There's a horrible sensation, one I can only liken to having someone reach inside your abdomen and gently but firmly grasp your kidney, in reading a writer you dislike make a point you suspect might be totally valid. Reading Brendan O'Neill in the Spectator harp on about the groupthink of the modern student left angered me because I am perfectly aware that the intended audience is meant to snigger at the very premise that all the student causes are worthwhile in the first place. O'Neill is in fact just talking about a generational divide here - one man's groupthink is another man's zeitgeist, and clearly the shock is not so much that students all think the same (they do not) but that the range of acceptable opinions continues to change as it always has. Social Justice movements may well be safer than they used to be in the days when the Cold War presented a dangerous alternative, but they are also more palatable to more people, I think, and so have greater gravitational pull on youth opinion. That is an argument for another day, though.
Because this is more than just another case of Guardian reader and Spectator writer talking past each other. I have been wondering a lot about whether the Left, or rather my Left, is intellectually inferior to the movements that preceded it, and this picture of people demanding the right to be comfortable, to feel safe, to not feel offended, above all to be in the Right and have the Right opinion - all of this strikes me as distressingly familiar from my own thoughts. I'm meant to be in solidarity with everyone, of course, because that's how the Left works. But I hate feeling like a traitor just because I read through the evidence presented in the Ferguson shooting. In doing so, the ghostly ranks of Twitterjustice soldiers call over my shoulder, telling me I am denying the minority voice, ignoring my privilege, playing into the mainstream narrative. That crowd has long decided that Michael Brown's hands were up when he was shot. To say otherwise is to rhetorically kneecap all the protesters who turned the gesture into such an affecting symbol.
Perhaps it is a gauche contrarianism on my part, but I am habitually suspicious of people who think they are Right. Even when I agree with them. My suspicion is that thinking you are Right betrays a lack of fluidity in thinking, such that even a forensic and tireless mind like a Glenn Greenwald can appear a flabby intellect because it singularly focusses on winning the ideological war it has set itself, such that jihadism is never, ever a threat and American power has never, ever done good in the world. My fear that the left-wingers of my day are inferior to superior ones of the past is of course not new. It turns out it has always been the case.
I turn to the writing of George Orwell for a reminder that scorn for the "pansy left", as he so charmingly calls them, is traditional for other leftwingers. And a modern critic of the Left like Freddie DeBoer hits the same points again. By simply declaring that some writers and thinkers and channels and opinions are just Wrong, and like kryptonite sear and burn all that is pure just by their very presence, the Left is shutting itself out of a dialogue with the world, and more than that is putting its younger adherents into a constant state of fear, so that all are watching everyone else for a break from orthodoxy, and watching their own mouths for saying something Not OK, resulting in all the intellectual curiosity of Stalinist Russia or Puritan Salem.
The S stands for Socialjustice
The ghost of Orwell hangs over so much of contemporary political discussion because he is determinedly non-intellectual, and he will appeal as long as there is a toothless and obfuscating Left drowning in long words and sanctimony, which is likely to be a while. I have been put in mind recently of his essay on Rudyard Kipling. Kipling is what would in the modern tumblr-verse be labelled "problematic". An unreconstructed racist, imperialist and advocate of continued white hegemony, he represents most of what I hate about my country's history. Orwell, who as a man who had seen first hand what Empire meant had more reason to hate Kipling than I, nevertheless takes him seriously as a poet. He is quite capable of seeing the guilty pleasure in Kipling's verse, and coins the term "good bad poetry" to explain the way that such poems "are capable of giving true pleasure to people who can see clearly what is wrong with them."
About the horrid views of Kipling Orwell is clear-eyed. "Morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting" as well as a sadist, the man nevertheless is capable of producing lines of poetry we cannot help but enjoy.
"Unless one is merely a snob and a liar it is impossible to say that no one who cares for poetry could get any pleasure out of such lines as:
For the wind is in the palm trees, and the temple bells they say,
‘Come you back, you British soldier, come you back to Mandalay!’"
