Author: Ophelia Benson

It’s a depressing thought, really. No getting around it. It’s depressing and discouraging – in fact it’s tragic – to think that our best qualities are so inseparable from our worst. That (if this idea has anything right about it) we can’t even aim to make things better, do great things, right wrongs, improve the world, without risking turning into a butcher or an apologist for butchers. But it seems difficult to deny. Of course some people manage it, of course there have been improvers who don’t become homicidal maniacs or their lackeys. But the inherent risk of it seems difficult to deny – I suppose because the two seem to be actually the same thing only in different forms. What the Romantics valued as intensity, what Hume and James Mill suspected or scorned as enthusiasm. Passion. The Stoics were very wary of it, too. Horatio is a Stoic. ‘Give me that man that is not passion’s slave,’ says Hamlet admiringly, ‘and I will wear him at my heart’s core.’ But we don’t love Horatio, we love Hamlet, and with good reason. He cares – and not just about himself, though some productions give that impression; no, he cares about the world, about the something rotten in Denmark; he cares about love and memory and loyalty and truth. As he should. And yet what havoc he wreaks – as people who care often do.

No, the safest course is to take things as they are, to roll with the punches, to be laid-back, to eat what’s put on your plate. Montaigne knew that, living as he did in the midst of a bloody civil war about (in reality) nothing – disagreements over theology. But…

But this is where the hesitant good word for utopia comes in. There is some obstinate core in me somewhere that thinks we shouldn’t just take things as they are, shouldn’t just settle for the world as it is. That we should want to and try to make things better. And yet I know how quickly and easily that kind of thing can run amok – into orthodoxy-imposing and heresy-hunting, persecution and excommunication, and thinking of people as large abstract units to be shoved around or eliminated and then forgotten. It seems safer to cultiver the old jardin and let it go at that. But then – that thought ‘could do better’ returns. We could be less selfish, less greedy, less trivial…Yes and be more like Ted Kasczynski, I suppose. Ted, meet Osama; Osama, Ted. Have a nice day.

Normblog pointed out a review by David Aaronovitch in the New Statesman the other day (read the NS item promptly because it will go subscription soon). It’s about a familiar but permanently mysterious fact of recent history: the willingness of the Stalinist and Leninist left to ignore or explain away or deny or justify mass murder. Thus it’s also about one of the starkest examples on record of the phenomenon B&W was set up to document and examine: the way ideology can distort the ability to think properly. B&W is primarily about the way ideology can warp judgments of the truth about the world, but moral judgments play a part in that process too. The denial of Stalin’s crimes was a moral denial as well as a factual one. In fact it was the usual sort of cover-all-bases defense of the desperate. I wasn’t even in the room, I didn’t break it, it was already cracked, everybody hated it anyway. There were no mass murders in the Soviet Union and they were a damn good thing.

How did it happen? Aaronovitch asks.

…for 20 years, this question has come to bother me more and more. Why did so many on the British left do it? Was it the case that they somehow didn’t know that the trials were rigged, the executed comrades were innocent, that the whole thing was a vast, foul set-up, until Nikita Khrushchev gave them permission to know in 1956?…And what now should we make of their credulity? Could such wilful blindness be repeated?

Any time, one can’t help thinking. Nothing easier. In fact one sees a fair amount of wilful blindness around even now.

What is revealed brilliantly through Beckett’s compassionate and well-researched account is this strange state of simultaneously knowing and not knowing. The communists looked at the beast, saw its claws and fangs, and loved it still, as people are required to love their own youth. They excused, explained, justified, denied, ignored, defended and forgot what everyone else knew.

Norm has a second post yesterday with a very good quotation on the subject from Maxime Rodinson, which I will just quote in my turn.

