One of the good things about blogging is that you don’t have to cover everything the way a newspaper does. Indeed sometimes someone else does it so much better than you ever could that any attempt to try yourself would be a total waste of pixels. This is such a time. David, my hat is doffed to you for this brilliant skewering.
Update: David Thompson might have done the skewering but Longrider has stuck the kebab in the pitta bread and added sauce.
I’m very glad to see Theo Hobson is not regarded as an übertwat just round my end.
Update II: In for a penny in for a pound… I just can’t resist. If David Thompson and Longrider made the kebab I’m going to scarf it and puke it into the gutter. emphasis mine
A basic British political division is not between left and right, or liberal and conservative, but between Schlegel and Wilcox. What separates the two families of EM Forster’s novel Howards End is that the Schlegels worry about how to make the world fairer, with occasionally embarrassing consequences, while the Wilcoxes worry about their stocks and shares. In other words, the Schlegels are afflicted by the complaint we sneeringly call liberal guilt.
Oh… Mr Hobson has read books. Like proper books. Literature even. Tighten the G-web - this is gonna be one hell of a ride…
Sneer ye not. Liberal guilt is nothing to be ashamed of. It’s really just the political expression of that rather old-fashioned thing, conscience.
Fuck ye off! Conscience is about things you did but shouldn’t have done and not about what you are. I feel terribly sorry for the flooded out people of Pakistan but I don’t feel guilty about it. I can hand on heart state I didn’t put on my “hooded-claw” costume and open some sluice gates over there a few weeks ago whilst laughing maniacally and twirling a moustache. I am sure I have an alibi to prove that. I was probably in Stockport at the time which is punishment enough.
To “suffer” from liberal guilt means that you are somewhat uneasy about all sorts of awkward things that it is tempting to harden your heart against, like global injustice, global warming, racism. It means that you are troubled by the stubborn persistence of our class system, though you personally have done fine by it.
That is verging on the unfiskable. But the bit I bolded does require some comment because it is unbelievably patronising. It is essentially saying folks like Mr Hobson shall weep and wail so the lower orders (bless ‘em) don’t have to. Moreover the whole paragraph seems to suggest that feeling “uneasy” about things is a positive. No, Hobson, you twat! If you really cared you’d be digging wells in Africa and not writing drivel for the Guardian to validate other Islingtonites feeling bad about having done much better in the lottery of life than the average person on this planet. This is self-indulgent wank of the highest order. “Guilt”? - Hobson ought to be ashamed for even typing this tripe.
It means you sometimes worry that you might be prejudiced against all sorts of people.
“All sorts of people”? Ye Gods almighty! And that “might”… I mean if you don’t know that already… I suppose potentially I could be some form of “stealth racist” for example but seeing as I’ve got to 36 without once putting a pillow case on my head, calling myself an Ineffable Cyclops and planting a burning cross in Mr Patel’s front garden would seem to suggest otherwise.
It means that your vague patriotism is laced with uncertainty about whether our ancient constitution is able to be truly inclusive. It means, for goodness sake, that you fail to be completely fatly smugly relaxed about this problematic world we inhabit. Is that really so shameful and wet, so laughably mentally effeminate?
Yes.
If this little parade of privileged anxiety fills you with derision, then you are a Tory.
Now that really is unfiskable.
Rejection of liberal guilt is the very cornerstone of the Tory soul, the unofficial definition of Tory. “Look how relaxed I am about my place at the feast,” says the Tory. “Regard my sense of entitlement. Inequality and privilege are nothing to be ashamed of; they are part of life, and life is good, n’est-ce pas? So please: no more strident student-union hectoring stuff about how evil the ’system’ is.” In other words, Toryism is a posture of world affirmation. It works by rubbishing reformist angst, painting it as neurotic hypocrisy. The phrase liberal guilt is obviously a Tory coinage. It ought to be called “the necessary self-accusing anxiety accompanying liberal idealism”. Or something.
“Or something” - quite. I’d call it being a profound twat but that’s just me. Note what Hobson is getting at here. He’s actually saying that the problem isn’t that some people are better off than others but that some of them don’t feel bad about it. On a global scale Hobson is clearly doing better than the average bear but that’s OK because he feels bad about it in a suitably non-specific way. That “feeling bad” doesn’t help one iota a shoeless Tanzanian peasant to send her kids to school doesn’t enter into Mr Hobson’s mind. It is enough that he feels bad. Knock yourself out Theo because neither me nor Mrs Ngaiza care! Oh, and the use of French there is pure sixth form debating society (Oh, how clever he got a GCSE in the language!). Hang you head in shame Hobson! You twat.
