Nick Cohen nails it, though of course he is as much at fault as those dreadful post-modern relativists - his brand of muscular liberalism existing in an ahistorical vacuum, as it were.
It seems to me that while the people who can see more than one side of an argument generally decline to have it and seek only to get on with their lives, those who get to the top, who run countries or get their opinions splashed across comment pages, are invariably the single minded - people who, because they are only really capable of holding one opinion, taking one side, having one dream, can run with it so much faster than the rest of us, burdened as we are with inconvenient truths, uncomfortable facts, a surfeit of ideological purity or spiritual certainty.
Little wonder then, this results in so much woe.
Sunday, October 16, 2005
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7 comments:
I totally understand where you're coming from with this post.
Which is probably my problem.
Indeed. The only thing is that it could be taken as a defence of a managerial politics. Though that is clearly not what our Nick intended.
Managerialism might seem value-neutral and free of danger but oddly its what the great ideologue Blair thinks HE is in fact in the business of.
Mr Cohen of course concurred in his critique 'Pretty Straight Guys'; though oddly he now finds himself one of Blairs lonely pro-war cheerleaders on the so-called left and reveals his own anti-humanitarian ideological credentials in the process. A fact I trust our Nick alludes to.
The 'ahistorical vacuum' is spot on. Part of being ahistorical is that it allows you to ignore the lives before. To ignore not only their existence but also their thoughts and voices, their joys and sufferings.
An absence of historical understanding in public policy is a state of political mind equivalent to psychopathy.
It is a continual life of the present and for the now, its waking up everyday as a pretty straight psychopath unable to comprehend others inability to understand that you had no choice but to act as you did.
Of course you couldn't understand that cacophany of opposition and questions, how could you? - your role as leader dictates that you must listen for the clear and simple sound - the one true way. You after all must take responsibility.
Mr Cohen should remember that in the old days when the pseudo-science of marxism was fashionably extolled both by himself and half of today's New Labour cabinet, (including its counter-intuitively named defence secretary John Reid), that there was at least some notion of 'historical process' coupled with a worthy if seldom-practised suspicion of the great man - how stalinism's victim's no doubt fail to chuckle at that of course. No doubt Blair's victims in seven-times pilloried Lawrence' Mesopotamia are equally ill-amused.
Blair the change maker seems ever-more to view himself as Kalki the destroyer, less pretty straightforward than straight to hell. His main mission to kick over statues in the graveyard of progressive politics.
In Blair land of course there is no progressive consensus only loud and ideological voices of power cutting arcs through the centre ground, felling understanding in their noisy wake.
Cohen fails to take on board that the current thrashings of secularism and religion alike are not just the result of the collapse of ideological certainties, they are also the result of an ignorance of the notion of progressive consensus on behalf of those who claim to represent it.
Actually of course our Nick said this far more briefly than that!
I hope he did, yes.
Um, yes, I think so!
Yeah, yeah, one can go on a bit! Nick Cohen just annoys me. He's the ultimate media poseur, attacking everyone else for their ideological mistakes but with a curious blind spot as to his own - its like he just thinks he's self-evidently right. Like the only area where choice doesn't apply is in history and ideology.
Or maybe its that (unkind) teacher thing: those who can f**k things up do, those who can't write f**kin' crap about it.
People like him (and our PM) need a sign on their wall - it would read:
'It sounds like a good idea and it might work, but it might fuck up, so maybe you should ask someone else what they think' - or something pithy about humility.
It'd be boring if it wasn't so tragic.
Choice of outcomes equals waste - I just think its an idea to try and minimise the actual waste of lives involved - placing ideas before people tends to have a bad effect on the people - which I guess is where Amnesty are coming from with their 'Defend the Human' campaign - which grows on me steadily, despite its incipient illiteracy.
That's it - placing ideas before the human is what really makes me puke... the gusto with which the puffed-up "muscular left" embraced the war in Iraq - as if they'd actually have to fight it - reminded me very much of the attitude of the hard-left students they used to be, all for the "revolution" regardless of a few million proles dead.
When "Norman" wrote in the Guardian that he was right to be a communist/ trot/ whatever as a student and right to be new Labour now I thought: actually no - you were wrong then and wrong now. But I suppose that's the point of the spoof, isn't it?
Indeed - which is why there's a curious symmetry about a faux left government now talking about abrogating in te interests of security (whose exactly) the human rights legislation it introduced and for which it was (and is regularly) pilloried in the Daily Mail which its own 'look-at-me-the-disabled-can-be-bigoted-too' Home Secretary come Little Britain character spent years playing race card poker with (Prison ships, I'll raise You Peter; Deportation - I'll raise you Peter; Imprison their kids? I'm still in Peter, deal me another and I'll raise you a Zimbabwean political exile and sixty Sudanese torture victims)
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