The Emperor Nero school of intellectual engagement

The reaction to an important new book illustrates a chillingly sealed thought system

Back in 1987, I became an op-ed columnist on The Guardian. I had been an enthusiastic member of its staff since 1977. My second op-ed column in 1987 was on education. I suggested that the problems in the education system weren’t caused by the prime minister, one Margaret Thatcher, but that something rather deeper was going wrong with teaching and the concept of education itself. 

The next morning, I discovered I had crossed a forbidden line. “What’s happened to you?” asked my suddenly chilly colleagues. “Have you gone mad? Why have you suddenly turned into the Daily Mail?”

From the point on, I steadily  became a pariah on the left. My stumbling discovery of the collapse of the very notion of education as the transmission of a culture steadily opened the way to an analysis of the lethal damage being inflicted by the left upon the idea of the nation and the core values of western civilisation and democracy — an analysis that was to turn me into a lifelong pariah among my former friends in liberal progressive circles. 

At that point in 1987, however, I realised for the first time that I was up against a chillingly sealed thought system. To my Guardian colleagues, it was simply inconceivable that they could be wrong. Their world view was based on a Manichean division between those who were good because they believed in transforming the world for the better (themselves) and those who were evil (everyone who opposed them on anything) — all of whom they indiscriminately termed “the right”.  If someone hitherto thought to be on their side happened to say or write something that corresponded with what “the right” had said, there could be no question that they might have a point. It meant instead that their former comrade had now gone over to the dark side. 

That was then, at The Guardian — then as now a small circulation newspaper. Now the whole British establishment has become Guardianised. The cultural dial has shifted.

Among the cultural avatars of the intellectual establishment, what was once considered a hard-left position is now considered to be the centre-ground; what was once the centre-ground is now deemed to be “right-wing”. Since no challenge to left-wing ideology can be entertained, truth, rationality and evidence have become “right-wing” concepts to be dismissed, scorned and reviled.  And the more important and more significant the truth, the more extremely “right-wing” it is deemed to be.

My early encounters with the sealed thinking of the left came to mind when reading the all-too telling reaction to the excellent new book by politics professor Matthew Goodwin: Values, Voice and Virtue: the New British Politics.