The downside of Twitter is that you cannot lead a sheltered life there. The most recent example of its intrusive nature that I've experienced is my unwilling discovery that a journalist with the surname Toobin was sacked for masturbating while on a Zoom meeting with colleagues.
I think sacking this person was a fairly reasonable response to his behaviour. People do have a duty not to shock those they work with simply because they have forgotten what is taboo and what isn't in a public setting - or in his case, because they aren't very good at working technical things. My only objection to the sacking of Toobin is that it ought to have been the resignation of Toobin, in a world that made any sense.
But I don't think the problem with what Toobin did is a moral one - that is, I don't think his behaviour had a victim; he didn't intend (or cause) any pain, (beyond a fair bit of disgust), to anyone else. What he did do was offend social mores, behaving with such tastelessness and vulgarity that, I would have assumed, he would never, ever want to show his face again.
A normal reaction to the debacle Toobin found himself at the centre of would have been to feel the most unutterable shame - so intense that one would do everything in one's power to remove oneself from public life ever afterwards. Personally, I would probably have chosen to become a hermit henceforward. That would have been the approach of a civilised human to the sorry sequence of events.
But the reason I know anything about Toobin is because he has been given back his job - or some other job - in the media and, as a result, a video to publicise his reinstatement turned up in the Tweets I see.
The video is one of the most unsavoury and uncomfortable exchanges I've ever witnessed. But also, for me at least, it is exceptionally depressing - because Toobin doesn't seem to understand that he has disgraced himself, that it will never be possible for anyone to look at him again - ever - without wondering if he is going to dash of for a quick private moment or has just returned from one. From the day that that Zoom story broke, every time Mr Toobin's hands are visible, everyone around him will find it hard not to wonder where they have been lately. And heaven forfend that handshaking ever comes back in in Toobin's social circles. Just, sorry, no.
Yet Toobin seems curiously unaware about the consequences of his unusual (I hope) behaviour. He doesn't seem to recognise that he has blown it - not morally, as I don't think what he did had any victims, but reputationally. He is ruined. He is a clown. He is a man known first and foremost for his sexual urges. From now until eternity, as a result of his gaffe, he will remain, at best, a figure of fun, a person who has acted with such exceptional vulgarity and tastelessness that he cannot ever be taken seriously again.
The fact that Toobin doesn't recognise what he has become only increases his lack of decency. "I am trying to become the kind of person that people can trust again," he declares on the video - but it isn't at all a question of trust but of manners and mores.
The only person Toobin has hurt is himself and he seems not to see this. Toobin hasn't made himself frightening but he has made himself absolutely disgusting. Just as, once you have made yourself famous, you can never go back to anonymity, so, once you have proved yourself unsavoury, creepy, skin-crawlingly uncivilised, you cannot just wipe yourself clean.
Toobin has exposed himself - no, not just like that, I mean spiritually. Reintegration is not an option. Profumo understood the problem. He knew that when you make a total arse of yourself you cannot return to public life. In the end, his acceptance of that fact did return to him a very tiny bit of respect, but even then he remained the man who'd done what he'd done.
Mr Toobin, with his desperation for yet more attention, proves himself a savage - and the fact a media organisation is complicit in attempting his rehabilitation proves that we live in truly depraved times.
And it is that that makes this story, ghastly as it is, very important. The return - or attempted return - of Toobin to the spotlight, the belief that he can be rehabilitated and regain respect after such behaviour, is a sign that we have reached a very low ebb indeed. Decadence is upon us. Civilisation is in the steepest of steep declines.
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