peek-a-boo

Worth a peek:

A discussion on the state of the left with Ophelia Benson, editor of the rationalist website Butterflies & Wheels and co-author of Why Truth Matters.

“...if a person doesn’t want an open debate to take place and wants to define in advance what kind of language is permissible and which subjects are off-limits, that usually indicates the weakness of their position and, more to the point, an awareness of just how weak that position is.”
 

"..................... DT: Well, as to what’s ‘left’ about the worship of dubious figures, I’m inclined to cough and mutter “Marx”, “Castro”, “Chavez” and “Che Guevara T-shirts.” Communist societies are surprisingly big on idolatry, aren’t they? It seems to be a practical consequence of egalitarian philosophy applied in the real world. Keeping everyone equally miserable requires some kind of deity, usually one with a firm hand. How many times have we seen Mao depicted as a god, complete with radiation beaming from his head, like some Communist Godzilla?

As a teenager I remember seeing CCCP badges and the people wearing them didn’t seem too concerned with the connotations of that project. Likewise, those on the left who seem smitten by Castro or Guevara don’t seem unduly bothered by the Cuban concentration camps for roqueros and other “bohemian elements.”

I suppose it’s not too much of a leap from identifying with Castro or Chavez because of their opposition to capitalism or American “hegemony” and identifying with the contortions of Derrida and Foucault for not dissimilar reasons. Both are postures of rebellion with no obvious moral foundation or practical usefulness. Ditto the white middle-class lefties who wave placards announcing “We are all Hizballah now.” I guess it’s something to do with “giving it to the man” or not liking one’s parents or something. It all seems a tad narcissistic to me, and just a little depraved.
 

".....................................I’ve some sympathy with Stephen Hicks, whose Explaining Postmodernism I read alongside Why Truth Matters. Crudely summarised, Hicks sees the rise of relativism, obscurantism and censoriousness on the left as marking a crisis of faith and a retreat from reality. As a practical blueprint, Socialism has been refuted. The question is what’s been left in the space it used to occupy, other than confusion, narcissism and a state of denial.

It strikes me as important to have some point of contrast to whatever the prevailing outlook is, but at the moment I’m pretty much repelled by the contrast that’s available, and I doubt I’m alone in this. I think we can safely dismiss the various tribes of the far left as a moral farce and practical irrelevance. So what we have, at least in the UK, is plenty of anti-US sentiment and oppositional posturing – what Nick Cohen called “the anti-imperialism of fools” – which leads to any number of absurd positions. Perhaps the most reprehensible of these were the protestations of “solidarity” with Hassan Nasrallah, despite his openly genocidal ambitions.

But I also think of the leftwing art critic, Julian Stallabrass, who wrote in the New Left Review about the spectacle of terrorism and seemed ever so slightly titillated by the “vanguard politics” of “Islamic revolutionaries” who “harden themselves against mundane sentiment.” And I think of the London Review of Books, which has published more than one strangely approving account of Hizballah’s “uncompromising” stance and use of suicide bombing.

I mention these things because they’re not just fringe curiosities - variations of these postures have come to define much of the mainstream left and can be found in the Guardian and Independent on a fairly regular basis. And it’s hard to miss mainstream commentators repeating the same relativistic denunciations of “Western ways of thinking” and the supposed “Eurocentric arrogance” of the Enlightenment. It’s easy to see what much of the left is against, if not the reasons why. It’s much harder to see what the left is for. I don’t see a coherent set of ideas. I see a patchwork of contradiction, often for its own sake, or the sake of appearance, or in some cases to enact some kind of personal psychodrama.

I remember Terry Eagleton’s description of jihadist suicide bombers - who murder and dismember people on a fairly arbitrary basis - as “tragic heroes” reacting to “injustice”, as if they had no agency of their own, and with the insinuation of some moral equivalence with their victims, including the people who leapt from the windows of a burning World Trade Centre. The fact that Islamist conceptions of “justice” are enormously loaded, unattainably so, and somewhat different from our own didn’t appear to be a detail worthy of comment. And if one suggests that it might be worth looking at Islamist theology, its lineage, and how it explicitly redefines these basic moral terms, one is very likely to be shouted down as an ‘Islamophobe.’

When I see attempts to ignore such details, or to stifle debate, or to control the terms of debate, or to shut down thought before it can happen, I most often find those attempts coming from the left. This wasn’t always the case, of course; but right now I don’t see too many leftists standing up for free speech and the testing of ideas. Those that do are, of course, assailed from the left. Instead I hear lots of talk about “sensitivity” and “respect for other cultures.” And if a person doesn’t want an open debate to take place and wants to define in advance what kind of language is permissible and which subjects are off-limits, that usually indicates the weakness of their position and, more to the point, an awareness of just how weak that position is. Which, I guess, brings us back to the issue of denial.