I don’t

wish to denigrate the trial or minimise

the seriousness of the allegations of wife-

beating on the one hand and husband-

beating on the other. But I do think there

is something tragic about the case and

the way it denotes a key trend in western

culture. I can’t be alone in experiencing

foreboding as I see data revealing the

cruelty of online interaction (the

psychologist Jonathan Haidt has found a

strong correlation between Instagram

use and depression among teenage

girls). It is as if something metaphysical

is happening to our consciousness and

moral psychology.

I don’t have a solution but I do at least

wish to suggest a pathway towards one.

Having read a number of books on tech

regulation, I have been struck by how

they each look at the problem through a

singular lens. Economists focus on

consumer welfare, tech experts on

platform externalities, politicians on

securing tax revenue, pundits on

protecting free speech. I would suggest

this is a problem that requires multiple

lenses, perhaps a Royal Commission,

drawing upon the wisdom of historians,

anthropologists and philosophers as

well as citizens, old and young.

It goes without saying that the social

media giants have mastered the art of

soft power, placing former politicians

like Nick Clegg and Helle Thorning-

Schmidt on the payroll as they insinuate

that they do nothing more than “connect

people” and “give a voice to the

powerless”. Elon Musk, seeking to buy

Twitter, was perhaps a little closer to the

mark when he described the platform as

“a clown show crashing into a

goldmine”. What seems certain is that

western democracies have ducked

confrontation with the cancer of social

media for far too long. We cannot afford

to wait much longer.

@MatthewSyed

Y

ou know the NHS is in trouble

when you can’t tell if a tweet is

truth or joke. “Last week my

GP made an urgent referral for

an appointment at Lewisham

hospital. They have just called

to say the earliest appointment

is 29th March 2023. Would

9am work?” tweeted Grant Tucker,

formerly of this parish.

There are another 6.2 million where

that came from. And yet 2022 was

supposed to be the year when the NHS

delivered a two-week average waiting

time. This is not a joke.

In 2002 Derek Wanless, a former

banker, produced a report for Tony

Blair, predicting the state of the nation’s

health and health service in 20 years.

Wanless concluded that NHS

improvement could only happen with

steady and predictable funding

increases year on year, to take into

account an ageing population, rising

expectations, technological advances

and the costs of training and employing

sufficient skilled staff. In addition, NHS

improvement was crucially dependent

on people doing their best to remain

healthy. Instead of pulling people out of

the river of over-eating, boozing and

immobility, we needed to wander

upstream and stop them falling in.

Wanless calculated that if we all paid

2.4 per cent extra for the NHS each year

and did our best to prevent disease, life

expectancy would continue to rise,

average waiting times for hospital

treatment would come down to two

weeks, with easy and rapid access to

GPs. And there, the fairytale ended.

Blair did manage to improve the NHS

greatly in the short term, with massive

investment getting average waiting times

down to six weeks. But the financial

crash put paid to that, and ten years of

austerity allowed waiting times to rise

alarmingly to record levels before the

pandemic struck, whence they have

risen higher still. We could “privatise the

NHS” but we’ve tried it for social care

with mixed results and a lot of money

disappearing off-shore. Safe staffing is

critical but there is no magic doctor-

nurse-midwife-dentist-physio-speech-

therapist-psychologist tree. And present

Medicine 50

years ago was

like No 10 today

— jolly good

chaps drinking

on the job

levels of obesity and alcohol

dependence, not least in Whitehall,

would suggest we haven’t quite cracked

self-care.

So what can we do? Perhaps we

should reinvoke the “anything goes”

spirit of the early NHS, when patients

had no expectations at all and rarely

complained or sued. They were

generally grateful for any operation,

even if it was meant for the person in the

next bed. There was no audit or quality

control, and death was a very cheap

outcome.

Junior doctors would happily work

120 hours a week but only be paid for 40

of them because medicine was

considered a vocation and practising on

patients a privilege. Australian doctors

would flock over here to operate on

POMs (Practice On Me) and you could be

on call from the local pub. It was not

unusual for the doctors on duty to whiff

of alcohol. One surgeon I know came in

from the pub to do an emergency aortic

repair and catheterised himself, feeding

the tube into his surgical boot, so he

wouldn’t have to leave the table.

Medicine 50 years ago was like

Downing Street today. Jolly good chaps

working jolly hard, drinking on the job

and making up their own rules.

Assorted scandals, some of which I

exposed in Private Eye, and the

European Working Time Directive put

paid to all that. Training hours and

opportunities were greatly reduced, but

patient expectation soared, with people

demanding competent, fully trained

doctors who knew what they are doing,

not trainees who learnt on the job. In the

NHS you can no longer drink on duty

but, if we want to get waiting times down

in a hurry, we need to return to the days

when the anaesthetist and surgeon can

work silly hours (but are allowed to swap

ends if they get bored).

And remember, waiting lists serve

their purposes. They encourage people

to go private, which may not be safer but

the grapes are nicer.

Dr Phil Hammond is the author of Dr

Hammond’s Covid Casebook (Private Eye)

Phil

Hammond

There is a

brutal

efficiency

to NHS

waiting lists

“Get your nose out of that book and

“Take me to your misleader” watch some television!”

NEWMAN’S

WEEK

“It only goes up to May 5”

“... and now my glamorous assistant

will fly to India.. .”