Glasto is a carnival of conformism

What was most surprising about the whole Glastonbury affair last weekend, when punk-rap group Bob Vylan led a chilling chant of ‘Death to the IDF’, was that people were at all surprised to see events unfold as they did.

After all, we’ve known for years that the festival is a mandatory pilgrimage for this country’s aloof and self-satisfied white, liberal upper-middle classes: it’s the Guardian and the BBC at prayer. We’ve also known for some time that the youth have been cynically employing the Palestine flag as a symbol of herd-like, ersatz rebellion. And we’ve known since the dawn of humanity that when individuals are submerged into crowds, they are capable of speaking atrocities and behaving like morons.

Still, the spectacle at Glasto was particularly fitting for a generation that has reared itself on groupthink, intolerance, incoherence and doctrinal cancellation. It’s a generation that has behaved like a crowd long before this year’s festival opened for the weekend.

Bob Vylan and Kneecap are the latest personification of a tradition going back to the 1960s – of conformism masquerading as radicalism. Unthinking compliance has been the order of the day in our politics ever since the Great Awokening 10 years ago. There is obedience to the same opinions on Palestine, Trump, race, trans and the environment, and with little latitude for free thought or dissent. This is why slogans and chants are so ubiquitous now: they reinforce groupthink. The crowds not only recited ‘Death, death to the IDF’ in Somerset, at Bob Vylan’s command – they also joined in a rendition of ‘From the river to the sea’, that simultaneously vague and sinister anthem which implies the destruction of Israel.

Of course the young have always been prone to conformity. It’s a scary time of life, especially when you’re on the search for a partner, when looking like an outsider will severely curtail your chances in this capacity. And of course there’s been something risible about the phenomenon of ‘radical chic’, ever since Tom Wolfe coined the phrase in 1970. But that was at least in an age of genuine liberation, when people were still making the rules anew. In the 21st century, the trend has gone decidedly into reverse – from liberation towards authoritarianism, from wanting to stand out to wanting to be ‘liked’ – or ‘affirmed’ or ‘recognised’, as the modern mania for pronouns attests.

Social media may have been the handmaiden of our new age of authoritarianism, handing fresh ideological weight to an already existing political correctness, with the help of postmodern theory. But whatever the genesis of our conformist age, we all recognise its symptoms: an unforgiving cancel culture, people losing their jobs or facing arrest for their opinions, the bellicose trans movement. Then we have had a nominally ‘progressive’ strain of racial politics, which persuaded millions that to be colourblind is racist, and persuaded many millions more to bend in submission before its ideology. It convinced much of the world that to be a white person was to live in original sin.

If you believe that the conformist madness of the herd and the eternal fear of social ostracism can’t affect the educated or those with robust, discerning minds, keep in mind that we are still emerging from a time when most of the best intellects in the world went along with an ideology that believes you can literally change your sex, to make it accord with a mystical inner self. All human beings, no matter how refined or rarefied, fear being outsiders. Contrariwise, the urge to dissent is something we should always nurture and cherish.

Last weekend’s events should serve as a reminder that we are emerging from one of the most lunatic, authoritarian, conformist eras in Western society. You don’t have to see the actual inanity and hideousness of crowds in action to recognise that we still inhabit a time of belligerent victimhood and recreational, self-righteous rage.

The smartphone zombies

Few people will be surprised to hear reports that, at the present rate, young people are predicted to spend 25 years of their lives glued to their smartphones.

According to research carried out over the first five months of this year by Fluid Focus, which aims to help people manage their screen time, the average person in school, college or university spends over five hours of their day on their mobile – which could clock up 25 years of screen time at such a rate. An unsurprising finding, sure, although that actual figure is shocking all the same.

Most of us are attuned to reports that smartphone overuse is having a devastating effect on the mental health of the young. But we all know that this is only half the story. It’s a multi-generational epidemic. Nearly everyone of all ages seems to be glued to their gadgets, all blithely frittering away their limited time on this Earth. For my part, I will never, ever get a smartphone.

For many, the worst culprits are pavement phone zombies, who personify cellular solipsism and selfishness by having no seeming concept of, or regard for, other human beings. I confess to having some dark thoughts about these types as they cross the road, heads craned over their devices.

One of the most frightening aspects of smartphone addiction is its erasure of the physical world and avoidance of actual physical people. Living principally in the disembodied online world is dehumanising in the quite literal sense of the word. It’s what made the lockdowns of 2020 to 2021 so depressing and dark. That epoch should remain in our past, not represent our future.

The tragedy of David Brent

Even fewer people will be surprised to hear that the BBC has placed trigger warnings on another of its old favourite comedy series. This time the victim is the early 2000s mockumentary, The Office, with five of the sitcom’s episodes now flagged for ‘discriminatory language’.

It’s surprising that The Office is still available at all, what with David Brent’s gaffes in relation to race, sex and disability. One would have thought it had already gone the same way as Til Death Us Do Part, The Young Ones and Da Ali G Show, and been banished from our television screens altogether – deemed just too ‘problematic’.

Although The Office is less than a quarter of a century old, it belongs to a different time, when it was okay to be offensive or feel ‘uncomfortable’. Yet the way the show makes us so uncomfortable is precisely its essential strength – a feeling that resulted from the essential tragedy of the series. David Brent was a desperately insecure, maladroit provincial, whose awful transgressions were the result of wanting to be laughed at and liked. In the end, The Office is heartbreaking.

Patrick West is a spiked columnist. His latest book, Get Over Yourself: Nietzsche For Our Times, is published by Societas.