Judas Iscariot would have loved Twitter
Recent public betrayals have brought sharp responses, writes George Pitcher. But it's the sanctimony of social media that really hurts.
The really intriguing thing about novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s take-down this week of two of her former creative-writing students was not a sense of betrayal, far less a queenly lese majeste, but how she chose to frame her censure of the younger generation’s self-satisfaction through its addictive abuse of social media.
It was “obscene”, she wrote in an excoriating essay about the pair’s impertinence on her website, that there are “many social-media-savvy people who are choking on sanctimony and lacking in compassion, who can fluidly pontificate on Twitter about kindness but are unable to actually show kindness.”
One of the students Adichie had helped with her career, only for her to turn on Adichie on Twitter for allegedly transphobic remarks, followed by alternately writing grovelling private emails and slagging her off in further public posts. The other had a Twitter meltdown after using Adichie’s name on the flyleaf of her book without permission and then objecting to being called Adichie’s “protegee”.
There was a whole lot more to it than that, but Adichie is interesting principally for concluding inter alia that “young people today” (three words that always make you sound old) show:
… a cold-blooded grasping, a hunger to take and take and take, but never give; a massive sense of entitlement; an inability to show gratitude; an ease with dishonesty and pretension and selfishness that is couched in the language of self-care...
She’s partly on about the New Puritanism here, a cult in which the young “are terrified to tweet anything” for fear of having the “wrong opinions” in the judgment of “angels jostling to out-angel one another.” But it’s her charge of sanctimony that really arrests the attention.
Religious righteousness
Sure, there’s a tone of betrayal running through her narrative. These are people she considered friends (or, it has to be said, students that might have shown her more respect), who could have written to her privately, rather than parading their virtue publicly on Twitter. But it’s their affected and almost religious righteousness that really gets Adichie’s goat.
A thought emerges that it’s not really the betrayal that hurts, it’s the pain that the sanctimonious inflict that is the real wound. Or, rather, it is sanctimony that is the spur to betrayal. You cannot properly betray someone – that is, seek to shame them by showing moral superiority – without it being the defining act of a sanctimonious person. And maybe it’s that sanctimony that hurts more than the betrayal.
That’s why so many instinctively despise the sanctimonious, regardless of the motives for their betrayal.
Moral high ground
Anyone who lives in a Conservative shire will know anecdotally that it’s not the apparent betrayal by a former employer of an allegedly incompetent Government that is the problem for Tory voters with former spad Dominic Cummings’ evidence, presented to parliamentary committees and on his substacks. It is that he seeks to occupy the moral high ground when he has no place to do so. That is the crime of sanctimony.
And, indeed, it may be that betrayal doesn’t really work without sanctimony – in order to shame a person, you have to put yourself above them. It’s well known in psychotherapy circles that the shamed need to shame others to redress their pride and restore their self-validation; just as the bullied have to bully.
The most infamous betrayal in human history contains these traits. When Judas Iscariot leads the Temple authorities to arrest the insurgent Nazarene in Jerusalem’s Garden of Gethsemane, he is assuming a higher moral status than the Christ, which in terms of the doctrine of the incarnation is to try to occupy morally higher ground than God.
A scholarly debate explores whether Judas was acting on Jesus’s instructions ("Judas, go quickly and do what you have to do." John 13:27), or whether he believed his actions would presage the Christ’s forced confrontation and miraculous triumph over the powers of Rome and Judea. What is beyond doubt is his sanctimony.
Anoints Jesus’s feet
When the nameless woman with the alabaster jar anoints Jesus’s feet with expensive spikenard, it is Iscariot who says it’s a waste of premium perfume – it could have been sold and the proceeds given to the poor. Here is the servant who presumes to be better than his master and, when snubbed, uses his worldly power to bring him down.
Sanctimony before betrayal. It would remind us of Cummings, if it were not to cast Boris Johnson as the Christ, which is probably a claim too far even for him.
But sanctimony as a symptom of betrayal does have its resonances in contemporary circumstances. Adichie was evidently genuinely fond of her students, until they figured they were better than her. Social media make it a safe and remote affair to betray one’s friends.
So today’s style of sanctimonious betrayal is to put the boot in on Twitter, rather than with the intimacy of a Judas Kiss. Iscariot would have loved that.
George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the LSE and an Anglican priest.