really

New one from Hitchens

Not too keen on Clinton H 

This post will begin and end with quotes from a recent book review by Peter Ryley. The book in question is not one that I would recommend you read. Life is too short, and there are surely better things you could do with your time. It is the debate surrounding the book that is most interesting. The idea of the book. The metabook.

Here is the first quote from Peter Ryley:

“There are plenty of blogs that reflect the orthodox left lunacy and ones that use seductively more ‘reasonable’ language to reach similar conclusions. However, there are two other broad categories of sites that can be found. Firstly, there are those that are firmly anti-totalitarian but have little or no critique of domestic politics. They have made their peace with the establishment and the legacy of Thatcherism. However dramatic their declarations of human rights, they are Tom Paines abroad but Edmund Burkes at home. Whilst the finely tuned English ear is quick to pick up the contented cadences of the privilege of class.”

These sentences encapsulate the thoughts of many of us on the left who despair at the degenerate state of political discourse in Britain today. This is a largely British problem, parochial in its self-centredness. While the largest part of the vocal left has sold its collective soul to reaction, organised religion, antisemitism and general paranoid lunacies, a minority has made its peace with those who dwell in the citadel of the English ruling class. New Left becomes New Burkeian, with a very blurred line dividing these two seemingly incompatible world views.

For two recent and particularly stupid examples of “decent left” thinking on the virtues of blameless bourgeois domesticity and the New Burkeianism, see here and here.

I was pleasantly surprised to read in yesterday’s Observer an essay by Jason Burke (no relation, as far as I’m aware!) that begins to deconstruct the new liberal-left, end-of-history thesis which states that with prosperity comes political moderation, increased tolerance and reduced conflict. Much as the living Burke would like to accept this theory, he can clearly see that history shows it to be bunk. Ironically, those who promulgate end-of-history ideologies – whether left or right – are those with the least historical awareness.

In his reaction to Burke’s Observer piece, Norman Geras goes further. Middle class people are not inherently ‘nice’ and ‘reasonable’, says Geras. They may have been responsible for much that is good in the world, but they are also at the root of many social evils. Let it never be forgotten that early 20th century “National Socialism” was a bourgeois ideology – the bastard child of a middle class whose cosiness was threatened by markets gone pear-shaped.

Geras concludes:

“The beginning of wisdom here is, in any case, an understanding that people sometimes behave badly (and – worse than badly – cruelly) just because they can. It’s the ineradicable downside of human freedom.”

And then there is Thatcherism and the political sanctification of selfishness, which commentators never tire of telling us was a necessary consequence of decades of stifling post-war corporatism. Only Thatcherism entrenched a new corporatism and managerialism, further centralised political power, legislated as if there were no tomorrow and displayed contempt for individual initiative, culture and creativity. And from its soulless suburbia of the mind the new bourgeois liberal-left appears to celebrate this.

But there is another left. The inchoate, anarchic, often inebriated band of activists, journalists, bloggers and others beloved of Peter Ryley:

“There are humanist Marxists, left libertarians, social democrats, Old Labour diehards, those who would combine Marx with Mill, querulous liberals, and others who place human emancipation at the centre of an ecological understanding of the diversity of the natural world. It is where I feel most at home and where the more interesting, and idiosyncratic, writing is taking place.”

I second that sentiment.