The latest Madness of Crowds column looks at sponsored charity events:

The other evening I saw Eddie Izzard, the celebrated Jack-and-Jill of all theatrical trades, complete 43 nearly consecutive marathon runs. Obviously I didn’t witness him doing this in the flesh – it took him 50 days – rather, I sat in a well-upholstered chair in the desiccated warmth of my own home and watched his astonishing feat on television.

I witnessed Izzard jiggling along the verges of arterial roads, I watched him serving ice creams to fans from his special van, and then, as the long miles began to take their inevitable, crippling toll, I looked on while he writhed in agony beneath the competent hands of his sports therapist, Jo, as she massaged his legs on the unsettling coverlets of mid-price provincial hotels.

For infinitesimal moments I wondered why it was that Izzard chose to stumble-stump for day after day within inches of lorries vomiting fumes – but of course, I knew the answer: if he had gone off-road, it would have been impossible for his support crew of vans and rickshaws to remain with him, filming every pace of this very modern odyssey. On the one occasion when he did divert along a canal towpath, Izzard had to film his own progress using his camera-phone, wonky footage that duly ended up in the finished documentary.

Still, there was a grim fascination to the tale, the watching of which was itself a kind of endurance – I mean to say, he was mad to be doing it, and I was equally deranged to be watching him doing it, when there were thousands of things more profitable and enjoyable I could have been doing. There were further parallels between Izzard and I; while he was proximately solo – the only transvestite comedian to be running 43 consecutive marathons – in the wider scheme of things he was part of a crowded field, for not a day goes by without some celebrity or other embarking on a punishing go-round.

Nor is it the notorious alone who do such things; the great commonality of our nation – if such a thing exists at all – often appears to me to be bound together by nothing so much as a bizarre collective impulse to run, jump and skip about the place, usually en masse, preferably while dressed up as gorillas and waving little flags. From an anthropological perspective, an observer would be forced to conclude that if these inutile and painful exertions have any purpose at all, it must be a sacred one.

Such an alien philosophe would be right. There was a religious impulse driving Izzard on his round-Britain hobble, the same one that drags the rest of the Volk sportlich out on to the highways and byways: charity sponsorship. Sponsorship is the alpha and omega of contemporary beneficence – its sole commandment: Thou Shalt Sponsor (and be sponsored).

Do it, because not to do it is to be marked out as someone who is, ipso facto, both mean and mean-spirited – because it’s fun, isn’t it? Fun for the fundraisers, and fun for those for whom the funds have been raised. Fun even for the fund donors, for they can join vicariously in these noble achievements while funnily toggling their mobile phones so as to donate.

But what is sponsorship, really? My late mother was wont to observe that if people really want to help, say, dementia sufferers (as Izzard did), why don’t they do a sponsored bedpan emptying, or Complan-feeding, thereby killing two birds with one altruistic stone? The answer is that, by and large, the people who solicit sponsorship couldn’t give a toss about the eventual use of this money. It’s a colossal displacement activity, this charity sponsorship lark, for if all these kilojoules of energy were geared to the commonweal, we’d be living in a far happier and more equitable society.

Moreover, charity-sponsored events tranquilise those unquiet spirits who might question the prevailing status quo. Worse still, the activities that are sponsored decouple achievement from the realm of the meaningful. In place of martial prowess, we substitute speed-eating Melton Mowbray pork pies; in lieu of discovering new worlds, we pogo-stick along the M62; instead of agonisingly bringing news of a crushing naval defeat by the Persians just the once, Izzard scrapes his soles over the bitumen again and again – ad tedium, and ad nauseum.

The latest Madness of Crowds column from the New Statesman:

The age of criminal responsibility in England, Wales and Northern Ireland is – as has been remarked on many times in the past few weeks – almost the lowest in the EU.

A child of 10 can be convicted of a criminal offence everywhere in Britain with the exception of Scotland, where an eight-year-old can be found bang to rights. Probably, given the deep-seated Calvinism of some Scots, they wouldn’t mind hauling a foetus from the womb and putting it on trial.

Not only is there this deep-seated British belief in the moral culpability of children, but also the current government has abolished the presumption known as doli incapax, which meant that it was up to the prosecution to prove that a child under 14 knew the difference between right and wrong before he or she could be convicted. Why are we so keen on demonising our children in this fashion? The answer I think lies in the madness of the crowds, whose rage is whipped up by the tabloids into a hysterical fervour to rival that of any medieval witch-hunters.

At root, in the deep, dark 3am of the soul, we all know that we are all capable of the basest and most vile acts. Lord of the Flies isn’t on every GCSE reading list simply because it’s a thumping good read. Moreover, the Milgram experiment, conducted at Yale in the early 1960s, proved that ordinary people will subject those they believe to be innocent of any crime to sustained levels of violence purely because they are told to do so by those they assume to have some authority.

