Inspired by the petty and not so petty cruelties with which the government attacks those economically least able to weather measures of austerity, George Monbiot is looking for ideas that ‘can make hope more powerful than fear’ and inform a new progressive politics. He points to two such ideas, land value taxation and basic income, and you may see for yourself why he rates them as he does. Here I want to note a striking feature of the explanatory framework Monbiot adopts in proposing these two ideas.
They’re needed, according to him, as a follow-up to the ideas of, in turn, communism and ‘freedom from want and fear through the creation of a social security system and a National Health Service’, which in the past acted to mobilize popular hope but have both now run their course, albeit in different ways. And such mobilizing ideas are needed, more generally, (a) because, if the ‘decent majority’ can be governed by a ‘brutal, antisocial minority’, this situation is enabled by the minority’s controlling the story (through wealth-favouring media etc), and (b) because of the long historical legacy of enslavement, bondage, fear of economic power and arbitrary authority. These still influence how ordinary folk think and react. Something is needed to ‘shake people out of this state’.
Now, here’s the extraordinary thing. One of the reasons for the failure of the communist idea, for Monbiot, was ‘the simplistic binary system into which they [Marx and Engels] tried to force society; their brutal dismissal of anyone who did not fit this dialectic’. And yet his own perspective on society and history includes the following thesis:
Most of the world’s people are decent, honest and kind. Most of those who dominate us are inveterate bastards. This is the conclusion I’ve reached after many years of journalism.
Perhaps Monbiot hopes this proposition will be sustained by his two uses of the word ‘most’; exceptions to the good people/bad people dichotomy can always be accommodated. But, though I will not hazard any guess about the differing proportions of inveterate bastards to be found in different communities, strata of the population, professions, institutions, and so forth, I do not think his thesis is a good advertisement for journalism if that is what many years of journalism truly teach. Whether as the cause or the effect of power, there are – in my own counter-hypothesis – other much stronger correlations than between power and inveterate bastardhood. Class origin, educational and other types of opportunity, political skills, personal ambition, dedication and organization, a certain idealism, and many other qualities strike me as being more pertinent than the degree of individual nastiness to the holding and exercise of power. From common observation, moreover, it would seem that all communities and all milieus have some significant share of bastards (if that is how we are to characterize such individuals), as they do also of people who are decent, honest and kind. If you’ve been around self-styled progressive politics for any length of time you will know that organizations from this quarter are no exception in either department.
The worst thing about this ‘simplistic binary system’ of Monbiot’s is the way it squares with a certain self-flattering image on the left that has been one of the sources of intolerance, illiberalism and, at the limit, indefensible violations of people and their rights; and has contributed thereby to sullying its reputation. It is the idea that righteousness is all on our side. We are the good ones, and they are the scum of the earth. No matter, then, what is done in the cause of our justice. This is a damnable conceit.