Another British leftist breaks free. Here are a couple of highlights from Nick Cohen's essay about his ideological apostacy and subsequent excommunication:
I'm sure that any halfway competent political philosopher could rip the assumptions of modern middle-class left-wingery apart. Why is it right to support a free market in sexual relationships but oppose free-market economics, for instance? But his criticisms would have little impact. It's like a religion: the contradictions are obvious to outsiders but don't disturb the faithful. You believe when you're in its warm embrace. Alas, I'm out. Last week, after 44 years of regular church-going, the bell tolled, the book was closed and the candle was extinguished. I was excommunicated.
The officiating bishop was Peter Wilby, a former editor of the New Statesman and a friend of long-standing, who delivered his anathema in the Guardian. The immediate heresy was a piece I'd written about how difficult the courts made it to deport suspected Islamist terrorists.
The least attractive characteristic of the middle-class left - one shared with the Thatcherites - is its refusal to accept that its opponents are sincere. The legacy of Marx and Freud allows it to dismiss criticisms as masks which hide corruption, class interests, racism, sexism - any motive can be implied except fundamental differences of principle. Wilby went through a long list of what could have motivated mine and similar 'betrayals'. Perhaps we became right wing as we got older. Perhaps we wanted to stick our snouts into the deep troughs of the Tory press. Perhaps taking out a mortgage committed us to the capitalist system or having children encouraged petit bourgeois individualism of the most anti-social kind.
The reason why one million people marched through London without one mounting a platform to express solidarity with the victims of fascism was that it never occurred to them that there were people in Iraq who shared their values.
[G]ood motives of tolerance and respect for other cultures have had the unintended consequence of leading a large part of post-modern liberal opinion into the position of 19th-century imperialists. It is presumptuous and oppressive to suggest that other cultures want the liberties we take for granted, their argument runs. So it may be, but believe that and the upshot is that democracy, feminism and human rights become good for whites but not for browns and brown-skinned people who contradict you are the tools of the neo-conservatives.
Who is going to help the victims of religious intolerance in Britain's immigrant communities? Not the Liberal Democrats, who have never once offered support to liberal and democrats in Iraq. Nor an anti-war left which prefers to embrace a Muslim Association of Britain and Yusuf al-Qaradawi who believe that Muslims who freely decide to change their religion or renounce religion should be executed. If the Archbishop of Canterbury were to suggest the same treatment for renegade Christians all hell would break loose. But as the bigotry comes from 'the other' there is silence.
The thing to watch for with fellow travellers is what shocks them into pulling the emergency cord and jumping off the train. I know some will stay on to the terminus, and when the man with the rucksack explodes his bomb their dying words will be: 'It's not your fault. I blame Tony Blair.'
My advice to my former comrades is to struggle out of your straitjackets and get off at the next station. It would be good to see you on this side of the barrier.
Plato tells the story of a a group of men imprisoned since birth in a cave, chained to a rock so that all they can see are flickering shadows on the wall of the cave. The prisoners pass their time debating the significance and meaning of this or that shadow. Their whole existence is spent speculating upon flickering, insubstantial images. The shadows are all they have to put meaning into their bleak lives.
One day one of the prisoners breaks free and climbs up out of the dark cave. At first he's blinded by the brilliance of the sun, but once his eyes adjust he becomes aware of a world infinitely more beautiful and substantial than the dark realm of the cave. He experiences life as he had never known it before. He hastens back to tell his comrades, but they're unreceptive. The cave is all they know. They're comfortable enough, and they don't care to hear of any sun or colors or anything else. They think their former friend mad, and if he persists in pestering them, Plato warns, they may even kill him.
I think of that parable almost every time I hear an account of another lefty climbing out of the ideological cave in which he had been chained.
