‘I HAVE a little trouble with compliance” – seven words from Frances McDormand that provide a badly-needed restatement of the right to individual freedom of thought and expression.

They were uttered at the Baftas on Sunday night as McDormand accepted the Best Actress award for her performance in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. Unlike her fellow actresses, she had decided against wearing plain black, a step requested by the Time’s Up campaign against sexual harassment. She stood, she insisted, “in full solidarity with my sisters”, but had instead opted for more colourful garb (my expert fashion analysis: it was still quite black, but had loads of red lipsticky doodles on it).

It’s not to denigrate the existence and ambitions of Time’s Up to celebrate McDormand’s wilful non-conformity. The organised rebellion of women against male oppression and subjection is one of the wonders of the age and deserves every success. And if you want to dress like a bling Queen-Victoria-in-mourning as you’re chauffeured from your 12-star hotel to the Royal Albert Hall, more power to you.

But equally it was good for the soul to see McDormand, while voicing her support for the cause, refusing to adopt the uniform. As an instinctive non-conformist who has always had more than a little trouble with compliance, and who consequently regularly finds himself in trouble, I wholly approve. Public life has become an increasingly pressured and delimited space.

Participants are expected to subscribe wholeheartedly to one gang or another, its passions and fashions. There are a non-negotiable set of views that must be held and positions taken. The badges must be worn, the tweets issued, the cause unblinkingly supported, the heretics bashed until they have stopped twitching. Those who demand the right to think for themselves, to hold up a hand on occasion and say “but…”, find themselves cast out and done down.

I don’t deny there are big, progressive arguments still to be won – that our modern society, for all its liberal advances, remains riddled with inequality. But there’s a difference between on the one hand debating and negotiating our way to a healthier culture, securing broad permission for change, and on the other demanding groupthink from people while issuing the online equivalent of punishment beatings to those who dare to differ.

The distinguished classicist Mary Beard is a case in point. As a public intellectual she regularly engages with issues beyond her academic specialism. I like academics such as Beard – too many are terrified of their own shadows, worried about tutting disapproval from their colleagues if they venture an opinion on a subject beyond whatever niche they’ve been boring (in both senses of the word) into for the past 30 years.

Beard has a torrid time of it. A few years ago, after questioning whether immigration was putting quite as much stress on public services as was sometimes claimed, the 63-year-old received mass online abuse of a horrific – and genuinely shocking – sexualised nature. As most women who dare to express a public view can tell you, this level and type of abuse is not uncommon. They are seen as fair game, as uppity, as an easy target by misogynistic misfits and bullies.

This weekend, though, Beard found herself under attack from the other side of the political spectrum – the one I suspect she would normally call home. She had tweeted about the Oxfam sex abuse story that “Of course one can’t condone the (alleged) behaviour of Oxfam staff in Haiti and elsewhere… But I do wonder how hard it must be to sustain ‘civilised’ values in a disaster zone. And overall I still respect those who go in to help out, where most of us would not tread”.

You might well disagree and argue that the whole purpose of intervention in disaster zones is to maintain “civilised” values. On the other hand, you might think back to, say, the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal in Iraq and countless other similar incidents and understand the point Beard was seeking to make.

Regardless, it seems to me she was observing the common (and important) academic practice of posing an awkward question. She herself used the example of having once asked a class of students what they would have done had they lived in occupied France. All said they would have joined the Resistance. Beard pointed out that “the logic of statistics suggests the majority would have been collaborators or kept their heads down”.

For her trouble, she suffered a torrent of abuse, accused of being a “colonialist” and an ‘absolute f****** monster”, among other things. In a response on Twitter, she said she had been reduced to tears: “I am really not the nasty colonialist you say I am… I just wish we were not so confident of our own moral rectitude.”

These pile-ons have become an increasingly frequent and unpleasant part of our public debate. Those who align to a certain tribe – be they Corbynites, Cybernats, Brexiters, Remainers, hardline Unionists and campaigners on issues of gender and sexuality, or whatever – seem to exist in a state of permanent righteous fury.

They entertain no doubts about their own moral rectitude or the quality of their intellectual analysis; they display no empathy with those who take a different view; they brook no compromise with wider society; and they always seek to circumscribe debate. All this produces is bruising clash after bruising clash, upset and demoralised individuals, and a public sphere that is both toxified and stupid.

One does wonder how hard it is to sustain “civilised” values in the digital disaster zone. The evidence suggests a disturbingly large number of people find it very tricky indeed. Well, shame on them. If I must belong to a tribe, I choose to belong to the sceptics and the free thinkers and the non-compliers. You’ll find me in the unfashionable corner with Frances McDormand and Mary Beard. The air is fresh, the sun shines, the company is good – why not join us?