The open society and its enemies

I am following with no little fascination the controversy over David Edgar’s article in the Guardian last Saturday, which has upset certain left-wing folk by suggesting that writers such as Christopher Hitchens, David Aaronovitch, Nick Cohen, Andrew Antony, Martin Bright, David Mamet and Ed Husain are but the latest to have deserted the left and moved to the right. Oh -- and me.

This list is in itself absurd. As Andrew Anthony has pointed out, in renouncing seventh century Islamism, Ed Husain has moved (insofar as these terms still have any meaning) from right to left. As for several of the others, they have merely understood that one cannot be a true progressive and at the same time support the continuation of certain tyrannical regimes that enslave and murder their populations, even if they do belong to the sainted third world. They have shown considerable courage in taking this otherwise obvious position, since it has exposed them to the truly venomous onslaught from their erstwhile comrades. But to say they have therefore moved to the right is absurd. They are all still recognisably men of the left over a whole range of issues; and there are still countries -- notably Israel -- to which some of them still fail to apply the principles they apply to Iraq, America and Islamist tyranny and apply instead the standard knee-jerk left-wing default denunciation.

The reason the article has caused the upset that it has, however, is surely this. For the left, to accuse someone of ‘moving to the right’ is akin to claiming they have put themselves totally beyond the moral pale. Anyone tarred with this dread brush instantly becomes an unperson, to be exiled from civilised society altogether and treated as a pariah. So others on the left who harbour similar feelings of support for overthrowing the tyrant Saddam Hussein or horror at Islamist extremism (which in their innocence they imagine are progressive positions) and who read Edgar’s diatribe wouldn’t think ‘What a berk!’ They would think with a shudder of dread: ‘So would I also be denounced if I were discovered to be thinking this’.

The single most important thing for left-wingers -- what defines them in their own eyes as people of moral worth -- is the fact that they are not ‘right-wing’. For ‘the right’ is a place of unmitigated evil. Only the left is good. So this is how it goes in the left-wing mind.

 

To be not on the left is evil.

To be not on the left is to be on the right.
Therefore everyone who disagrees with the left on anything is automatically an evil right-winger.

The idea that there can be anything other than left-wing or right-wing – eg ‘liberal’, or ‘not really that interested in political ideology, thanks’, or ‘it’s just common-sense, surely?’ – won’t wash at all. Anything not left-wing is right-wing. Any other explanation is just… well, false consciousness.

 

So this is what follows.

 

The left believe a wide range of lies.

Others believe in the truth instead.

Therefore to the left, those people are ‘right-wing’.

Therefore truth is actually a right-wing concept.

Therefore truth is evil.
Therefore truth has to be relabelled lies while lies of course remain unchallengeable truth.

It is no exaggeration to say that, since the vast majority of the media and intellectual class in Britain are on the left, this mindset has quite simply poisoned British public debate and brought us to our current state of suicidal irrationality in the face of an unprecedented global threat. For examples of this pathology, and the viciousness to which it gives rise, see some of the readers’ comments posted under various entries on this very website.

The reflex reaction of a left-winger, when presented with a set of facts which challenge his or her assumptions about the world, is not to ask ‘Is this true?’ but ‘Will adopting this position make me right-wing?’ It’s not just that to adopt such a heresy would risk social ostracism and worse amongst friends and colleagues. More profoundly, the left-winger really does believe that to be left is good and to be ‘right’ is evil. So adopting even one position which contradicts left-wing thinking (Saddam was a worse tyrant than George W Bush; Israel is the victim not the villain in the Middle East; Islamism is a denial of human rights) risks the total collapse of that left-winger’s entire moral universe. Since that world-view can brook no challenge whatever, the left-winger has to kill off any such challenge stone dead. Which is done by demonising and smearing the challenger. And the bigger the lie that is challenged and the more murderous its consequences, the more savage are the smears and ostracism.

This, of course, is by no stretch of the imagination a progressive attitude. It is instead a totalitarian mindset. As in Edgar’s article, the left claim they are the ‘progressives’ in society -- but the truth is the precise opposite. Nothing new here: the idea that the left were always the heroic opponents of tyranny is merely a self-serving myth invented by the left. From the French Revolution onwards, the left have in fact generally sided with tyrants and oppressors; ever since that time the most ‘progressive’ intellectuals have been fascinated by violence; socialism and national socialism were after all brothers in blood, descending from the same counter-Enlightenment strain of thinking.

In 1987 I became a columnist on the Guardian, where I had worked for the previous ten years in a variety of roles. During that decade, I had never challenged left-wing orthodoxy and was thus considered to be a favoured daughter of progressivism. In my second column for the paper, however, I wrote that the crisis in education standards was not the fault of the evil Margaret Thatcher’s ‘cuts’ but what children were actually being taught in the schools, where something very damaging had clearly taken hold. I wrote that because it was what I had seen and believed to be true. Overnight I became an un-person. Why had I suddenly moved to the right? What on earth had happened to me? How could I write this nasty right-wing rubbish? Had I taken leave of my senses??!! It’s been the sunlit uplands ever since. As I ploughed on over the subsequent two decades through issues such as family breakdown, gender roles, drug abuse, victim culture, multiculturalism, national identity and then in the past seven years, Israel, America, Iraq and Islamism I moved from being right-wing to far-right to ultra-right to clinically insane to far-right lunatic Zionist Jew.

The thing is, I don’t think I was ever really left-wing: more a soggy liberal just going along with the consensus. Then I was mugged by reality, as the saying goes; and the rest is history. But I still believe, as I always have done, in creating a better society; still believe in encouraging the good and discouraging the bad; still believe in fighting harm and tyranny rather than appeasing it.

The only thing that’s changed is the identity of the people who I now realise are always going to be at one end of the gun, and those who are always going to be at the other.