Some British writers and journalists of the “Left” have launched what is called The Euston Manifesto: For a Renewal of Progressive Politics. Much of its studied vagueness sweeps difficulty under the carpet of sonorous abstraction:

We stand for global economic development-as-freedom and against structural economic oppression and environmental degradation.

To be unambiguously “for” development and “against” environmental degradation is, presumably, to be aware of a widely available secret new source of energy that does not worsen global warming. Perhaps they’ll let us know what it is?

In other places there are pleasant allusions to key buzzphrases of neoconservative speechmaking:

we have also to fight against powerful forces of totalitarian-style tyranny that are on the march again.

Early readers of this blog will remember fondly the thrilling rhetorical applications of “on the march” when applied to freedom; it is just as impressive when applied to tyranny, “totalitarian-style” or not. It is almost superfluous to point out that Saddam Hussein was not marching anywhere in 2003 except into a hole in the ground.

Where the manifesto gets really knotty, however, is on the matter of “our” and “their” violence. What happened on September 11, 2001, we learn, was:

an act of mass murder, motivated by odious fundamentalist beliefs and redeemed by nothing whatsoever. No evasive formula can hide that.

The 9/11 attacks were indeed an act of mass murder. It is refreshing to know that the authors are hostile to evasive formulas. But what’s this?

The violation of basic human rights standards at Abu Ghraib, at Guantanamo, and by the practice of ?rendition?, must be roundly condemned for what it is: a departure from universal principles, for the establishment of which the democratic countries themselves, and in particular the United States of America, bear the greater part of the historical credit.

Why so coy? 9/11 was an act of mass murder, but the depredations of the US torture regime are, by contrast, merely “a departure from universal principles”, and please remember that the US invented those principles, so you can’t be too hard on them for an occasional “departure” since otherwise they would never have existed at all. (Please do not mention France.)

The flight into abstract language here is telling. Perhaps it even strikes you as an “evasive formula”. Why not call a spade a spade? If we congratulate ourselves on noticing that the 9/11 hijackers were mass murderers, why can’t we bear to say that the US has been systematically torturing people, in many cases to death? Why not flatly reject the linguistic massaging of torture into a mere “departure”? Try not to laugh, but to do so would apparently constitute a “double standard” . . .

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Note: this is a review of four books, originally commissioned by the Guardian. Some of it may be found relevant to a current debate about the Enlightenment and “universalism”, among other things.

• Decadence: The Passing of Personal Virtue and Its Replacement by Political and Psychological Slogans, ed Digby Anderson
(Social Affairs Unit)
• Politics of Fear: Beyond Left and Right, by Frank Furedi (Continuum)
• Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas, by Perry Anderson (Verso)
• Metapolitics, by Alain Badiou (Verso)

Take your seats, ladies and gentlemen, for a clash of incompatible fantasies. According to the conservative essayists in Decadence, a misty golden age of “genuine virtue” has passed, to be replaced by bogus slogans and psychobabble. This is all the fault of the Enlightenment. But here comes Frank Furedi in Politics of Fear, arguing that conservatives no longer appeal to tradition, and that the problem is that we have turned our back on the Enlightenment. Evidently, both these views cannot be right. In Decadence, Nietzsche is the drooling bogeyman, denounced as a cheerleader for the Enlightenment and the subsequent plague of leftism; and yet Frank Furedi calls Nietzsche “the philosopher of the right at the turn of the twentieth century”. Whom shall we believe? It is a choice between cartoons.

Cartoonishness is often, indeed, the result of appeals to concepts of “left” and “right” in politics, which invite the drawing lurid stereotypes of opposing points of view. A collection of essays about political philosophers and historians by Perry Anderson (let us call him Perry A., to distinguish him from Decadence’s Digby A.) appeals explicitly in its title to this topographical metaphor of a “spectrum” of ideas; and it travels, as it were, from Hayek over to Hobsbawm. But the problem in general with such talk is that each is free to draw his own personal spectrum, clustering things he dislikes at opposing extremes and thus making himself look reasonable in the middle. A messy graph of incompatible spectra arises.

