How post-liberals are showing their flaws over Ukraine

Paradigms of Western defeat and decline align to Putin's power

In The Silence of Animals, John Gray wrote, “An anxious attachment to belief is the chief weakness of the western mind.”

It’s perhaps one of Gray’s more elusive utterances. Certainly it’s one that stopped me in my tracks when I read it.

I take it to mean that Westerners, stuck as we are in a progressive mindset with its reactionary echoes, struggle to deal with imperfect understanding. As Gray writes, “We cannot do without an idea of truth.”

We struggle to cope with not knowing. We typically respond to our limited understanding by claiming to know more than we do. Indeed our tendency is to respond to information by putting it into its rightful place; trying to organise and codify it; to fit it into a network of assumptions and rules that can help us to give the impression we know what’s going on, giving us a place in the world, establishing ourselves as part of the conversation.

Through this process of codifying and rule-making, we end up making unnecessary commitments to certain things being true which prevent us from seeing reality as it arises. Belief comes first; reality second. The payoff is that it simplifies our political lives: giving us a set of ‘takes’ to roll out whenever interesting things happen, to make it seem as if we’ve got everything covered. The price is that these assumptions and rules must be defended to maintain our credibility: and they are often wrong.

Gray is quite rightly a hero for many post-liberals and anti-progressives. But I think many of his fellow travellers remain stuck in the paradigm that he identifies and criticises. His critique is just so contrary to the prevailing winds of everyday Western political language that, even if you get it and understand it, assimilating it into your ongoing approach is a different matter entirely.

I think we are seeing this revealing itself over the current Russian invasion of Ukraine. Quite a few of the post-liberals/ social conservatives I’ve been observing have committed to a general picture of geopolitics in which ‘the West’ has over-reached by plunging into war and nation-building in countries far from home. Many appear to have turned this quite reasonable conclusion into a set of rules: by which interventions virtually anywhere should be avoided; that the Western alliance of nations (including NATO) is fatally flawed and we should withdraw from it, at least partly; that the likes of Putin should be accommodated and given way to. They also tend to lament the apparent weakness of Britain’s armed forces and of the West more widely, taking a defeatist position on our capacity to do good beyond our shores (and even within).

All this adds up to a picture on Ukraine which, while not actively supporting Putin, broadly aligns to his aims and power – and sometimes veers quite close towards admiration for his ‘strong man’ stances. It fixes its criticisms on Western governments – subsuming them all over many decades into a general picture of misjudgement, ignorance and complacency - while failing to hold the Russian leader in any way accountable for his actions.

From what I have seen a principal inspiration for this approach is Peter Hitchens: one of our best and most penetrating writers. Hitchens is right on most things in my view. He has been a canary in the coalmine on the West’s descent into many of its current idiocies like progressive identity politics, open borders and stupid, elongated wars in faraway places.

However I think people should be wary about hanging on his every word.

For one thing he is very much a detached observer. He has admitted defeat for his brand of conservatism and now openly embraces that defeat. He’s not in the business of offering hope and solutions via the messy business of politics. He’s a critic. He’s one of our best. But at least on Ukraine he has been more concerned with past Western mistakes than Putin’s outrages firstly in Crimea and Donbas, now in the rest of Ukraine. This has led to him being very wrong about the evolving situation. Referring to Putin’s complaints about Nato expanding into Eastern Europe Hitchens wrote that, “He [Putin] has asked, quite reasonably, who it is aimed at.”

As he wrote in that same column in January,

So why are so many yelling that such an invasion is about to take place? In many cases it is because they know nothing of the issue, could not find Odessa on a map and are joining the crowd because they feel safe doing so. For these days, if you don’t join such crowds you will be accused of being a ‘Putin apologist’ and worse.

Peter Hitchens @ClarkeMicah

'If Vladimir Putin is stark, staring mad, then he will invade Ukraine. But I have seen little evidence he is. He is nasty, cruel, sinister, intolerant and many other things. But you do not remain in power in Moscow for so long if you are a lunatic.'

mol.imPETER HITCHENS: Labour’s hero? Nurse who stopped man seeing dying wifePETER HITCHENS: It is only now, when Johnson has finally stood up to the panic-mongers and begun to liberate the country, that the leaks have come.

I think it is now pretty obvious that the reasonable people in this situation have been the Eastern Europeans who jumped at the chance to get some sort of security blanket; especially with Putin in the Kremlin (a psychopath who appears to want to recreate the Soviet Union). NATO may not be perfect and Western nations have without doubt been negligent and made serious errors, but we should keep a bit of perspective here.

People trying to make their way in public life are so desperate to know, to have a take, to be an authority.

Hitchens and his fellow commentators have a responsibility to their employers and readers: to take a stand, take risks and make assertions that may turn out to be wrong. This is part of what it means to live in a free society.

However we don’t all have to commit so far.

Rather, I think we should always retain a healthy scepticism about all prophecies, whether optimistic or pessimistic. And have some hope for the future: that, despite much of the evidence, the democratic world and its institutions may not be as finally broken as some ‘post-liberal’ pessimists make out.

See also this post, on my problem with social conservatives:

My problem with social conservatives