In an age in which there is rarely a consensus on anything, there is something refreshing about the entire nation coming together in shared outrage. The Post Office Horizon scandal has created a rare moment of unity. That we can celebrate.
But it is also worth considering why this has happened. While it’s heartening to be reminded that there are at least some issues on which all decent people agree, if we look more closely at the conditions that have allowed for this outbreak of ethical agreement, they could be as much a cause of concern as they are of reassurance.
The outpouring appears to have been the result of a very unusual and particular confluence of factors. First, there is a lack of any moral ambiguity. There are no “on the one hand this, on the other hand that” complications to muddy the waters. It makes no difference what your politics are: it’s a clear miscarriage of justice, pure and simple.
Second, because there is no need to pick a side, the villains of the piece can all be seen as “others”. None of the guilty are people who we identify as part of our tribe: the baddies are “faceless bureaucrats” and politicians, almost mythical creatures who tread the corridors of power, not the streets of our neighbourhoods.
Finally, there is a clear and compelling story, told powerfully in a TV drama and watched by millions. Nothing engages the human mind more than a strong narrative, and this one has been expertly and movingly told.
For hundreds of Post Office branch managers, this perfect storm – merging as it has with a febrile public mood – is welcome if years overdue. But such an alignment of conditions is exceptional. And when they are not all found together, injustices go neglected, ignored or even unnoticed.
Consider the absence of moral ambiguity. Few moral issues are entirely uncontroversial, and where there is disagreement, there cannot be the kind of groundswell of public opinion that has finally brought the Post Office scandal to the top of the political agenda.
Much as the branch managers are innocent victims, it is also possible to point to people whose lives have been at least as bad and often much worse: refugees and homeless people, for example. And as soon as you start to think about how to redress the injustices all these have faced, you come up against complications that inspire differences of political opinion. Immigration can have negative impacts on host communities; the causes of homelessness are myriad and can’t be removed simply by building more homes.
Faced with such complications, many simply deny them. This creates divisions with those who take a different view or refuse to accept the complexities. Others quickly despair of there being a “right” answer, shrug their shoulders and disengage with a resigned, “It’s complicated!”. Without any social consensus, urgent moral issues are left unresolved.
Consider also how public attention can be focused by a compelling story. That can be a good thing, but it can also mean that our moral priorities are set by the most skilful and powerful storytellers, not by what is most ethically important or urgent. The Conservatives have masterfully used immigration, for instance, to tell an insidious and divisive story about Britain and who belongs here.
Too often the news agenda gets taken over by the newest, most gripping story at the expense of more significant ones. The Horizon story is very important, but it is taking Gaza off the top of the headlines, which had in turn distracted attention from Ukraine, while all of these have taken eyes off other major crises such as the horrors in Sudan and Yemen.
Even then, we know that morally equivalent stories rouse different levels of outrage depending on how appealing the victims are as characters; in the UK, when the photogenic children of middle-class white parents go missing, it tends to get more noticed than when the same happens to working-class or ethnic-minority families.
What’s more, although the grip of narrative is strong when you are in the midst of it, all too often it doesn’t last. Think of how images of the dead three-year-old Syrian Alan Kurdi on a Turkish beach transformed the public mood on refugees, but only briefly. The fact that stories have more power to move us morally than bare facts and cogent arguments is a sign of a lack of a clear moral compass.
Perhaps the most questionable feature of our collective response to the Post Office scandal is the key assumption that the villains are safely different from us. The more disturbing truth is that this scandal is not the doing of a different breed of human being. Hundreds of workers must have been complicit: managers, auditors, IT team members and many others in the Post Office, government and Fujitsu went along with the persecution of branch managers without even raising concerns.
For many, the purpose of the ongoing inquiry is to identify who is to blame and to hold them to account. A more pressing question – one that really needs to be addressed – is what made ordinary people complicit in such an outrage? If we have already demonised those we see as the bad actors, maybe we don’t even ask that question. And that has repercussions. If we don’t answer it, the same kind of complicity could occur again.
There has been something cathartic about this collective show of anger. We are right to be outraged and to demand justice for the branch managers. But it is not always as easy as this to side with the angels. Many appalling things are happening every day in our world that require admitting complexity, compromising to reach solutions, and refusing to pin the blame on a few bad apples.
If it takes such a perfect storm of moral clarity, identifiable villains and a good yarn for our collective moral conscience to spur us into action, isn’t that a little troubling?
Julian Baggini is a writer and philosopher; his latest book is How the World Thinks
