Flights at Dusk

Apposite to all of this, there was an enlightening exchange in the Times Literary Supplement this September, culminating in a letter from one Sebastian Gardner of University College, London. The correspondence was about The Oxford Handbook to Nietzsche, which the TLS had reviewed two weeks earlier.

This reminded me of how I used to say to people that Charles Dickens clearly sympathised with the poor but that that didn’t allow us to infer that he would be on the left if he were to be alive today. The fantasy is philosophically objectionable, of course, but, if we allow it as a harmless methodological experiment, it can only be a stimulus to speculation. Now, however, the same basic impulse (to recruit intellectual reinforcements from history) seems to have hardened into something truly objectionable.

Let me try an illustration. Kierkegaard was a confirmed monarchist and a virulent critic of the emergent democratic movements in Denmark in the middle of the nineteenth century. However, if resuscitated miraculously for a sojourn in our own time, I’m sure he would affirm democracy and be on the centre-left or centre-right.

But I’m equally sure he would continue to insist (as he did in 1847 in ‘Works of Love’) that there could never be a temporal dissimilarity with which Christ would side in partiality. He would continue to see that it was fashionable to emphasise the equality of the lowest but that sometimes the really difficult thing was to remember the equality of the highest.

So Christian love is not impossibly difficult because of our natural hesitation over a smelly vagrant. Our routine partisanships are a good deal more telling. 

Which is quite an appealing definition of nuanced leftism.

And it won’t do if you’re the grand old man of the literary left in Britain either.

Writing in the London Review of Books recently, Alan Bennett was once again airing his familiar disapproval of private schools in the UK. This time, though, he was also talking about ‘that dreary safari from left to right which generally comes with age, a trip writers in particular seem drawn to, Amis, Osborne, Larkin, Iris Murdoch all ending up at the spectrum’s crusty and clichéd end.’  

Bennett was wrong about Philip Larkin too. Larkin was on the right from early on. He was a fanatical despiser of trade unions, sociology, anti-war campaigners, communism, and indeed pretty well all the trappings of the left. He adored Margaret Thatcher at a time when it was de rigueur for intellectuals to hate her.

Prison for strikers
Bring back the cat
Kick out the niggers
How about that?

But that could be healthy enough.

Joseph Conrad once wrote in a letter to a friend that there were ‘no converts to ideas of honour, justice, pity, freedom’ –

So perhaps ‘Fuck Oxfam’ is a (very) clumsy attempt to resist cliché and sanctimony. Larkin is just having a go at the inhospitability of the self-congratulating in-group.

‘We all have coffee together on Thursday mornings at the church. We all care about the poor and the planet and the third world, so we have a lot in common.’

‘In my world, there would be plenty money for welfare and health because none would be wasted on nuclear submarines.’

Which leads me back to Alan Bennett.                      

His piece about private schools also made the claim that he ‘had never been much concerned with politics until the 1980s when they became difficult to avoid.’ Now this was an unusual remark, coming as it was from a man who had written two very clever plays about the Cambridge spies and had said at the time that he found it difficult to get too worked up about their treason because ‘at least they were on the right side.’  

In fact, my impression is that, over the last fifty years, the humanities on this side of the Atlantic have sent young people out into the world with their minds firmly attuned to the idea that a post-modern (or even transcendental) version of collectivism is always the single imperative of a sound human understanding.

It waits to emerge. 

And in the Daily Telegraph a few years ago Dominic Cavendish asked why so few of today’s plays challenged the leftward consensus. By way of reply, Lisa Goldman, artistic director of the Soho Theatre, asked dismissively what a right-wing play would have to offer. ‘Anti- democracy, misogyny, bigotry, nostalgia of all kinds? Let’s get back to a white Britain? That the slave trade had a civilising influence? That women should stay in the home?’ 

How does such a narrow person get to be the artistic director of a theatre in London? You hear the same easy consensus throughout our cultural elites. Indignation sometimes appears to have replaced moral imagination.  

It’s interesting.

What, in the end, does it mean to be on the left, or on the right? And why is it so heart-easing when someone doesn’t want to leap in to proclaim one or the other of the two positions? 

Very crudely, I suppose cultural elites tend towards progressive thought and cooperative economies, whereas the majority of people outside those elites just want to spend their money and not have it taken off them by the state.

The elites insist that an alternative (cooperative) economy is to be hoped for at all costs, while ordinary people are suspicious of cooperation if it’s going to be imposed by egalitarian politicians.

Well, for Michael Oakeshott, planning everything was a dismal way of looking at the world but a plan to have no plans was still a plan. And to be a conservative was ‘to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.’

So an Oakeshottian conservative could quite conceivably support plans to bring about a cooperative economy, or a welfare state.

Not everyone should be assumed to be ‘one of us.’

It’s a big ask.

But, the more we try to think it through, the more we may indeed be searching ‘the interstices of our pessimism’ for new hope.

I must be a progressive at heart after all!

But you wouldn’t know it sometimes.

_________________________________

David Wemyss graduated in law from the University of Aberdeen in 1977 and worked in local government in that city until he retired in 2011 at the age of 56. He continues to live there with his wife and son. Having been published in a number of journals and magazines over the years, his essays are usually drawn from a mix of middlebrow and highbrow literary interests.

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