She was going so well, but then she went and ruined it. She managed to be fabulously even-handed at the beginning of her column. I have condensed a few paragraphs here, but they are a reasonable summary:
Everyone is for "fairness". The winner of the timeless tug-of-war between the parties is the one who best captures the spirit of "fairness" in their time.Sometimes the centre of gravity pulls leftwards: sharing more fairly, we all do better morally and economically. But after years of a Labour government, the tug pulls in the other direction: goodness resides in individual endeavour, not to be outsourced to the state. (src)
But then we get to the end, and the old Toynbee shows through:
politicians need to be sure to appeal to both halves of the contradictory human brain – what the religious traditionally mythologise as the internal tug between a pro-social God and a pro-individual Satan.Politicians neglect either at their peril. The left appeals more loftily to the higher impulse, but loses whenever it forgets to throw something to the lower beast too: many would say New Labour gave away far too much to the old devil.
Methinks the head of the Humanist Association Toynbee is imposing her politics on religious believers who are quite frequently to be numbered on the right. One could just as easily say that God is in favour of individuals — after all, he made us individuals — and it is the devil who favours collectivised control.
Something not far off this line of reasoning is what that reactionary bigot CS Lewis had in mind when he wrote, 'Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters.' He also wrote that if Christianity is true, then (liberal) democracy is better than dictatorship because the individual will last forever and therefore has more value than the State.
It is therefore telling that Toynbee ignores the rather more obvious issue in her politics: freedom. The libertarian and libertarian-ish will say that fairness and freedom align pretty well, whereas the left all insist, in various ways and to various extents, that freedom has to be curtailed in order to procure fairness, or that freedom means something different from what those on the right mean. What freedom and fairness are, their relative values and the way they interact have to be a part of one's political reflection, quite possibly as well as other matters. By focussing only on the question of fairness, Toynbee necessarily restricts her perspective. There are yet more things in heaven and earth (or even politics) than are dreamt of in her philosophy.
6 comments:
Some time, Phil, if you care to get into this issue, I for one would be interested to hear your further thoughts on C S Lewis. I only really know him from the Narnia books which I read as a kid, and I realise there's more which I haven't got to. Perhaps he was a "reactionary bigot", as you say, but the little bit you quote here suggests that he had something to be said for him.
All good wishes.
Thanks, anon. I should clarify, because in writing this isn't always clear: 'reactionary bigot' was quite definitely sarcasm on my part.
I don't think Polly Toynbee is imposing her humanism on her metaphor. See C.S. Lewis again (e.g. Screwtape, Mere Christianity) for the contrast between the stark individualism of the devil and the sociability of the Triune God who draws others into fellowship with him.
You might try to argue instead that the left, despite talking a good fight, tends in practice to undermine social ties, while the right promotes genuine, concrete social entities (families, communities) rather than abstractions such as "society" (which was, of course, Mrs T's point in her much misquoted comments about society). I'm not convinced, but it's a better line of argument than "individualism is divine, collectivism is satanic".
I don't think it's that the left oppose freedom and fairness to one another. Rather, it's that they see "freedom" in broader terms than just "absence of state coercion". Libertarians focus on freedom from the state, but in doing so they hand people over to capitalism "red in tooth and claw" - the results of which are contrary to any notion of fairness that anyone on the left could begin to recognise.
Not her humanism, but her left-wing politics, and not on a metaphor but on a genuinely-held belief among religious believers. God is not a metaphor!
But for all that, I wasn't really saying that divine individualism vs. satanic collectivism was a legitimate argument; merely that it was as legitimate as Toynbee's argument. It's all a lot more nuanced than Toynbee makes out: the individual matters, but so does the individual-in-society. Where I really do part company is in turning 'society' into a thing in itself, practically divorcing it from the individuals who make it up.
I've got a half-baked post in the oven on Julian Glover's contribution to the same series. He, you may recall, is the Guardian's Danny Finkelstein (Chief Leader Writer) and argues that equality — which is what the left generally thinks of as fairness — and liberty are 'implacable enemies'. I can't get a political stance out of him, but I'm imagining that he's somewhere on the left. For the moment!
As I acknowledge, you do define liberty differently from us. The left's definition of freedom seems to me to be too willing to interfere in order to expand the envelope of 'what you can do' through the power of government.
Haven't seen Julian Glover's article, unlikely to have time to check it out today.
But I don't think most on the left now believe in absolute equality. The metaphor I keep going back to is Polly Toynbee's about the camel train crossing the desert - it's not a case of saying everyone has to be clumped together in the same small spot (and, to extend the metaphor, the only way to do so is to stop moving!), but at what point does it become so spread out that it is no longer a single group?
No, I tried but failed to work out how to express that. I think I can see how to put it now. It's that for the left, fairness means 'more equality', rather than 'total equality'. For the right, fairness means 'getting what you work for'. I simplify, of course: again, it's more nuanced than either of those cases puts it. I suspect that generally speaking, both sides would acknowledge some degree of truth in the other's statement even while preferring their own.
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