Can liberals be trusted with liberalism?

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“A fight between two bald men over a comb”, was how Jorge Luis Borges described the Falklands war. What a line: somehow cruel and humane all at once. It has survived these four decades because it really is unimprovable in its Wildean economy.

What a shame it is nonsense. In that war, a junta was violently infringing the right of some islanders to self-determination. Or a faded empire was willing to kill over some faraway and ill-begotten territories. Or a little of both. At any rate, it mattered. Wider principles were involved. Defusing the whole subject with an epigram is a mark of high cultivation, but also of evasiveness. In the end — and this isn’t aimed at the late writer so much as at those who thoughtlessly quote him — where do you stand?

It is a question liberals are skilled at dodging. We have just lived through another major example. There is now some data to support the anecdotal impression that woke-ism at its most censorious peaked a few years ago. I wish those of us in the liberal centre could take a bow. But who led the resistance when it was hardest? Single-issue feminists. Rightwing free speech zealots. Political casuals with a radar for humbug.

Not all liberals deserted. Malcolm Gladwell and others signed a Harper’s Magazine letter about creative freedom when that took some fibre. But don’t let’s pretend this was typical of the wider caste. Newspaper websites have search engines. Our successors will be able to look up what passed for the bien pensant “position” circa 2020. Which was? Woke is exaggerated by conservatives (which doesn’t say where one stands on the issue), a distraction from economic injustice (which doesn’t say where one stands on the issue) or the wrong way of winning people over (a piece of tactical counsel from Barack Obama that didn’t, quite, say where he stood on the issue).

As with the old line about the Falklands, you could smell the desperation to avoid an argument. It is understandable. But it also ill-equips liberals for the protection of liberalism.

On tour at 83, Richard Dawkins is taking what he calls his “final bow”. Most of us can recite the main tenets of his Enlightenment outlook. Religious claims about the workings of the universe are either wrong or unfalsifiable. Science is not just truer but more majestic. The church acts all nicey-nicey now because it is weak. When it was strong, it sought to permeate everything, so don’t give it the slightest inch ever again. I tend to this view. Billions don’t. What is the liberal line? The one that dogs him as much as criticism from clerics?

It dwells on form, not substance. “Dawkins punches down.” But is he wrong? “His arrogance alienates more people than his eloquence converts.” But is he wrong? “He strays into cultural terrain nowadays.” Is he wrong, though? And then the ultimate midwit dinner party cliché, the verbal equivalent of having a Banksy print on your wall: “Atheism has become a religion in itself.” Fine, whatever. Is. Dawkins. Wrong? If so, what about? Where do you stand?

This almost physical horror of confrontation is captured in that weasel phrase, “read the room”. Rooms can be wrong. The eternal mistake is to conflate liberalism, a set of specific beliefs, involving trade-offs and hard choices, with what we might call liberality: an openness of spirit, a generalised niceness. You can only build a society on the first of these things.

I write all this as someone who wants milquetoast liberals in charge almost all the time. But in a crunch moment? When core freedoms are on the line? We’re too flaky. You need cranks and single-issue fanatics. You need people who take abstract ideas to their conclusion. In order to recognise and fight extremism, it helps, I think, to possess at least a trace element of it. (Dawkins would be awesome in a crisis.)

It has become fashionable to tease conservatives, such as the Tory member of parliament Kemi Badenoch, for pounding away at a woke movement that is now fading. Fair enough. But it isn’t fading because of what the sensible centre did. For the most part, their contribution was to stroll up to the pub brawl and tut just as it was petering out.

Where do we stand? At a safe distance.

Email Janan at janan.ganesh@ft.com

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