Causes of diversion

It's funny how one person's explanatory resource is another person's means of evading the issue. Think of causes. I don't mean causes in the sense of issues that move you to action, for which you march, organize, sign petitions or make a donation. I mean causes in the sense of antecedent facts having effects or consequences. As we all know, these can be used to illuminate, to show why things happen. But they're also often a way of distracting attention from what others are wanting to focus upon. An example I won't need to remind anyone of is provided by the alleged 'root causes' of some people committing mass murder upon other people when the former people are being 'understood' by sophisticated members of the metropolitan intelligentsia, as a way of avoiding having to be too vulgarly condemnatory. But a different kind of diversionary use of causes occurs when someone explains away an argument by invoking its supposed social and psychological roots in order not to have to meet it.

Cue Ms Decca Aitkenhead. She's reviewing The Fall-Out by Andrew Anthony, whom she characterizes as one of a bunch of former leftists taking flight to the right. She speculates that perhaps the right was always their 'real political home', and the war on terror just gave them the opportunity to see that and realign. She wonders if their stance might...

... have something to do with a midlife panic over masculinity and mortality? These are, after all, men of a certain age, and they did seem to find Bush's shock and awe disproportionately exciting.

I'll pass over the psychologizing of a political difference for the manifest vacuity it is - as if Aitkenhead and her friends could have some means of knowing the real political personalities of the people she's talking about prior to and independently of what she takes to have been their - our - conversion. In response to the attempted 'gendering' of it, however, I offer two words: Pamela Bone - prominent Australian journalist of the left whose views on the various issues involved, while doubtless not identical to those of Anthony or the other British journalists Aitkenhead has in mind, have been rather more in their ballpark than in Aitkenhead's or that of the left-liberal virtue-consensus to which she belongs. Pamela Bone, as you will have been led by her name to expect, is a woman. Let her stand here for all the other women of the liberal-left whose views are closer to Andy Anthony's than they are to the aforesaid virtue-consensus.

Aitkenhead grants The Fall-Out a few consolation points, but describes it otherwise as...

... a predictable inventory of grievances. The anti-war movement was led by some pretty nasty totalitarian lefties, don't you know. The veil - why do we tolerate it when we're meant to stand for sexual equality? Abu Ghraib was pretty bad, yeah - but what about Saddam's torture chambers?

There's the side-step: 'predictable inventory' and of 'grievances', nothing more. Nothing in the way of arguments needing to be met, arguments about weaknesses in the anti-war movement or the compromising of egalitarian values, or the way indeed that Saddam's torture chambers and all the rest of the criminality he was responsible for have not been allowed to carry the weight that for many of us they did carry. They have not been allowed to by means of the very act of labelling of left support for the Iraq war as a departure to the right that Aitkenhead repeats in this review of hers, sealing it with the flip and repulsive cynicism of the passage quoted above. It's yet one more case of the 'Who, me? Who, us? What, the left?' sarabande.