News from the New Party

The reactionary left

Free speech and a free press, the dignity of individual and family, liberty of religious conscience, parliamentary democracy, human rights balanced by duties: "If these are rightwing values," says Standpoint's editor, Daniel Johnson, "I plead guilty."

...One may also point out that nearly all the values Johnson holds dear were won by liberals and leftwingers, and opposed through the centuries by the right. But there's something far more insidious about the aims of Standpoint, and thus of at least a section of the newly-confident right. Johnson speaks up for the "toleration of minorities" - "but not at the price of moral relativism". In this last line, although veiled in terms that reference the British debate about multiculturalism, it becomes clear that these new warriors for western civilisation believe in the maxim that the best form of defence is offence. These principles are not to be fought for only in the realms where their seeds spent many hundreds of years growing into the mighty oaks they are today. They are the bedrock of a universalist credo that Standpoint believes all should profess. And that "all" contains multitudes. Never mind from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic: this means from Jakarta to Rio de Janeiro, Benghazi to Beijing, Mombasa to Moscow. West is best, and any countries, creeds or cultures that beg to differ are wrong.

This is where the left - or certainly liberals - should fight back and speak the unspeakable: defend that moral relativism that has become a catch-all term of abuse for a position whose very label seemingly renders it indefensible. Philosophers may differ as to the precise definition of the term. We know that in this context it is used - very successfully - to denigrate those who question the notion that there is one morality that fits all; it's used to dismiss those whose tolerance extends to accepting that different societies with other traditions may have arrived at social contracts in which the rights of the individual are at vastly varying balances with those of the state or religion compared to the balances to which we are accustomed...

...The genocide in Rwanda and the recent uprest in Kenya should give the lie to the idea that nations of citizens have replaced tribal loyalties that do not recognise the conveniently straight lines on maps in Africa.  There are wells, other than those of Athenian democracy and the Enlightenment, that the rest of the world continues to draw on: especially those of race, religion and tribe...

So here are two fronts for the left, or for those on the left who still have the stomach for a fight: reclaiming the great achievements of - or at least the striving towards the ideals of - liberty, fraternity and equality, for progressives; and reminding ourselves that true tolerance means accepting that others have the right to choose their own paths and values. If that means rejecting the civilisation that the west has won, so be it. The standpoint of others is not the same as that of our own.

Interpretative charity requires us to recognize that Byrnes is not commending genocide; he's merely pointing to it as evidence of the continuing strength of tribal loyalties. Genocide is not, in any case, something that Europeans are in a position to be complacent about; tribal loyalties are not its unique source. In recent memory collections of Europeans showed themselves remarkably adept at it, for their part appealing to the notion of race. The point, however, is that such allegiances when they are not set alongside and restrained by universalist codes of rights, human rights that secure each person his life, her freedom, their protection against violation by others, can turn, precisely, murderous or, short of that, oppressive. Yet Byrnes is entirely happy to validate them - 'race, religion and tribe' - as alternative sources of moral inspiration to our universalist values, as if, ungoverned by any broader code, 'race, religion and tribe' were just the proverbial bowl of cherries.

The topic is not really funny, of course; it's serious. But what is funny is a person of the left objecting, as Byrnes does, to the cheek of people of the right claiming to speak for liberal values, and then mounting as a defence of the left this abject parallelism of choice: for us, liberty, fraternity and equality; for others, race, religion and tribe - 'their own paths and values', no less. And if these paths and values, let us just say, demean other people, then what? It's hilarious, Sholto. You and others like you are why - or at any rate one reason why - the left is regarded by some as not necessarily being the stoutest friend of the values you profess to believe in.