The Wiki Man: A lifetime of Lent?

What divides the left from the right nowadays is almost never the wildly divergent aims each group claims to believe in: it’s simply that, at a personal level, each finds the other bloody irritating.

What divides the left from the right nowadays is almost never the wildly divergent aims each group claims to believe in: it’s simply that, at a personal level, each finds the other bloody irritating.

The left finds people on the right selfish and self-satisfied. They’re not wrong. A philosopher friend of mine says he dislikes the City ‘not for the money they earn but the unquestioning sense that they deserve it’. The right’s aversion to the left is more complex — sanctimoniousness, perhaps. The middle-class left can seem more eager to display good intentions than to obtain successful results. Showing how deeply you care about poverty is more important than solving it. Intentionality is what matters, so something that benefits the poor as a by-product of its own self-interest (Asda or Tesco, say) doesn’t count — it’s better to wear one hair shirt than to sell 10,000 cheap cotton ones.

This emphasis on signalling ‘how much you care’ infects environmental debates too. The odd disdain environmentalists show towards easier technological fixes such as geoengineering or nuclear power makes me suspicious (rightly or wrongly) of the whole movement. It seems what campaigners want is not so much a solution as a lifetime of Lent. ‘This is a massive issue,’ the thinking goes, ‘so we must dignify it with a correspondingly large intervention.’

Observe, too, how the possible technological fix of e-smoking will soon be met by health campaigners. Nicotine itself is clearly rather a good drug. An appetite suppressant and an antidepressant, it is also an aid to protracted creative thought — since Bach wrote ‘So oft ich meine Tobackspfeife’ (BWV 515a) in 1725 it is hard to name a single worthwhile piece of music written by a non-smoker.