No enemies on the Left

Pathologies of information lead to pathologies of judgement.

Many years ago I read an article—I believe in Granta magazine, though I no longer remember the title or the author—which made the point that many folk on the Western radical Left were outraged that Mao would meet “that mass murderer” Richard Nixon.

President Richard Nixon Shaking Hands with Chairman Mao Tse-tung, 2/21/1972, Wikimedia Commons.

This comment stuck in my mind because it revealed such a bizarre, even diseased, moral perspective. Nixon was fighting a war he had not started and sought to extract the US from. (Winners of that War were later to drive their Chinese minority and others into the sea and commit one of history’s most horrifying megacides.)

Mao was one of the great mass murderers in history via the Great Leap Forward that had already happened, added to by the Cultural Revolution, which was still underway. Only Stalin, Hitler and Genghis Khan were in his league as mass murderers. The notion that Mao was in any way morally superior to Nixon was ridiculous: indeed, deeply pathologically so.

Nor is it the only manifestation a deeply disturbing moral perspective. All those who look at the history of revolutionary Marxism—the mass murders, the cruelty, the brutality, the mass starvations, the tyrannising—and go “yes, but …” are very much in the same moral ballpark.

There is no yes, but. There is only revolutionary Marxism revealing its nature again and again. Especially as the more committed leaders are to the prosecution of the ideology as a path of action, the more complete the tyrannising, the more extensive the mass murdering.

Deeply interwoven with this is the notion of “the Left” or “Left” as not merely a descriptive term about certain sorts of (political) claims about humans and society but as a positive moral category.

Yet “the Left” includes Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Mengistu … With the exception of Hitler, all the great (megacidal) mass murdering tyrants of the C20th are of “the Left”. Hence, to make being “Left” into a positive moral category requires either lying or delusion—pretending these folk are not of the Left, or that they are not mass murdering tyrants—or a profound moral pathology: that the Left is morally superior even including mass murdering tyranny on a grand scale. There is simply otherwise no rescuing the claim of Left as a morally superior category.

So, to claim or act as if being on “the Left” is some moral advantage shows that you are either a liar, or delusional, or evil—or some combination of these things—and you are this about a fundamental part of your own political identity.

Nevertheless, it is easy to observe that so many who see themselves as “Left” very clearly regard being on “the Left” as a positive moral category. How so? It is because turning the imagined future into one’s benchmark of judgement—as so many folk on “the Left” do—entails a pathological relationship with information: one that is self-rewarding.

This bases one’s political identity on pure imaginings, which are not in anyway reality-tested. Indeed, they can be insulated from reality-testing, because any previous failures can be dismissed as not having the right Theory, or perspective, or whatever. Setting what is in your head as one’s benchmark of judgement and moral identity generates an effortless sense of moral superiority—no actual actions or effort are required.

Moreover, the imaginings in your head do not envisage mass murder, or tyranny, or mass impoverishment, so they must be fine. This sort of blocking of the inconvenient is precisely how the (very inconvenient) Leftism of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Mengistu … can be ignored. Or even have their regimes, and their horrors, excused, denied and extolled.

Designating “the Left” as being some moral category also makes it much easier to dismiss anything that folk not of “the Left” bring up. But the people most likely to notice, and criticise, what you are doing wrong are people who disagree with you. The more you create a moral gulf between your political in-group and others, the more treating “Left” as some moral category impedes confronting inconvenient facts and concerns.

The problem does not arise if one merely takes a descriptive view of “Left” and “Right” as being about certain sets of claims about humans and society. But very few people on “the Left” seem to take such a descriptive view.

It is notable, for instance, that a 2012 study found that US liberals were more inaccurate about both fellow liberals and about conservatives than US conservatives were about US liberals and fellow conservatives. This tendency for those whose ideas-in-their-head are more central to their moral and political identity to less accurately moralise political differences than those whose identity is more grounded in connections within, and to, their society has certainly not lessened since.

This taking “Left” to be a morally positive category leads those on the Left to conclude that there cannot be bad people on the Left, for to admit that is to admit that being on the Left is not a morally-positive category; that the Left can produce not only evil, but great evil. This generates, for example, the fable of progressive innocence: to systematically avoid being noticing how, again and again, extreme politics on “the Right” are a reaction to extreme politics on “the Left”; to the social imperialism of “the Left”.

And we are back to lies, delusion or evil as a fundamental part of one’s political identity.

Reference

J. Graham, B.A. Nosek, J. Haidt, ‘The Moral Stereotypes of Liberals and Conservatives: Exaggeration of Differences across the Political Spectrum,’ PLoS ONE (2012) 7(12): e50092. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0050092