And now Norm emails to point out an article of his on this very subject. Very apropos, and full of good points. I want to quote and quote…

Notwithstanding any of this, however, it remains true that from the outset socialism was utopian. It was a distant land, another moral universe. It was radically other vis-a-vis the order of things it aspired to replace. And that is what it still is. A society beyond exploitation is in the realm of the ideal.

And the thing is…well, my colleague will doubtless disagree, but I can’t help thinking that those distant lands we imagine, those other moral universes – those thought experiments and counterfactuals and what ifs – are good for us, … Read the rest

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. … Read the rest

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 … Read the rest

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 … Read the rest