Frank Furedi knows this - after all, his title promises to take us “Beyond Left and Right” - and yet he cannot help but continue to use the labels. At one point, for example, he calls Perry A. “one of Britain’s leading leftist intellectuals”. Well, Perry A. edits the New Left Review, and, sniping from this position, he is able in Spectrum to lump together the disparate thinkers Leo Strauss, Friedrich Hayek and Michael Oakeshott under the label “radical right”, which rather leaves one at a loss as how to describe neo-Nazis. Yet Perry A. will also shift the goalposts when it suits him, using an appeal to some vague past of “coherent ethical vision” - an appeal that would warm the heart of Digby A. - as a stick with which to beat John Rawls, the liberal writer of A Theory of Justice, here described as occupying the “centre”, and laboriously traduced and patronised by the author. “Leading leftist” Perry A., moreover, describes the London Review of Books (in a generally admiring article) as “politically correct to a fault”, while sighing relievedly that at least it has never hosted any “feminist insistence”. Is that how “leading leftists” talk these days? “I detest pubs,” Perry A. confesses at another point. No doubt. Pubs are notoriously hotbeds of “feminist insistence” . . .

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Oliver Kamm, a British writer and blogger, criticizes with his usual style and vigour an academic, Professor Ron Greaves, who has called the July 2005 London bombings an act of “demonstration” instead of “terrorism”. Kamm is right to find this absurd. However, his argument does not stop there. He writes:

Moral clarity on terrorism requires distinguishing the force used by the democratic state from the violence of private armies. [...] It is true [...] that the word terrorism is used politically in order to denote illegitimacy of certain types of violence. And there’s much to be said for that, as there is for referring (as I have done in this post) to the “force” exercised by the security services of a democratic state as against the “violence” of those arraigned against democratic authority. To do this is [...] to use language discriminately where moral discrimination is essential. The democratic state uses violence, and terrorists use violence; but these acts are not alike.

They’re not alike, we are to understand, because state violence is democratically legitimized. Well, let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that tens of thousands of civilians were to be killed by a country whose leader became President after the Supreme Court instructed a state to stop counting votes. Would that bless anything he chose to do with the nimbus of democracy?

That can’t be it. Let us imagine what might better justify the qualitative distinction between types of violence. There must at base be an implied appeal to accident. Acts of terrorism such as the atrocity committed by the July 2005 London bombers deliberately kill civilians. State acts of “force”, in Kamm’s formulation, may cause the killing of civilians as, in the disgusting Unspeak has it, “collateral damage”: an unfortunate side-effect of the effort to kill the enemy. In each case, the civilians are just as dead. But we didn’t really mean to kill the second lot, so it’s not so bad.

Those who wish to argue that state violence is always especially legitimate are obliged to explain exactly how much of a moral fig-leaf this appeal to accident provides. They will need to respond to the idea that to deliberately commit an act with foreseeable consequences is to intend those very consequences, among any others that might also be under consideration. The point was made powerfully by an Israeli air-force captain, among one of 30 who refused to continue bombing Palestinian cities in 2003, after the dropping of a one-tonne bomb on the home of Hamas leader Salah Shehade had killed him along with 14 members of his family, mostly children. Captain Assaf L said (cited in Unspeak, page 132):

You don’t have to be a genius to know that the destruction from a one-tonne bomb is massive, so someone up there made a decision to drop it knowing it would destroy buildings. Someone took the decision to kill innocent people. This is us being terrorists.

For Kamm, however, any such conclusion must be forbidden by “moral clarity”. It is an interesting rhetorical paradox that the phrase “moral clarity” usually signals the introduction of a double standard, an attempt to split morality into a twin-track system whereby, for instance, “they” are evil, and “we” just make mistakes. In this sense, “moral clarity” is really moral relativism: if you criticize us, we will just point over there and remind you of how bad they are . . .

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