Author: Ophelia Benson

Have things changed, or did we (I, you, they) get them wrong in the first place? It can be hard to tell, sometimes. Or perhaps I mean always. It can be hard to sort out misunderstanding from wishful thinking, confirmation bias from overcorrection, too much suspicion from not enough suspicion, too much suspicion of X from not enough suspicion of Y – and so on.

From Open Democracy:

Some of my friends and relatives tell me I’ve changed – that my politics aren’t as “leftwing” as they used to be during the anti-nuclear movement in Britain back in the 1980s. In a way, they are right. My core politics haven’t changed, but it seems to me that the world has changed so dramatically – traditional alliances and reference points have become unreliable, the ground rules of the power game have so shifted – I’d be a fool not to incorporate these changes into my analytical framework.

Maybe. Maybe, maybe. Or maybe we (I, they, you) were (at least partly) wrong about some of those alliances and reference points and ground rules all along. Or maybe not. It can be very hard to tell. Which means it can be very hard to tell just what is ‘leftwing’ anyway. It’s getting to be a very slippery eel, that ‘leftwing’ attribute.

Unlike my compatriot Christopher Hitchens, however, whose break with erstwhile comrades on the left over foreign policy has resulted in a wholesale swing rightward, I still hope that my rethinking of some foreign policy questions can be incorporated into a vibrant progressive movement. Indeed, I’d argue that a strong defence of pluralistic, democratic societies needs to be an essential, perhaps a defining, component of any genuinely progressive politics in today’s world.

There’s an example of that eel right there. That ‘wholesale swing rightward’ is highly disputable (and disputed). Just for one thing, I would venture to say that Hitchens also hopes that his ‘rethinking of some foreign policy questions can be incorporated into a vibrant progressive movement,’ and he certainly would argue that a strong defence of pluralistic, democratic societies needs to be an essential component of any genuinely progressive politics – so the ‘unlike’ bit is not altogether clear. A distinction without a difference.

But the basic point is unexceptionable.

Yet reading the voices of much of the self-proclaimed “left” in the London papers in the aftermath of the bombings, I was struck by how ossified many of them have become, how analyses crafted at the height of the cold war have lingered as paltry interpretive frameworks for political fissures bearing little if anything in common with that “twilight conflict.”…They assume that groups like al-Qaida are almost entirely reactive, responding to western policies and actions, rather than being pro-active creatures with a virulent homegrown agenda, one not just of defence but of conquest, destruction of rivals, and, ultimately and at its most megalomaniacal, absolute subjugation…Moreover, many of those who reflexively blame the west do not honestly hold up a mirror to the rest of the world, including the Muslim world, and the racism and sexism and anti-semitism that is rife in many parts of it. If bigotry were indeed the exclusive preserve of the west, their arguments would have greater moral force. But given the fundamentalist prejudices that are so much a part of bin Ladenism, the cry of western racism is a long way from being a case-closer.

Well there’s an understatement. A bit of litotes, as a commenter usefully reminded me the other day when I was groping for an antonym for hyperbole. A bit of hyperbolic understatement, that is – ‘If bigotry were indeed the exclusive preserve of the west, their arguments would have greater moral force.’ Yes, they certainly would! But boy is that ever not the case. Nothing in that whole capacious box of human cruelty, brutality, exploitation, oppression – racism, sexism, nationalism, ethnicism, religionism, megoodyoubadism – none of that is the exclusive preserve of the west, in fact it flourishes in gangrenous proliferating bottomlessly malevolent ways in many pockets of the non-west.

Indeed, what al-Qaida apparently hates most about “the west” are its best points: the pluralism, the rationalism, individual liberty, the emancipation of women, the openness and social dynamism that represent the strongest legacy of the Enlightenment…It is because bin Ladenism is waging war against the liberal ideal that much of the activist left’s response to 11 September 2001 and the London attacks is woefully, catastrophically inadequate. For we, as progressives, need to uphold the values of pluralism, rationalism, scepticism, women’s rights, and individual liberty and oppose ideologies and movements whose foundations rest on theocracy, obscurantism, misogyny, anti-Semitism, and nostalgia for a lost empire.

Yes. We do.

Pamela Bone also makes that point.

”A move back towards the left for you?” a regular correspondent emailed, in response to a recent column. “I never left the left. The left left me,” I replied. “The left I thought I was part of didn’t make common cause with fascists.”

Therefore placation is not an option.

Of course we are all for peace, aren’t we? It’s certainly the easiest moral position to take. The problem is that sometimes things are just not that easy. And I am yet to hear a satisfactory explanation from the anti-war left as to what should done to stop mass murder when diplomacy has been exhausted and sanctions have failed. What should be done about Darfur?

