Summary
Major changes in the Civil Service are needed to tackle metropolitan ‘groupthink’ in government, according to Michael Gove. Sceptics are worried about the impact of all this on the political neutrality of our administrators. Beyond the walls of Whitehall, there are those in Britain who believe that ‘groupthink’ has become pestilential. The word was coined in the 1970s by social psychologist Irving Janis. It has come to refer to people who are passionate about a particular view of the world and who treat those who don’t share their values with contempt, or even hostility. Today, commentators talk also of ‘cancel culture’ – public denunciations of high-profile individuals whose beliefs are deemed to be incompatible with the prevailing moral orthodoxy. When ‘unacceptable’ private thoughts are made public, reputations can be trashed and jobs are sometimes lost. Those accused of this kind of ‘groupthink’ reject that criticism and believe that all public figures should be held accountable for their views. Once made public, they argue, those views can have a direct and adverse impact on people’s lives, so they become everybody’s business. Should a person’s legitimacy in public life be judged as much on what they think as how they behave? Is it possible to separate thoughts from deeds or are they intimately connected? Has social media robbed us of the ability to tolerate diversity of opinion, or is this talk of ‘the thought police’ hysterical? Is ‘groupthink’, as we have come to understand it, irrational, divisive and dangerous? Or does it merely describe an age-old phenomenon: a group of like-minded people uniting to campaign for a better world? With Dalia Gebrial, Paul Taylor, Rt Rev Dr David Walker and Toby Young.
Producer: Dan Tierney.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to a program from BBC Radio 4. You can download many more BBC Radio 4 programmes for free. |
| 0:07.7 | Find these at BBC.co.com.uk slash radio 4. |
| 0:12.5 | Good evening. Michael Gove, former panellist of this parish, so we should know, tends to be irritatingly cheerful. |
| 0:19.0 | But in a wide-ranging speech at the weekend, he said we were living through morbid times. |
| 0:24.4 | He likened it to the 1930s when, as a writer at the time put it, the inherited was dying and the new yet to be born. |
| 0:32.1 | As in the 30s, the danger Michael Gove said was groupthink, the Orwellian idea of the hive mind that submerges |
| 0:38.7 | individual thinking in favour of conformity to the group. He was talking of government and advocating |
| 0:44.3 | shaking up the civil service to widen both its intake and its outlook. But many see groupthink |
| 0:50.0 | at work in wider society, particularly on social media with its vilification of public figures like |
| 0:55.6 | J.K. Rowling and Baroness Nicholson for expressing views incompatible with fashionable moral orthodoxy. |
| 1:02.7 | Many would argue the expressed opinions of public figures have as much force as their actions, |
| 1:07.5 | and they should be held accountable for them, that Groupthink is merely the like-minded, |
| 1:12.2 | even the right-minded, getting together to make the world better. Others see it as cultural |
| 1:17.6 | condescension and a new and dangerous intolerance of others' opinions. Groupthink. Our moral |
| 1:24.2 | may is tonight. The panel, Melanie Phillips, social commentator at the Times, |
| 1:27.9 | the chief executive of the RSA, Matthew Taylor, Anne McElvoy, senior editor at The Economist |
| 1:32.9 | and the priest and polemicist, Giles Fraser. But what does this group think? Anne, |
| 1:37.4 | Anne McElroy. I am minded against group think, though I'm sure I must commit it on a daily |
| 1:42.7 | basis. But I do want to explore the |
| 1:45.0 | idea that our ideas work best, are more fruitful, more challenging, and just more elastic |
| 1:51.6 | as we go through life if we don't seek the conformity of the herd as comforting as it is. |
| 1:57.9 | Melanie Phillips? When we think of groupthink, I think we're not talking about people being nasty to each other. |
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