Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

UNREASONING CROWDS

Very, very occasionally, you read something from many centuries ago which seems to have huge and urgent relevance to the present day. Pardon my preciosity, but recently I was, with great pleasure, reading my way through the collected letters of Pliny the Younger, as translated by Betty Radice for Penguin Books back in the 1960s. Pliny the Younger, born in 67 AD and dying in 113 AD, lived nearly two thousand years ago. Because they are the largest section of his works to have survived from antiquity, his letters are now his best-known writings. Among them are the two letters that have been most anthologised, in which he gives an eyewitness account of the explosion of Vesuvius and the burying of Pompeii and Herculaneum in 79 AD. His uncle Pliny the Elder, a naturalist and an admiral of the Roman fleet, died in this disaster.

But this was not what caught my attention as I read his letters. It was his comment (in Book Two of his letters) to one Maturus Arrianus, in which he describes the effects of public clamour thus: “In a general uproar many will support an opinion which no one is prepared to defend when silence is restored, for only when separated from the crowd is it possible to form a clear view of a situation which the crowd hitherto obscured.”

As I read these words I thought of mass protests (peaceful or violent) in which slogans are shouted and much noise is made, but very few participants are able to articulate why they are protesting… apart from repeating slogans, clichés learnt from the media and probably insults. A demonstration (or riot) has a dynamic of its own. Whatever motives may have led people to join the mass demonstration, they will be caught up in the passion of the event itself and frequently reason flies away. In one sense, demonstrations are shows of strength, or shows of strength of feeling, but no logical proof of the rightness of any cause. And in saying all this, I am fully aware that some demonstrations take place for very valid reasons indeed. But it is only when people, calmly and rationally and with real evidence to support them, present the reasons for their discontent that any sort of clarity will be achieved.

While reading Pliny, I was aware that there was what we might now call an anti-democratic streak to him (remember, he was living in an imperial system where the common voice counted for little). Speaking of a measure, of which he disapproved, that was passed in a popular assembly, he writes in the same letter: “But the majority gave their consent; for votes are counted, their value is not weighed, and no other method is possible in a public assembly. Yet this strict equality results in something very different from equity, so long as men have the same right to judge but not the same ability to judge wisely.” This argument has often been used against democracy, hasn’t it? Not everybody has the same level of intelligence. Haven’t we all, at some time, regretted that the vote of that idiotic chump over there carries as much weight as the vote of incredibly intelligent me? But that line of thinking quickly degenerates into contempt for democracy itself, and fathers extreme systems (left-wing or right-wing) which assume that only a closed power elite is allowed to make policy.

Still, while he reflects some attitudes that should now be forgotten, Pliny the Younger was right about the behaviour of crowds. Where mass demonstrations are concerned, much noise and fury does not add up to being right.