What should have been done about Rwanda? Kosovo? Bosnia? Peace is good, war is bad – but sometimes peace is not the best good and war is not the worst bad. Sometimes peace is not peace but desolation, as Tacitus pointed out a long time ago. I’ve quoted this before, I think, but I’ll do it again, because it’s good. ‘Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.’ Where they make a wilderness and call it peace. By the same token, submission is not peace, it’s submission.

In the 1930s, people of the left went from around the world to fight fascism in Spain. The left didn’t argue then that fascists needed to be “understood” and placated. Today’s terrorists will be placated only when they have achieved their declared aim: a worldwide, Taliban-style Islamic state…I am not part of that left who seem to believe democracy is OK for Swedes but not for Arabs.

No. Nor am I (nor are you, we, they).

Hitchens also makes the point.

Never make the mistake of asking for rationality here. And never underestimate the power of theocratic propaganda. The fanatics look at the population of Bali and its foreign visitors and they see a load of Hindus selling drinks – often involving the presence of unchaperoned girls – to a load of Christians. That in itself is excuse enough for mayhem. They also see local Muslims following syncretic and tolerant forms of Islam, and they yearn to redeem them from this heresy and persuade them of the pure, desert-based truths of Salafism and Wahhabism…So, what did Indonesia do to deserve this, or bring it on itself? How will the slaughter in Bali improve the lot of the Palestinians? Those who look for the connection will be doomed to ask increasingly stupid questions and to be content with increasingly wicked answers.

Stupid questions and wicked answers – let’s not. Let’s at least try not to.

Time for some legend-tweaking, some myth-interrogating, some eye-poking in the.

But while millions of colonists were accepting of slavery if not relaxed about it, millions of Britons back in the old country really were disgusted by it. And when slaves could choose whom to trust, they trusted Britannia.

So in the end it’s a poke in the eye for America?

“Yup. In the interests of truth,” he says.

Simon Schama, this is. He’s written a new book on – well, what it sounds like.

He’s grateful, he says, for Americans thirst for popular history – a thirst that can make “doorstoppers such as Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton beach reading for the summer”. But there’s a but, and it’s a big one. All these blockbusters (one thinks also of Stephen Ambrose’s boomingly titled The Victors, Band of Brothers and Undaunted Courage) are “very coloured, in my view, by the wish for a pre-lapsarian past; (by the notion that) however much trouble we’ve been in since the civil war, there was once a place where America’s founding fathers were good, wise, strong, heroic, devoted to liberty and all of that”.

And by the wish for ‘the good war’ and for ‘the greatest generation’ and other cuddly items. Wishes of that kind do get in the way of truth. That happens.

Wrong sort of history for his esteemed colleagues to be writing, Schama reckons. Go back to Thucydides and the great cock-up theory of how we got to where we are. “It may have been low-key and Macaulay, not Carlisle, but that’s the greatness of the Western historical tradition. It’s not purely celebratory — in fact it began with unflinching self-criticism — so there is some sense of the virtue of party-pooping.”

There is indeed. Unflinching self-criticism is a good deal more likely to get at the truth than wishful thinking about pre-lapsarian pasts is. (Why? Because there is always something to criticise, whereas pre-lapsarian pasts don’t exist. And because wishful thinking distorts perception. That’s why.)

Schama was on Start the Week last week, talking about this book and being amusingly rude about Mel Gibson’s terrible mythic movie ‘The Patriot’ and about the decisiveness of Bush – ‘He’s decisive,’ Schama said acidly, ‘about doing whatever the last person he spoke to recommended.’

It’s outrageous. Something ought to be done about it. ‘College’ in the US apparently has the unmitigated gall to teach things that conflict with Christianity. Isn’t that illegal?

Spend a couple of days at the workshop and it becomes clear that, for many of these students, college is fraught with peril. There is the pressure to party, to drink, to have sex. There is also the subtle pressure to conform to a non-Christian worldview. There are biology courses that ask students to accept evolution, which workshop organizers and most of the students reject as untrue and ungodly. There are literature courses that see any text, including the Bible, as open to multiple interpretations. And there are philosophy classes that view absolute truth as nothing more than an illusion.

The subtle pressure to conform to a non-Christian worldview – meaning, the expectation that students will give rational answers to questions. That if asked to write an essay on the Renaissance, they won’t begin every sentence with ‘God made it come about that’. That they will read secular books on secular subjects and think about them in rational, empirical, non-supernatural ways. Yes, no doubt such a pressure is there – but how can university subjects be taught properly if it’s not? How can you have biology courses that don’t ‘ask students to accept evolution’? How can you have philosophy courses that view ‘absolute truth’ as revealed by a deity and passed on by authority, when that’s not philosophy but religion? The problem seems to be basic, in fact downright foundational.