This is the thing that unites every sort of Tory, from Norman Tebbit to Nick Boles. They all find liberal guilt risible and dangerous. Its risibility is highlighted by fat jocular types like Boris Johnson. Its peril is highlighted by wide-eyed humourless skinny types like Thatcher. Beware the “socialist” puritans, they say, who want the world to be radically different, who dream dreams and scheme schemes, and worry that someone somewhere is having fun. Don’t be anxious about your status as a comfy bourgeoisie, but blumming well rejoice in it, you chump!
Yet, I’m a classical liberal minarchist or a pretty mainstream libertarian or basically just “Nick”. I’m not a Tory. I know Tories and quite frankly the description doesn’t fit but then Mr Hobson is by now so far off the idiocy scale that he’s reminding me of the demented Greens who hold funerals for trees. last week I butchered an ash tree and the portrait of me in the attic has not got worse looking as a result.
On Any Questions recently, someone asked the panellists whether they intended to cut down on their meat consumption, for environmental reasons. There were a couple of hesitant, nondescript answers and then Ken Clarke calmly guffawed at the whole idea. Like I’m going to cut down on my merry feasting, he basically said. And the audience found his cavalier confidence sort of reassuring, and laughed. Here, it struck me, is the very nub of the Tory soul: it enjoys showing its lack of angst. And such confidence impresses people. Let us be ruled by these Nietzschean strong souls, we cravenly feel, who are too busy living well to entertain cowardly moral scruples.
What utterly profound bollocks. I’m supposed to feel guilty for having a steak? For the sake of the planet? For the sake of the cow that copped an unfortunate one maybe but the planet? And just like the EM Forster reference the reference to Nietzsche is just saying, “I’m Theo and I’ve read books you know so listen to me!” Well, so have I. I have read the moustachioed Kraut though I haven’t read Forster because that’s all just people going in and out of rooms and dialogue like, “I think you ought to go, Sebastian”. “Yes, I think I ought to”.
There is really no excuse for failing to feel liberal guilt about global warming. No excuse. It is a fact that our affluent lifestyles are endangering the planet, to some maddeningly unknown degree. What is wrong with someone who is not made uneasy by this? What is wrong with someone who affects (or, worse, genuinely feels) indifference to this fact, and sneers at the muddled, hesitant, hypocritical responses of the conscience-pricked rest of us?
“Maddeningly unknown degree” - You said it pal. You said it. And quite frankly I think “muddled, hesitant, hypocritical responses” to anything were designed to be sneered at. I mean do they have any other purpose? I mean apart form allowing twats like Hobson to feel good about themselves because they feel bad about themselves.
Of course we don’t know if cutting down on meat will really help things, and make future flooding of distant lands less likely. But those farting cows are a problem, and maybe one should sponsor slightly fewer of them. To be a bit anxious about this is just to acknowledge the strange moral universe we seemingly inhabit.
I am savouring that. That is 40 year old single malt lunacy. Point by point. Farting cows are primarily a problem if you are in the shed with them at milking times. Next! “Sponsor them”? I dunno about Theo but I don’t sponsor cows. I eat them. The final line is stunning. “We seemingly inhabit”. Seemingly? What has Theo been shoving up his nostrils and where can I get it? Perhaps not though, because I for one am glad I don’t “seemingly” inhabit the same “moral universe” as this gold-plated twatter.
Similarly, there is no excuse for failing to feel liberal guilt about race and class. The fact is that it is excessively hard for the vast majority of people from ethnic minorities, and from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, to attain the cushy lifestyle that one was born into and takes for granted.
Oh, behave! You might take it “for granted” Theo. You might. And what is this hog-wash about ethnic minorities? The last time I saw a doctor he was “ethnic minority”. He is undoubtedly severely oppressed by the “white man” who pays him over a hundred thousand a year.
One can either react to this fact by pretending that one’s good fortune is one’s natural right, and by boasting that one has “worked hard” for it (well done, for turning up to banker school, or to that internship your uncle wangled); or one can react with humble awareness that our social world is still packed with injustice – an awareness known as liberal guilt.
Drivel.
Liberal guilt is one of the key factors in the ebb and flow of British politics. New Labour was propelled by a wave of liberal guilt. As it ran aground, fat jocular Toryism was limbering up in the wings, and learning to mask its braying tones with a new liberal urbanity. It found a new figurehead (Boris), and a soberer practitioner, and it rides high.
You said it Theo. I don’t believe it. I think New Labour was propelled primarily by appalling avarice for power at any cost (billed to John Q Taxpayer). Blair, Brown and Mandelson are quite frankly obsessed with power. “Liberal guilt” and “fat jocular Tories”. Yeah, right. And how guilty does Blair appear having personally made a fucking packet out of it all?
In Howards End, Margaret Schlegel eventually forms a surprising coalition with Mr Wilcox. It won’t last; it can’t. You’re either a Schlegel or a Wilcox. And I assure you that Schlegelism will bounce back.
Whatever!
I’m sorry David and Longrider. I just had to. I couldn’t help myself.
