Sholto Byrnes is put out that the new magazine Standpoint is claiming to defend the values of Western civilization from the right. He is put out by this claim because, he says, 'nearly all the values Johnson [Daniel of that ilk, Standpoint's editor] holds dear were won by liberals and leftwingers'. So Byrnes is going to stand up for the left. The way in which he proceeds to do this is funny.
Byrnes's defence of the left insists on going by way of the defence of moral relativism - such that although universalist values are fine for us, based as they are in our beliefs and our history, to imagine that their reach could be any more extensive is to show the condescension of empire, a lack of tolerance for different cultural ways. Surely, he remarks, 'the genocide in Rwanda and the recent u[n]rest in Kenya... give the lie to the idea that nations of citizens have replaced tribal loyalties'!
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.