GET IT TOGETHER

In the beginning was the mob, and the mob was bad. In Gibbon’s 1776 “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” the Roman mob makes regular appearances, usually at the instigation of a demagogue, loudly demanding to be placated with free food and entertainment (“bread and circuses”), and, though they don’t get to rule, they sometimes get to choose who will.

- ADAM GOPNIK

Gibbon was a sort of conservative radical—contemptuous of Christianity and attached to freethinking Epicureanism, but fearful of social disorder—and by “the mob” he meant the lumpenproletariat of any big city, his own London as much as his remembered Rome. What do you do when two mobs are shouting at each other during a public election? So Mr. Pickwick is asked in Dickens’s “Pickwick Papers,” set in the eighteen-twenties. “Shout with the largest” is Mr. Pickwick’s protective advice.

In time, this fearful conception gave way to an image of the crowd that was, mostly, good, and when bad more comic than anything else. In Charles Mackay’s “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds” (1841), the people who swarm to buy tulip bulbs in Holland or shares in the South Sea Company in London are frantic and mutually reinforcing, but their victims are chiefly one another. In a capitalist society, the crowd turns inward, focussed more on making money than on extorting it from power. Indeed, the crowd could now be thought of as the “people”—a concept that might merit approval, as in “We, the People,” or abhorrence, as when the Nazis promoted the purity of the Volk, whose blood was being poisoned by outsiders. More recently, the crowd returned as a wholly positive force, full of collective savvy. We got books on the wisdom of crowds, while on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” the best way of answering a specialized question was often to sample the audience, smarter as a group than any shrewd contestant alone. “Crowdsourcing” became a cheery thing. Then January 6th happened, and suddenly the twenty-first-century quiz-show crowd seemed to dissolve back into the Roman mob, violent seditionists instigated by a demagogue and aimed at the destruction of the very idea of law.