Unacceptable!

Just another day on @Twitter where a chemistry professor @Cornell with 80k+ followers is suggesting that he would kill 17 "elite scientists" for a paper they wrote in @TheLancet in 2020. Cheered on by followers.

This is not normal, nor is it remotely acceptable @TwitterSafety. pic.twitter.com/0UU4mREyXT

— Kristian G. Andersen (@K_G_Andersen) June 9, 2022

A group of people largely unknown to each other rally around the idea that another, smaller group, equally unknown to them, is responsible for their discomfort and as a consequence wish that group ill? 

Our country has gone to war on less. Our politicians do as much almost every day. This football coach did it just this week:

Washington Commanders Defensive Coordinator Jack Del Rio says there are “two standards” between Black Lives Matter protests and January 6th:

“We have a dust-up at the Capitol, nothing burned down, and we’re gonna make that a major deal.” pic.twitter.com/Nd5pd0mhTc

— The Recount (@therecount) June 8, 2022

One group matters, one group doesn’t. Unacceptable? Clearly it should be, but it isn’t.

Besides, we’re dealing with several levels of abstraction. 80,000 followers is a number, not a conceivable set of individuals. It’s a placeholder for “large.” We literally can’t imagine it concretely, so we agree it stands in for “many.”  17 we grasp more easily, but who were they? Individuals, or just a group of “they”? And what are they responsible for? A letter in The Lancet? How many of these followers have read it? How many of that group understood it? No; it is all abstraction: the claim, the threat, the approval. It is all the actions of children afraid of the dark. The dark is an abstraction. It is where we place our fears. We don’t fear the concrete; we fear what we abstract from the concrete.

Which is why we’d all be better off if we stayed off social media, and dealt with the life and the individuals around us. As Wendell Berry advised long ago: think locally, act locally. It’s as much as you can ever hope to do. 

Any more than that, and you just turn people into things.