Roger Scruton spent his career as a conservative philosopher in the overwhelmingly left-wing world of British academia. His colleagues reviled him, many grudgingly conceding he was a brilliant and original thinker. In what looks like a throwaway line, Scruton observed that:
“Left-wing people find it very hard to get on with right-wing people, because they believe that they are evil. Whereas I have no problem getting on with left-wing people, because I simply believe that they are mistaken.”
It’s a devastating diagnosis. What Scruton identified is something deeper and stranger than a political position: that what matters when evaluating a claim about reality is the moral worth of the person making it. In this view, to be right-wing is to be evil, and any claim made from that position is merely an expression of the same.
Of course, conservatives also recognise moral distinctions between good and evil. The difference is that, like Scruton, they are less likely to treat them as a method for determining what is true.
This would be academic but for the fact that most Western institutions have become hostile environments for those on the “wrong side” of that equation. Millions of good and decent people today will habitually self-monitor for ambiguous utterances that might be misread or used against them. In the background, just out of sight, someone is passing their comment – or more likely their vibe – under a moral Geiger counter, checking for the crackle of wrongthink.
The cost is real. A mature civilisation ought to be able to have differences of opinion without one side reducing the other to evil. That we can’t is a symptom of a society no longer at ease with itself.
The left’s division of the world into good and evil rests on a powerful myth, woven so deeply into left-wing identity that it’s become invisible: that the left is more humane, more compassionate, and more morally serious than its opponents. Not more correct – more good.
The utopian impulse, the uncompromising pursuit of the ideal society over the flawed but principled one, reveals a dark paradox: the willingness to license suffering and oppression today, so long as they are in service of a vision purged of both tomorrow. And purged in particular of those who stand in the way. The gulag is permissible – essential, even – to realise such an ambition, a necessary evil toward a virtuous end. Sacrifices must be made, hard decisions taken with unsentimental resolve. Today’s body count is irrelevant. Everything is subordinate to chasing the new dawn.
The journalist Peter Hitchens spent his youth actively seeking a British Bolshevik revolution. He has described this from the inside with brute honesty. He would have done terrible things to his opponents, he says, if he’d ever achieved the power he sought, not out of cruelty but out of certainty. It was the certainty that was dangerous, and upon finally seeing it, he got out. Most don’t, because getting out requires surrendering the thing the myth most reliably provides: the clean division of the world into good and evil, and the knowledge of which side you’re on.
In 1994, Eric Hobsbawm, one of the most eminent historians in the English-speaking world, was asked a simple question: if he had known that millions were dying in the Soviet experiment, would it have changed his commitment to Communism? Hobsbawm said probably not. The journalist Michael Ignatieff pressed the point. Might the loss of fifteen or twenty million lives have been justified if the revolution had succeeded?
Hobsbawm’s answer was a single word.
Yes.
There it is. A lifetime’s scholarship and ideological conviction compressed into a syllable, a black hole of moral reasoning with the weight of twenty million dead. Hobsbawm doesn’t flinch because the matter is settled, the reasoning sound. He can pass off unimaginable cruelty as the cost of a more radiant tomorrow. What’s a million dead next to the grander project, the millions more who will inherit the earth when the destination is finally reached?
What sustains it is the claim that this is all about intentions rather than outcomes (which, rather conveniently, is what makes it impervious to evidence). When left-wing policies fail – and they fail spectacularly in ways that damage the people they claimed to protect – the governing framework is never brought under scrutiny. The failures are written off as sabotage or as evidence of insufficient zeal. It’s the unmanageable complexity of the problem, the unwillingness to make the necessary sacrifices. And always, above the wreckage float the good intentions held by people incredulous as to the outcomes. Their own kindness is never called into doubt. The myth is preserved, and the mission recharged for another day.