Blindness
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.
OB,
I’m a mediocre thinker at best, but that doesn’t stop me from recognizing excellence in others. And I think your post was excellent. You placed your finger exactly on the weak spot of how politicians commit and then refuse to turn back. “I have no reverse gear” comes to mind. Rule 1 : If you’re in a hole, stop digging.
Aw, shucks, Fryslan.
And yet commitment certainly has its uses. And yet it can be so judgment-distorting. Etc.
But it may be that there is something about the idea of utopia, as opposed to simply ‘something better’ or even radical change, that does have a Lubyankawards tendency. Utopia may be too perfectionist, too millenarian, too as they say (well one of them does anyway) eschatalogical. I don’t take Allende or the Sandinistas to have been really utopian, necessarily. But you’re right about the superpower stepping on them anyway, of course.
“and can’t you read the compulsion in the prose?”
Yes, as a matter of fact, I can, which is why I stopped reading them some months ago. Well that and the long-windedness and the fact that they kept slagging me off and accusing me of lying because I had a different opinion from theirs about the hijab. Their prose is indeed highly compulsive or coercive: agree with them or be accused of prevarication.
I think you’re right Ophelia.
The snag with utopias is that they are so obviously a wonderful end that any means can be justified in order to reach them.
PM,I do sympathise with your comments regarding Aaranovitch, Cohen, Hitchens etc, although I do feel that for a lot of people – including myself – the US/UK invasion of Afghanistan then Iraq were complex issues with a lot of variables, and the last thing we needed was our liberal heartstrings tugged by apologists for tyranny such as bastards like George “the worst day of my life was when the Berlin wall fell” Galloway. The afforementioned writers were frequently having a pop at those high profile stalinist/sophists too, which seemed worthwhile at the time.
Nick S, I totally agree that it was a complex issue – which is why it so annoys me when, after finally choosing a position on this horribly knife-edged decision with massive ramifications – you get gimps like Cohen and Aaranovitch telling you that you are actually some kind of stalinist.
Kind of like if I called OB a Nazi for favouring the ‘band the headscarf in French schools’ position and she called me a popular-frontish Stalinist.
As for, Galloway, yeah, the man is an idiot and an embarresment to the left. Although he was hounded out of the party for doing not-very-much.
“These people have a fine attitude to rationality, materialism, and the fight against relativism.”
They do indeed. Funny you should mention them – I just posted an interview by Marayam Namazie, who is of their number, yesterday. I hadn’t heard of them before. There will be more Namazie articles posted soon.
I was intrigued by the comments on motivation and committment and how they are developed.
For anyone looking for a discussion of these things, I recommend Robert Cialdini’s “Influence: Science and Practice”. If you haven’t read it, and you are interested in belief, committment, irrationality, anti-quackery and so on, DO NOT HESITATE just go to your library (or bookshop) and get it. For me it was full of AHA! moments. For the anti-religious there is a sweet analysis of a flying-saucer cult when the saucers fail to show up, that shrieks ‘that’s Pentecost!’. More chillingly, it has useful models for why people die in circumstances where they should not, such as school massacres.
To the point of belief and committment to causes, the point is that people value their associations by the cost of having them. Crazy initiations, followed by high prices in volunteer labour reward and strengthen activist manias in their cultish victims.
Because it’s harder and harder to take that something was a sham, the more it cost, right?
Well, it certainly works for the Hells Angels. And the bullies who run the Russian army. A diluted version of it is wheeled out every time British senior doctors oppose ceilings on working time for junior doctors.
However, I think that this is not the only motor for people relishing the occupation of otherwise irrational positions (SWP glory in defending the MAB, RP Dutt glories in defending Stalin, SIAOW glory in defending censorship, etc). Other factors are in play here:
1) To improve the world requires hard thinking and tough choices
2) We are very good at hard thinking and tough choices
3) Therefore we are very good at improving the world
4) The tougher the choices we make, the better we therefore are at improving the world.
It works for the SWP, and for SIAOW (AKA MIAW – ‘Marxism Inflicted by American Warplanes’); but it is equally apparent in the political trajectory of A Blair Esq. And that of Clare Short, whose willingness to sell everything that isn’t nailed down whilst still convincing herself she was a leftist is wondrous to behold.
Aaronovitch and Cohen fit, but it doesn’t work quite so well for Freedland and Hari, who appear to be having second thoughts. Maybe it’s a Young Communist thing – which still doesn’t explain Blair, though it does Mandelson.
Bit harsh on Claire Short; if you momentarily ignore the (admittedley enormous) issue of her resignation, what she got going in terms of restructuring foreign aid and development after 1997 was – and remains – pretty impressive, even when stacked up against the rest of the EU.
Hmm . . . is this the time or the place for my ‘why IMF structural adjustment programmes and all who impose them are evil’ rant?
Give me the Tories in DFID any day. Less cash, and most of in to the wrong place, but fewer nasty strings.
Short’s resignation was actually pretty rational, once you assume that Blair promised her prewar that, though the war itself wouldn’t be fought by the UN, they’d be in charge of the reconstruction. The manner of her resignation, and her subsequent behaviour, are less internally consistent.