[T]he deeper reason for the delay in registering disillusionment is simply the visceral need not to renounce a commitment that has illuminated one’s life, given it meaning, and for which many sacrifices have often been made. Hence the reluctance to recognise the most obvious facts, the desperate paralogical guile to which one resorts in an effort to avoid the required conclusion…

Just so. Just so. We’ve talked about these things before, I think – quite often. How double-edged things like commitments and meaning can be – how destructive as well as beneficent they can be. How they can motivate courage, self-sacrifice, dedication, hard work, generosity; but they can also motivate fanaticism, cruelty, ruthlessness, lying, vindictiveness, hatred. Exactly the same ambivalence came up in that discussion of religion a few months ago, when Chris at Crooked Timber said the reason he couldn’t agree with my hostility to religion had to do with religion’s power to motivate. I saw his point, and agreed (and still do), but also pointed out, as did Norm, that it cuts both ways. I think it’s an unresolvable issue, really. I do think commitments are a good thing (though some commitments are vastly better than others, of course, and one can always judge among and between them), but I also think they are potentially and often actually terribly dangerous. There’s not even any need to name examples of highly committed, motivated people in the world today whose commitments are dangerous in various ways. People can be for instance deeply committed to taking away other people’s rights, to subordinating and exploiting other people, or just to getting rid of them entirely; to demarcating who is inferior and who is not and then acting accordingly. People can find that a very meaningful activity. Can and do.

This idea relates to the idea of utopia, I think. My colleague and I were talking about utopia recently (I forget why). I said a good word for the idea, and he commented that we may have a basic disagreement on the subject. Maybe, but maybe not. My good word for the idea is a very limited, hedged, cautious one. It’s the sort of good word I just said about commitments and motivation. Ideas of utopia can inspire – but they can inspire to appalling things as well as to good ones. It may be that the only disagreement we have is on how inevitable the appalling possibility is – and I’m not really even sure I disagree about that. It may be that I do think the road to utopia leads straight to the basement of the Lubyanka.

Okay, that was fun, picking fights with my colleague is good entertainment but it’s a luxury, a rare, truffle-like item that only occurs once every few years. Life is not all holiday, as Niall Ferguson has just been reminding us, so it’s time for me to get back to the hard graft of saying something substantive. Well no not substantive – I don’t know how to do that – but anyway not frivolously internecine.

Check out this piece of reactionary nonsense from the aforementioned Ferguson. I’d seen links to it here and there but didn’t bother reading it, because the links merely talked about Europe and holidays and laziness and how much better the US is – and I’ve seen that kind of thing often enough before, thanks, I don’t feel much need to read it yet again. But José del Solar informed me that there’s more to it than that, so I changed my mind.

No doubt Ferguson is just doing it to get a rise out of people like me – or doing it for other reasons too but confidently hoping also to get a rise out of predictable people like me. He must be, because it’s such a silly thing to say. Such a correlation not causation remark. He can’t mean it all that seriously…surely. Weber notwithstanding.

The article starts from the (as I mentioned) unoriginal observation that Europeans get longer holidays and better coverage for illness than Americans do. He regards this as a terrible vice in the Europeans rather than as a respect for people’s needs, and he regards the contrasting frenzied overwork of Americans as a splendid thing rather than as a horrible necessity caused by having ruthless bastards as employers, who are aided by lobbyists who prevent the government from enacting worker-protections by paying large ‘campaign contributions’ i.e. bribes.

This is the nicest bit:

In the U.S., of course, the approach is different. Workers who consistently miss work because they are feeling under the weather are given the chance to miss it on a permanent basis — by being fired.

He says that with approval, note, not with revulsion or even regret. A pretty sentiment. But then he goes from the ruthless to the peculiar.

You see, the most remarkable thing about the transatlantic divergence in working patterns is that it has coincided almost exactly with a comparable divergence in religiosity, both in terms of observance and belief…[M]ore than twice as many North Americans as Europeans attend religious services once a week or more. I do not say this is the sole explanation for the fact that London today is lethargic while New York toils away as usual. But there is surely something more than coincidental about the simultaneous rise of unbelief in Europe and the decline of Weber’s work ethic.

And? What follows from that? Perhaps that godbothering employers think they have encouragement from a deity to gouge every bit of work out of their employees that they possibly can, while atheists have an idea that while the factory and office are great fun, still, there are other things it is desirable to do in life and a walk in the Alps might be nice at this time of year.

Well now really. I can’t just leave this sort of thing sitting there unopposed. It would be a dereliction of duty. I like jokes and provocations as well as the next person, but there is a limit. There are some things up with which I shall not put, to paraphrase Winny.

