How a so-called liberal reevaluated his beliefs as a result of 911:
Milne’s savaging of American self-absorption was the most conspicuous example of an attitude that could be heard in plenty of sophisticated conversations, or should I say conversations between sophisticated people, and read in a number of left or liberal publications.
What all these reactions had in common, I realised, was not complexity but simplicity. For all of them this was an issue of the powerless striking back at the powerful, the oppressed against the oppressor, the rebels against the imperialists. It was Han Solo and Luke Skywalker taking on the Death Star. There was no serious attempt to examine what kind of power the powerless wanted to assume, or over whom they wanted to exercise it, and no one thought to ask by what authority these suicidal killers had been designated the voice of the oppressed. It was enough that Palestinians had danced in the West Bank. The scale of the suffering, the innocence of the victims and the aims of the perpetrators barely seemed to register in many of the comments. Was this a sign of shock or complacency? Or was it something else, a kind of atrophying of moral faculties, brought on by prolonged use of fixed ideas, that prevented the sufferer from recognising a new paradigm when it arrived, no matter how spectacular its announcement?
In the end I reached the conclusion that 11 September had already brutally confirmed: there were other forces, far more malign than America, that lay in wait in the world. But having faced up to the basic issue of comparative international threats, could I stop the political reassessment there? If I had been wrong about the relative danger of America, could I be wrong about all the other things I previously held to be true? I tried hard to suppress this thought, to ring-fence the global situation, grant it exceptional status and keep it in a separate part of my mind. I had too much vested in my image of myself as a ‘liberal’. I had bought into the idea, for instance, that all social ills stemmed from inequality and racism. I knew that crime was solely a function of poverty. That to be British was cause for shame, never pride. And to be white was to bear an unshakable burden of guilt. I held the view, or at least was unprepared to challenge it, that it was wrong to single out any culture for censure, except, of course, Western culture, which should be admonished at every opportunity. I was confident, too, that Israel was the source of most of the troubles in the Middle East. These were non-negotiables for any right-thinking decent person. I couldn’t question these received wisdoms without questioning my own identity. And I had grown too comfortable with seeing myself as one of the good guys, the well-meaning people, to want to do anything that upset that image. I viewed myself as understanding, and to maintain that self-perception it was imperative that I didn’t try to understand myself.
But it’s not just about foreign policy:
The scene outside the off-licence shocked and depressed me. Violence happens in all big cities and it is always shocking and depressing to witness. Or at least it should be. What made me feel particularly low, however, was the effortlessness and extremity of the attack, the apparent absence of compunction, the offenders’ lack of fear of censure, their obliviousness to social constraint and the compliance, almost conspiracy, of the silent onlookers. Not only was it a savage assault on a young girl but on civic decency as well. Yet the more I thought about it – and I thought about it a lot – the more I realised that there wasn’t an ‘appropriate’ response to what had happened. There wasn’t a liberal vocabulary with which to describe the situation. Indeed, even a phrase like ‘civic decency’ sounded fuddy-duddy, uptight, somehow right-wing. There was a liberal way of talking about the culprits. It involved referring to their poor education and difficult home lives and the poverty they suffered. To have done so would have meant ignoring the expensive clothes and mobile phones that all of them had, or it would have been necessary to explain that these were signs of superficial wealth, the desperate avarice of the marginalised and underprivileged in a nakedly materialist world. But I had no appetite for that brand of reasoning. It blamed nebulous society and excused not just the individuals but also the community of which they were a part. Thus the problem was not local, communal, immediate, it was national, multifaceted, the result of innumerable political mistakes made by the powers that be. In other words, it was inevitable and effectively incurable. We were all powerless: the girl, the onlookers and the culprits who had been led by great social forces beyond their control to stick a broken bottle in a young girl’s face.
I had trouble figuring out what to excerpt. Read the whole thing. It looks to be a good book.