Even though he is a devout Christian, Mr. Thomas chose to attend a secular college because it will “make me a more well-rounded person.” Still, he is worried about what he will encounter in the classroom. “You always hear horror stories about professors treading on students’ beliefs,” he says. “I hope they won’t ignore my point of view.” When a professor or fellow student asserts something that runs contrary to Christianity, Mr. Thomas intends to speak up. And now, thanks to the workshop, he knows what to say.

He wants to be a more well-rounded person – which is a very good idea, especially for a ‘devout’ Christian – but he is also determined to reject anything ‘that runs contrary to Christianity’ – thus assuring that he can’t possibly (unless he fails in that project) become a more well-rounded person. It’s basic. You can’t do both. You can’t both get a real education – which involves asking genuine questions, not ones with predetermined answers; which involves following the evidence wherever it leads; which involves learning things you didn’t know before; which involves learning things that don’t conform to what you want to believe – and reject in advance anything ‘that runs contrary to Christianity.’ That’s not education – that rules out education. Vocational training, yes, but education, no.

Columbia undergraduates study the Bible not as divinely inspired scripture, but as literature. For Ms. Keyes this was distressing. But, she says, Summit taught her that the Bible is “historically accurate,” and this knowledge kept her from believing that it belonged on the same plane as Homer or Aeschylus. “It equipped me to think through things and not accept everything I was told,” she says.

Except of course when that everything is told to her by the people at camp. Summit taught her something that is not true, and that equipped her to accept everything she was told provided the tellers are Christian.

It’s sad, really.

You might as well know. I don’t usually spill these things, I don’t just blurt them out, I keep myself to myself. I don’t make everyone a present of my secrets. I don’t bore you with my passions and adorations. I don’t feel it necessary to go public with everything. I don’t ‘share’ my every emotion. But you might as well know – there are few people I like as much as I like Alan Bennett. Not that I know him or anything – but everything I’ve read and seen by him, everything I know about him, everything I’ve heard him say; his voice, his plays, his journals, his readings, his performances – well, I just like them intensely, that’s all. And this review of his new book in the Times simply refreshes or reinforces that liking, and also creates new branches of it.

Bennett does not tell it as a success story, and doubts, in glummer moments, if it is one; “Living is something I’ve managed largely to avoid.” Rather, he inspects his past to discover how he came to be himself — fastidious, buttoned-up, an inveterate outsider…Being categorised at all is what he resists. He laments his constant sense of being shut out, but when he looks at those he might be shut in with, being shut out is clearly his preference. “I have never found it easy to belong. So much repels.”

Oh, dear – come over here and sit by me, as Dorothy Parker said. Those three little words – dalling, they are so very me. So much repels. Yes.

Like most lower-middle-class couples at the time, they believed in keeping themselves to themselves and avoiding anything “common”, articles of faith their son has inherited. It would do, he suggests, as a definition of what has gone wrong with England in the past 20 years, to say that it has got common. Unfashionably ready to call vulgarity and stupidity vulgarity and stupidity, he picks out, in an anti-paedophile mob on a Portsmouth housing estate, a tattooed mother with a fag dangling from her lips and a baby in her arms, proclaiming how concerned she is for her kiddies.

So much repels.

His father taught him to distrust affectation (“splother”, he called it), and Bennett proved all too apt a pupil…He has an unerring ear for verbal falsity — the archbishop of Canterbury at the Queen Mother’s memorial service referring to her as “someone who can help us to travel that country we call life”…The modern jargons we invent to keep reality at bay arouse his scorn. You sense the struggle when he refers to Rupert Thomas, who now lives with him, as “my partner, as the phrase is”. He has trained himself, or maybe it was just a gift, to hear and see what is actually there, not what convention dictates…

Well that’s why, then – he has an unerring ear for verbal falsity. I do value that quality – so naturally he’s a hero.

Elsewhere his incisiveness is less alarming, and often pleasingly sceptical. Puncturing reputations is a speciality. He comments wryly on the “canonisation” of Iris Murdoch, whose famed unworldliness somehow did not prevent her accepting umpteen honorary degrees and a damehood from Mrs Thatcher. Sir Isaiah Berlin and Anna Akhmatova are also put through the mill — the one not much good at thinking, the other not much good at poetry, and both too pleased with themselves.

Yeah, yeah, yeah – more, more.

I have never read a book of this length where I have turned the last page with such regret. It is intelligent, educated, engaging, humane, self-aware, cantankerous and irresistibly funny. You want it to go on for ever.

So much repels; what a good thing there is Alan Bennett, who doesn’t.