What is the purpose?
Colin Welch
ike a happy and resilient cricket team, 1../ the Spectator seems to have no tail. So
long as Kavanagh, P. J., hasn't come to the crease, you always have something to look forward to. I was watching him the other day with my usual complacent content when suddenly he hoisted a series of beautifully timed sixes into the sun, which landed with mighty thuds either in my hasti- ly vacated deckchair or jolly near. Narrow squeaks!
I have since brooded on what Mr Kavanagh had to say. He himself had been
ruffled by hearing the Spectator traduced as 'the right-wing rag'. He had thought of it as, 'in the main, cheerfully Tory anarchist, or at least radical; concerned with pointing out the warts on the Conservative Party as well as the wens on Labour'. I stirred uneasily at the words 'in the main', which seemed to include me out. Ever attentive to Labour's wens, rarely do I point out a Tory wart. Peccavi? Not mortally, I plead. With Lenin in 1917 at the Finland station, who cared about warts on the Kadets? Did anyone point out warts on the coming Campbells?
But it was the next mighty Kavanagh blow which, if I hadn't leapt smartly aside, would have finished my gall bladder off for good and all. 'The remark', he wrote (the one about 'the right-wing rag') 'has em- boldened me to admit my hearty dislike, and suspicion, of what seems to me a grow- ing obsession with politics.' Who, me? Is it paranoia to take it a bit personally? Pro- bably: but other civilised persons have, as it happens, accused me of being obsessed with politics, so perhaps I'm a bit over-sensitive about it.
The pity of it is that my obsession with politics, if such it is, springs from precisely those horrible developments which dear Mr Kavanagh and I hold in common detesta- tion. I too hate the 'woozy politicisation of everything.' I too mistrust heads filled with 'the hub-bub of "action", and meetings, and Declarations and rancour', with the 'blessed sense of belonging', with the 'sheer noise' which drives out 'clear thought, true feeling or self-knowledge', even 'a very clear idea of what is in fact going on'.
Yes, honestly, my 'obsession' with politics is an obsession about driving it back, curbing its usurpations and mon- strous predominance, and enlarging the area in which Mr Kavanagh and other civilised beings can get on unimpeded with creative tasks far more important than politics. He legitimately wants, 'with reason, to be interfered with as little as possible'. Well, just as only armed soldiers can protect the peace, so only politicians can protect him against the determination of other politicians to interfere with him.
Politics won't just go away. It has to be shoved; and only politics can supply the necessary bulldozer. I have heard Mrs Thatcher described as a 'bully'. Well, if so, she is a bully of a rum sort, a bully not for coercion but for freedom, a bully on our side. Mr Kavanagh seems inclined to look this gift-obsessive in the mouth. I cross my fingers instead.
He hears an ever noisier battle ap- proaching. Naturally it vexes him. He seems to curse both sides. Yet, as Schiller said, 'The most pious man can't live in peace if it doesn't please his evil neighbour'. Between pious men and evil neighbours we must distinguish.
Mr Kavanagh quotes with approval Pro- fessor John Carey: 'Politics is essentially a branch of morbid psychology'. To him, 'this is so obviously true of all who put politics at the centre of their lives'. I see what he means, because in every sane, well- balanced and beneficent politician there must be something higher at the very centre of his life which in fact informs and directs his perception of what is good and evil in politics. Yet, for all that, how is it that we can contemplate extremely conscientious dentists, say, or plumbers, immersed in their work, without denouncing the crafts to which they are devoted as branches of 'morbid psychology'? And, if politics is in any sense a branch of morbid psychology, how can this be unless sane, well-balanced and beneficent men are bored or disgusted by it or stand for some other reason aloof? If enough people regard politics as a madhouse, then it will assuredly become one. It is a self-validating insult.
I quote from memory one remark of the great and good Dr Johnson which seems to
me to have worn ill. Sir, he said, or words to this effect, depend upon it that no man ever lost a night's sleep about public affairs. Is there not here an uncharacteristic failure of imagination? A failure to see how public affairs or politics, at least at other times or in other places, can bring here peace and plenty, there rain, misery, famine, suffer- ings beyond belief and deaths without number? What are Auschwitz, the Gulag archipelago and Cambodia but public af- fairs run mad, mercifully different in degree from anything dreamed of in the hapPY West but not, alas, in kind? For in these ter- rible manifestations we only find writ large and put into hideous effect the coarse language and thought of those nearer home who see before them not individual human beings in all their infinite and lovable varie- ty but only classes, races, functional groups or like abstractions which can be eliminated without crime. What is the Labour Left but Khmer couleur de rose? The monstrous modern state robs us of our sleep. Why? At least part of the answer lies, I think, in the word, 'purposeful', as used by Roger Scruton in a recent deep arti- cle in the Times. 'There exist States', he wrote, 'whose lives are structured by a Or pose [my italics] and who cannot accept another's freedom as an obstacle to its fulfilment ... The mark of the purposeful polls is that it cannot be governed by law, which vanishes just as soon as the ruling purpose is questioned or compromised'.
The purposeful State exists not to pro- tect, comfort or help its subjects but to reshape and transform them. More than in- terfering, it cannot allow its subjects to prosper independently or tolerate spon- taneous change and development. It detests privacy as much as law. Its own purpose does not consist in any fusion of infinitely numerous private purposes but rather in the obliteration and frustration of all private purposes. It dwarfs its subjects, reduces them to cogs in a machine or, if useless as cogs, as Mr Kavanagh and I might be, eliminates them. It thrives in Russia and elsewhere. It is on offer, with pretty pink ribbons on it, to us here. Mr Kinnock's State is purposeful. It Is in essence Stalinist — yes, but in his view Stalinist without terror, restrained by democracy and participation, and therefore unobjectionable. It contains therefore war- ring elements within itself: which will win( The overriding purpose could well diminish or obliterate the feeble restraints put upon it. One can imagine a subordinated par- ticipation being used to further the great purpose and to discuss means of achieving it. But could real democracy indefinitely be allowed its quinquennial chance to chuck the whole purpose into the dustbin? I hope we Shall never know. In the great strife between private and public purpose I welcome Mr Kavanagh as willy-nilly a valued friend. I wish him 111W happy innings and, if he wants to kilt where the evil neighbours are sitting, I will try to point them out.
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