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More particularly, it is learned behaviour, a collective performance as prescribed in its stages as kabuki theatre. First someone decides they are offended, and reports it online. Then a storm of the like-minded repeats the original grievance, and redoubles it. Then the media report: “There was outrage on Twitter today, when…”

It is unclear what the participants hope to achieve. If it is to prevent the offending thought from being expressed — as in the self-conscious ritual, made camp through repetition, of demonstrators shouting down a visiting speaker — is it imagined that it will not still be said in other fora, or if not said, thought?

Or is it simply a kind of moral preening, to be valued for its own sake? Look at me, shrieks the Perpetually Aggrieved Person: I’m angry. Which would seem little more than a disclosure of emotional incontinence, but for the self-aggrandizing subtext. I’m angry, it says, at some injustice. How wrong it is, to be sure, that such injustice should exist — but how fine of me to be so enraged by it!

I don’t mean to suggest there is never any cause for people to feel pained by what they read or hear. Speech can wound. It can do harm to reputations, it can threaten physical harm. There’s a reason why hockey players, who might shrug off the nastiest personal abuse, will drop the gloves and mean it over a racial slur. For then a fight between two people is raised to the level of two races, and all the history of insult and injury the one race has endured from the other is imported into that moment, and re-enacted.

But these are the exceptions, in the serially offended world we are now in. It is no longer news that “Twitter is outraged.” It would be news if it weren’t.