At least it rhymes
I don't mean to go deeply into Kipling's merits as a poet here. I find him trite myself, whatever Orwell says. But the ability to see what is good in your political opposition is sorely missing from the inheritors of Orwell. The problem of "problematic", a catch-all word that has come to mean nothing but a surrender to intellectual laziness among certain segments, is that it places cultural items and figures into a box in which you never again have to think of them. The infamous yourfaveisproblematic.tumblr exemplifies this trend, in which if a celebrity expresses an insensitive opinion (some of which are genuinely awful) they are beyond the pale.
I recognise precisely why web-based activists employ this method. Powerful cultural forces require a strong response. Benedict Cumberbatch complaining about being discriminated against for being posh must be placed straight in the problematic pile precisely because he has so much cultural power already. The ability to fight so actively and strongly against opinions that control the dialogue so often is no doubt intoxicating. The feminist societies of today's universities, for example, have an understandable defensiveness about their hard-won gains, so the urge to lash out against the forces of privilege is strong. Yet it leads all too often to the logical extreme of the kind Laci Green had to deal with.
My travels in America have made me certain that if there is a threat to civil society in the coming decades, it is not either the clamping down on freedom of speech that Mr O'Neill seems to think the PC brigade wants, nor its repressive state-sanctioned counterpart, nor even the ever present threats of racism, sexism, homophobia and the supremacy of the wealthy. Rather, it is that as people increasingly choose who they speak to, the websites they visit, the channels they watch, the reality they live in, the willingness to regard opposition as even remotely legitimate decreases. Anti-abortion activists are threatening to the mental health of women and cannot be heard. The Democratic Party are a fifth column and must be fought with eradicationist tactics lest the USA be destroyed. and so on.
There is a certain type of fortitude required to be young today that is too easily sneered at. Being endlessly surrounded by a sensory bombardment of that which can stress you out with very few quiet places to which you can retreat has doubtless contributed to a mental health timebomb. I don't doubt that the reason trigger warnings have become ubiquitous is because there are a whole bunch of people out there who are very easily triggered. It takes bravery to live in a society constantly telling you are worthless, to deal with the endless wearing away of your psyche that are widespread ignorance and prejudice and idiocy. Conservatives have sneered at this as mere cowardice, oversensitivity, and they are wrong about that. But neither should we be happy to retreat to our safe spaces, because we have to live in the nation of our oppressors, too. We must have the fortitude to share it with them, or eventually watch our society crumble.
To love your enemies is hardly going to be welcome advice today in the black communities mourning the Ferguson outcome this month. But we may not have a choice. In the Twentieth century Auden amended Jesus' commandment to "love one another or die". In the Twenty-First, the necessity of that commandment may be realised. Today's progressive forces are swiping at indistinct midges of oppression far harder to squash than the concrete laws of yesteryear, and the frustration is increasingly hard to communicate to the communities that have long benefited from those oppressions.
Yet they will need to sit on that frustration and see good in their opponents and their cultural products not because of the "politics of respectability" but because the alternative is a paralysing cold civil war from which western society may find it hard to escape. A start to this process would be the embrace of the "good bad" over the flinch of "problematic" - to accept that these cultural items exist and have merits as well as demerits. This means not being afraid of them, above all. It means being brave.
George Orwell once said that when reading any writer, you had an impression of a face somewhere behind the page. For Orwell himself the face I see is that of a man sitting across a table from a number of horrors themselves given face. There sits Kipling, the envoy of Empire and its attendant miseries. Over there sits Adolf Hitler and Reinhard Heydrich and behind them the brownshirted lackeys of fascism. At other seats still sit a gimlet-eyed Lenin and Felix Dzerzhinsky and Joseph Stalin, crowded behind by an indistinct crowd of the useful leftwing idiots murmuring affirmative nothings while not noticing they are ankle deep in blood. And Orwell sits there, smiles grimly, and says what he thinks of them to all of their faces, each in turn. And he treats them as humans.
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