What Other Measure

Peter Hitchens writes:

Will any lessons be learned from the disaster now unfolding in what used to be Iraq? I doubt it.

The interventionists still seem quite unable to see that it was their intervention that brought this about, and that their utopia, like all others, can only ever be approached across a sea of blood, and then you never get there.

Such people will continue to scan the world, looking for places in which to do good, in which they will actually, quite unintentionally, end up by doing the most terrible harm.

What motivates this desire? Why does it go so wrong?

I think it’s obviously a sort of displacement, and a good impulse, denied its proper course searching to find a way out.

We know that we ought to try to do some sort of good in our lives, even to try to be good.

But the old devotional and pious approaches to this, personal self-examination, confession of our own misdeeds, self-control and self-reproach, all underpinned by ideas of God, sin, repentance and grace, are now regarded as completely absurd.

They are so unfashionable and outmoded that even to attempt them is to court mockery, or dismissal as some sort of eccentric survival, a human coelacanth swimming on alone in the depths, living on long past its proper time, with no shoal to call its own.

Also dismissed by modern thought is the idea of man as a created being, with a special purpose. He has been replaced by a malleable, reformable being who has no unchanging nature.

So he can (in theory, though of course not in practice, as we saw yet again in the 'Arab Spring')  be changed by vast utopian projects, whether Trotskyist or, Trotskyism's close cousin, neoconservative.

And with the destruction of that kind of man has come the destruction of what used to be viewed as common sense, so that the more radically in conflict an idea may be with common sense, the more it is respected.

And so has come the idea of the social conscience - of doing good not in minute particulars,  for which we have no time and which are too small when set against the vast size of such problems as ‘child poverty’ or ‘colonialism’ or ‘exploitation’ or ‘racism’:  but in grandiose gestures, often involving other people’s money (which we spend) and other people’s children (whom we send out to kill, or arrange to have killed).

And then of course there are all the disappointed sixties revolutionaries, whose great cause evaporated  amid unexpected prosperity and the computer revolution, and the disappointed Cold Warriors, who have no threat from which to defend us now that the Evil Empire has gone.

They too need a place in which to store their noble impulses.

And gosh, look, an attractive and terribly committed young woman on the television is telling us of woe and injustice in some corner of the world we’d never heard of an hour ago, have never visited and never will visit.

And it becomes a moral imperative to intervene, and do good. And all those who oppose such intervention are callous and heartless.

And we do do good, a lot of good, to ourselves and our unquiet consciences. Or, if we don’t do any actual good, we feel as if we have.

And that’s what matters, isn’t it? How we feel? After all, what other measure could there possibly be?