Double Aspect

Well, that happened. And, from His (I nearly still wrote Her) Majesty’s Government to humble bloggers “in the darkest Berkshire”, as JRR Tolkien put it on an unrelated occasion, people are wondering what to do. There are already those who say that

A new Power is rising. Against it the old allies and policies will not avail us at all. … This then is one choice before you, before us. We may join with that Power. It would be wise … There is hope that way. Its victory is at hand; and there will be rich reward fro those that aided it. … and the Wise … may with patience come at last to direct its courses, to control it. We can bide our time, we can keep our thoughts in our hearts, deploring maybe evils done by the way, but approving the high and ultimate purpose: Knowledge, Rule, Order … There need not be, there would not be, any real change in our designs, only in our means.

There will be more of them. Rich reward and all that, and, even more importantly, hope, which people crave beyond reward.

But what for those who are not inclined to Sarumania, and who remember that we have “heard speeches of this kind before, but only in the mouths of emissaries sent from Mordor to deceive the ignorant”? I won’t pretend to know the way. Practical politics has disgusted me for almost 16 years, long before our present predicament was even imaginable, and I have little interest in thinking it through. This is just a personal affectation of course, not a peremptory judgment on all and sundry who devote themselves to this sadly necessary endeavour.

But if I don’t know the way, I still know the destination. I may not be able to offer much hope, which is less necessary than people suppose, but there is utopia. Practical politics is pointless if it is so practical as to be devoid of ideal. When men of action wonder “how shall a man judge what to do in such times”, those wiser than them can answer: “As he ever has judged … Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear.” Let alone since the day before yesterday. That is where one ought to start from, and end with, whatever road one might take in between.

I am still a liberal, and not a conservative. I still believe that power corrupts, and because of that, I believe in the rule of law. The state is ignorant, whether it is run by voters to whom its masters pander or by experts whom some of our latter-day Sarumans think they can put in charge, and those who want big government must (at least) sacrifice either democracy or accountability to their desires. Hayek’s diagnosis of and solutions to the problems caused by “socialists of all parties”, including ones ranting about “commies”, “cultural Marxists”, and what not, are still fundamentally correct.

I expect that some people, even those whom I may have considered friends, or those who once claimed they wanted to be my friends, will take this a profession, or confession, of my leftism. Let them. I have paid too high a price, in my career and personal life, for not capitulating to leftist orthodoxy to care about those who would slander me by saying otherwise. But, having chosen to pay that price, it is not an especially big further payment to also refuse to swim with the new rising tide, and so I refuse. Tolkien, late in life, recalled Gandalf’s admonition “that it is not for us to choose the times into which we are born, but to do what we could to repair them; but”, he wrote, “the spirit of wickedness in high places is now so powerful and so many-headed in its incarnations that there seems nothing more to do than personally to refuse to worship any of the hydras’ heads”. So there.