Or is the objection that he lacks self-knowledge; he should realise he isn’t very bright – if he isn’t – and, therefore, not have stood for the presidency? If so, let’s have a reality check here. Bloggers are hardly paragons of self-knowledge…And, anyway, since when does a lack of self-knowledge justify the kind of opprobrium levelled at Bush?

What have bloggers got to do with anything? Is that the opposite of Bush? Bloggers? You have Bush and his fans on the one hand, and bloggers on the other? Hardly. So why bring them up? Eh? But more to the point – bloggers are one thing, and presidents of the US are another. To say the least. What does it matter if bloggers lack self-knowledge or are not very bright? At least, what does it matter compared to the way it matters if the president of the US (the single most powerful human being on the planet, unfortunately) is? Bloggers don’t run anything, they don’t have the ability to launch nuclear weapons, they can’t start wars, they can’t nominate Supreme Court justices, their foreign policies don’t make anything happen (except possibly indirectly by helping to shape opinion). So the standards are simply different, that’s all. Very different indeed.

They make lots of linguistic errors, just like Dubya. Because that’s the way we speak. We start sentences, change our minds about what we want to say halfway through, alter tenses, don’t finish what we started to say, and generally talk in a way which makes little sense when transcribed onto paper.

Give me a break. Watch any bit of old tv footage (or listen to old radio archives) of unrehearsed unscripted Clinton and then listen to Bush. Everyone knows there is a gigantic difference, and it is all too obvious what the difference implies. Clinton has a functioning brain and a lot of knowledge; when he is asked a question he can sort through his knowledge quickly and give a coherent, relevant, interesting, complicated answer. I’ve heard and seen him do it many times, and so has everyone else. (And by the way I’m not a total fan of Clinton, but I do think all presidents should be clever the way he is as a minimal qualification, not as a luxury item.) Bush can’t do anything remotely comparable, not even with a ‘cat sat on the mat’ type question, let alone one that relies on some knowledge. There are degrees in these things, and no doubt some philosophers and scientists do make lots of linguistic errors (though no doubt my colleague’s experience of the matter is skewed, because the people he interviews are rendered peculiarly unable to speak coherently by the very fact of being interviewed by my colleague, for what sinister or impressive reason I leave to your surmises), but some make more than others and some make fewer. People who run for president ought to be good at thinking and talking before they even think about running; it’s that simple.

However, I do agree with JS’s point [you know, the point he didn’t make, because it was in an email not in the N&C – that point] that it’s the system that’s at fault. It is indeed. It’s a frighteningly disfunctional election system for such a powerful country. There just isn’t any mechanism to eliminate the blindingly incompetent, for one thing. That’s not good.

If I don’t dislike George Bush as much as the next guy, I certainly dislike him enough to have stayed up all night on US election night, worrying about chads, and hoping for a Gore victory.

But what I don’t get is how come he gets so much flak for supposedly not being very bright? If it’s true, how exactly is it his fault? Is it okay, then, to attack the intellectually challenged simply because they are intellectually challenged (Madeleine Bunting notwithstanding)?

Or is the objection that he lacks self-knowledge; he should realise he isn’t very bright – if he isn’t – and, therefore, not have stood for the presidency? If so, let’s have a reality check here. Bloggers are hardly paragons of self-knowledge (“Ooohh, I’ve just been promoted to a shiny new university position”. Yeah, right, nobody cares.). And, anyway, since when does a lack of self-knowledge justify the kind of opprobrium levelled at Bush?

And what’s with this business of the fact that he messes up his sentences? Let me tell you something – I’ve interviewed some of the world’s top scientists and philosophers (though admittedly “top philosopher” is something of an oxymoron). Guess what? They make lots of linguistic errors, just like Dubya. Because that’s the way we speak. We start sentences, change our minds about what we want to say halfway through, alter tenses, don’t finish what we started to say, and generally talk in a way which makes little sense when transcribed onto paper. Hell, I even write in a way which makes little sense when transcribed onto paper. Does that mean we’re peculiarly daft? Nope. Does it mean we’re necessarily unable to run a country? Nope.

So, if you want to attack George Bush, attack him for being a religious maniac; or for his stem-cell nonsense; or for cutting the taxes of the rich; or for coming from Texas; but not for getting his words mixed up or for his lack of intelligence. They’re cheap shots.

(The Texas thing was a joke.)