Edmund Burke for the left (or, a bargain basement Peter Hitchens knock-off)
My first thought when I saw the title of Alistair’s recent (and, he says, unfinished) series of posts, Explaining my apostasy to the Lefties was, “Oh dear, I hope he’s not just doing Christopher Hitchens with the serial numbers filed off.� Luckily, that worry turned out to be unkind and, more importantly, innacurrate. Christopher Hitchens’s was, once upon a time, a Trotskyist, and his ‘apostasy’ from the left is specifically in relation to that experience. Alistair, as far as I know (and I don’t know him very well, so I may be wrong), has never been a Trotskyist; and so, at least to that extent, his rejection of the left is going to be different.
In other words, then, Dan is (as always) right when he says that we shouldn’t consider the left or the right as sets of policies but as traditions. This disposes, I think, of Alistair’s problem that identifying with the left is adhering to an amorphous set of dogmas, rather than reasoning from “positions which actually mean something.� The intellectual basis of this kind of political commitment is not susceptible to this kind of criticism, because the left isn’t really about theory at all, but about practice, about acting in memory of certain events rather than coming to hold certain positions.
I was going to say that the central left proposition would be of the form, “that is the right way to proceed,� but, although that may be the best our everyday vocabulary of practical reasoning can do, it’s rather misleading. Political commitments aren’t propositions at all, but practical syllogisms, with events as premises and actions as conclusions: The Civil War and the bombing of Iraq entail the beheading of Tony Blair, say, or the Seattle WTO protests and the 2005 G8 meeting entail me sitting in a road somewhere near Stirling in a year’s time, or whatever.
That was a bit of a detour, but the point is that Alistair is right to criticise an identification of the left with the hip or the nice, and may well be right to distance himself from the left (note that whether Alistair is a member of the left or not is not up to him). Actions become actions when they come under a dsecription; this description is not a matter of anyone’s choice, but is a matter of what Quentin Skinner (among others) calls ‘social meaning’. Some actions mean what they do because of the history of the left; but many admirable actions don’t, and if you’re not acting in the tradition of the left, you’re not of the left. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing — post-left positions, such as primitivism and insurrectionism have a lot going for them. Nonetheless, I find that I am acting under left-wing descriptions, and that pleases me.
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