I attended an academic conference in late 1989 on the collapse of communism in
Eastern Europe. Martin Jacques, editor of the now-defunct journal Marxism
Today, put a brave face on the rejection of the ideals he espoused. He
argued that these revolutions would expand the variety of left-wing views in
Western Europe.
I recall arguing with him from the floor that the opposite was true. Of the
two principal left-wing traditions in Europe, insurrectionary socialism and
pro-Western social democracy, only the second retained credibility.
It is obvious now that we were both wrong. The revolutionary Left has made
fitfully fruitful tactical alliances, such as the bleakly comic amalgam of
Leninists and Islamists who formed and then rent apart George Galloway’s
Respect party. But in its own name it remains a minuscule if variegated
sect.
What has happened to the other wing of nominally progressive politics is more
surprising. Liberalism, in its broadest sense, has become suspicious of its
own ideals.
Notions once considered reactionary, even extreme, have insinuated themselves
into the mainstream of right-thinking (that is, left-thinking) social
idealism.
When you encountered someone of professed left-of-centre opinions, you used to
be able to draw broad but important, and generally reliable, inferences
about what these entailed.
They included, at a minimum, commitments to secularism, freedom of expression,
individual liberty against collective authority, women’s rights, homosexual
equality and the combating of xenophobia. Times have changed. Now these
stances are unusual, even heterodox.
The degeneration of progressive idealism has many roots. But among the most
important is the instinct that the ideas of Western liberty are specific to
time and place — that they are Eurocentric. Almost coincident with the
revolutions of 1989, which testified to the power of the human instinct for
liberty, was a far more atavistic political movement.
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Supreme Leader of Iran, issued in February 1989
his fatwa calling for the murder of Salman Rushdie, a British citizen, for
writing a novel that satirised Islam.
Western governments, religious leaders and political figures were more
embarrassed than appalled. In effect, they acknowledged the offence and took
issue only with the sentence. The chief rabbi in Great Britain, Dr Immanuel
Jakobovits, remarked: “Both Mr Rushdie and the Ayatollah have abused freedom
of speech.”
Such ignorant, boorish heedlessness of the principles of a free society and
the value of the novelist’s imagination sits easily on the political Right
and with religious authority. Yet even then it had its left-wing adherents
too. In his invaluable — because so often unintentionally revealing —
diaries, Tony Benn records a meeting of the left-wing Campaign Group of
Labour MPs in February 1989.
He refers to the late Bernie Grant, who was among Britain’s first black MPs:
“Bernie Grant kept interrupting, saying that the whites wanted to impose
their values on the world. The House of Commons should not attack other
cultures. He didn’t agree with the Muslims in Iran, but he supported their
right to live their own lives. Burning books was not a big issue for blacks,
he maintained.”
This was one day after the leader of a foreign theocratic state had sought to
procure the murder of a British writer for his ideas. Few then or now would
be as openly contemptuous of the life of the mind as Grant.
Yet the notion that freedom of expression is a specifically Western obsession
that needs to be balanced against the demands of social cohesion has become
commonplace in today’s debates. It is part of the political mainstream; part
of supposedly progressive thinking, assuming that the sensibilities of
minority groups should be protected.
These impulses littered the controversy about the publication in the Danish
newspaper Jyllands-Posten in 2006 of cartoons satirising the Prophet
Muhammad. The offence caused to believers has become a catch-all explanation
for religious violence and intimidation.
When, last year, suicide bombers attacked the Danish Embassy in Pakistan,
killing six people and wounding more than 20, a Danish journalist writing
for The Guardian commented that the attack was “of course,
indefensible, but it raises questions about the wisdom of the much-debated
cartoons and Danish reactions to Muslim wrath”.
The “of course, but” formulation is worse than a dreary cliché. It indicates a
liberalism evacuated of content. Those who prize social unity and order will
tend to believe that people’s deepest feelings and beliefs should be
accorded respect.
But respect for ideas is never an entitlement. It depends on their
intellectual resilience in public debate. No free society can treat people’s
deepest beliefs as sacrosanct. They are fair game for hostile and derisive
criticism. That is how knowledge advances.
The figure of Rushdie continues to disturb the liberal imagination. When he
was awarded a knighthood in 2007, the Pakistani parliament passed a
resolution condemning the insult to the feelings of Muslims.
Some British liberals thought they were right. Baroness Shirley Williams
declared on the BBC Question Time programme that the award was not
wise, for Rushdie had “deeply offended Muslims in a very powerful way”. It
was, as her fellow panellist Christopher Hitchens remarked, a contemptible
statement.
No one has a right to the protection of feelings. If politics concerns itself
with mental states, there is no limit to how far legislation can intrude on
people’s lives. The task of progressive politics is to protect liberty, not
least by attacking the accumulation of bad ideas. Yet to many on the Left,
the individual, inquiring mind is of far less importance than the
representation of designated groups.
For example, Ken Livingstone commonly asserted that as Mayor of London he had
“a responsibility to support the rights of all of London’s diverse
communities”. No, he did not. Londoners belong to many different ethnic,
national or religious groups. And for civic purposes those affiliations have
no relevance at all.
The only characteristic that matters for politics is common citizenship with
equality under the law. The notion that democratic politics acknowledges,
even celebrates, group identities leads inexorably to the idea that the
loudest figures in such groups have a claim on the attention of everyone
else. Livingstone notoriously (and literally) embraced a visiting Islamic
cleric, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who defends suicide terrorism in Israel and
advocates the “punishment” of homosexuals.
It ought to be obvious that liberalism should not stomach that type of thing.
Yet there is a type of left-wing thinking that regards militant Islam almost
as idiosyncratic liberation theology. Verso, the left-wing publishing house,
has produced a volume of the thoughts of Osama bin Laden entitled Messages
to the World. To read the editor’s annotations is to gain the impression
of a revolutionary figure who daringly challenges Western oppression.
The mass murder of American and other civilians on 9/11 was the expression of
a nihilistic, millenarian doctrine of religious absolutism. Yet for a
certain type of critic the greatest war criminal of our age is Tony Blair.
Blair in reality perceived earlier than most the nature of the international
order after the Cold War.
This was an anarchic international order in which supranational institutions
were too weak and inchoate to stymie the ambitions of the worst of rulers.
In a speech almost exactly ten years ago in Chicago, he expounded the
responsibilities of Western nations in the protection of human rights
against oppressive governments. And he named Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam
Hussein.
Blair’s analysis has many critics. But the extraordinary fact of the
supposedly left-wing objections to his interventionist policies is its
identity with realist positions on the conservative wing of politics.
Attempting to broker a disinterested division of territory in the Balkans in
the mid-1990s merely encouraged Milosevic in further depredations, against
Kosovo. The containment of Saddam was an inherently threadbare system that
could be implemented only if the UN Security Council were resolute in
implementing it.
Many civilian lives were lost in Iraq owing to a grotesquely underprepared
military intervention. But the notion that this was aggression against a
sovereign state with rights gets exactly wrong the balance of moral
responsibility. It is hard to find many on the Left who will say this, or
will argue the intrinsic connection between peace and human rights. It is
not the trahison des clercs, only because there is nothing any longer
that the Left still has to betray.