Mostly, our violence is restrained by raw sanction and canalised in acceptable ways: young men are sent off to kill other young men in distant lands, and this is glorified by the entire apparatus of state and society. Other young men kick seven kinds of shit out of each other on the football and rugby field, and this, too, is seen as irrefutably glorious. More disadvantaged young men punch each other in the head until they sustain brain damage, while older men in evening dress look on – it’s a grand sport.

Britain is a particularly inventive culture when it comes to this channelling and exteriorising of violence – and so successful at it that large numbers of us remain firmly wedded to the delusion that we aren’t simply contingently, but absolutely, law abiding. The lynch mobs who would like to see Jon Venables strung up seem on the face of it to be far removed from the MPs who voted to abolish doli incapax, but in fact they occupy positions on a single continuum.

Both groups cling to an irrational belief that distinguishing right from wrong is innate, intuitive and commonsensical, and the more that belief is challenged the more crazed they become. The lynch mob expresses its insanity as the righteous conviction that their collective violence will annul the impact of individual homicides – as if, were Venables to be spontaneously executed, James Bulger would be magically resurrected.

The parliamentarians express their insanity by mirroring the lynch mob, and so seek to annul violence by enacting more and more “criminal justice” laws. For both groups the end result is what the psychology trade terms “cognitive dissonance”; a painful state akin to that of lab rats subjected to continuous white noise while at the same time self-administering increasing doses of cocaine hydrochloride.

Britain’s woeful attitude towards children who commit crimes – just like its determination to send teenagers to kill Afghan peasants – can be seen as a successful strategy of scapegoating. After all, while it’s true that I can’t walk round my local park without seeing socially excluded young men goading their roid-enraged weapon dogs, the fact remains that, as societies go, this is a reasonably irenic one.

But that’s just the problem: this pragmatic ethical overview disavows the very nature of the crowd’s madness, which seeks not to restrain our worst collective impulses, but to inaugurate a new world of diamond geezers who love their mums and wouldn’t harm so much as a hair on a kiddie’s head. Ever. And if you so much as whisper a contradiction to this, just see what that gets you …

But seriously: it’s easy to identify the sentimental child-lovers who’d like to string up child malefactors, but how much more difficult it is to acknowledge that their irrationality is only our own writ large and ugly.

“I find it absolutely mind-boggling that on our high streets there are more than 214 branches of Nando’s, a restaurant chain originally started in South Africa by ethnic Portuguese refugees from Mozambique – but then I suppose that says everything about my failure to grasp the following: capitalism, globalisation, the free market and the great British public’s gnawing desire for chicken.

“Yes, we’re back in the chicken coop again – but in fairness, as this column treats of real meals that people really eat, we should probably never stray too far from the chicken wire. The Nando’s website thoughtfully provides a map showing the distribution of its outlets that makes it look as if doughty Britannia is being pecked to death by sinister, strutting, stylised cockerels – the chain’s logo. Using said map, you could quite easily complete a coast-to-coast walk, à la Wainwright, solely provisioned with the Nando’s signature dish of peri-peri chicken.

“This being noted, there seems to be a marked preponderance of Nando’s in inner-city areas, and I would wager – although I haven’t checked up on this personally, I do have a life you know – that many of these areas have high ethnic-minority populations. It could be that there’s an awareness in the black community of the African roots of Nando’s but, if so, it’s pretty residual. Certainly, when I mentioned this to a black friend who eats there regularly, she didn’t know about it, having just assumed the gaff was Portuguese.

“Indeed, there’s nothing obviously southern African about the Nando’s decor, which is heavy on the faux-adobe, the faux-corrugated iron, the job lots of clay pots and plenty of cockerel-related tat – cages, feed bins and so on. There are also hokey signs on the walls bearing fowl sayings, which stick even in the human craw. Still, the overall feel is tastefully muted: the tables are dark wood, the floors are tiled and the lighting is angled down.”

Read the rest of the latest Real Meals column here.

“Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841), to which this column owes its title, devotes a chapter to the subject of men’s hair and beards. However, while Mackay locates the fashion for western men to wear their hair short in St Paul’s declaration that ‘long hair was a shame unto man’, his reticence when it comes to the mass follies of religion means that he only dichotomises his way through history, noting that this faction wore theirs long, while that one went for the No 1.

“Mackay is unwilling to venture into the semiotics of hairstyle, although he concedes that during the English civil war ‘every species of vice and iniquity was thought by the Puritans to lurk in the long curly tresses of the monarchists, while the latter imagined that their opponents were as destitute of wit, wisdom, and of virtue, as they were of hair’.

“The association between plentiful hair and the farouche is easy to divine, as is its paradoxical tangling of effeminacy and machismo. In our own era, the Janus-faced view of hippies – at once filthily feral and girlishly gentle – would seem to have been the apogee; by the mid-1970s, one might have hoped, the tedious go-round between long and short hair would have been abolished, peace and prosperity having been instantiated in the valiant figure of Richard Branson, with his carefully oiled locks flowing over his well-laundered collar.”

Read the rest of the latest Madness of Crowds column at the New Statesman here.