Groupthink

Groupthink

Norm has been thinking rather a lot recently about the UK public discussion about the war in Iraq. In a nutshell, there's a large and influential group of people for whom the wrongness and illegality of the war are the starting point of any discussion; all that remains thereafter is to condemn or praise people or actions according to their relationship to the fundamental truth. Today's installment:

There were, of course, certain facts of the matter about the war, certain unambiguous truths, as there are about more or less anything. But the justificatory arguments on both sides appealed to a range, not only of facts, not only of projections of the likely consequences of one or another course of action, but also to moral and political principles - concerning the general justifications for war, the application of international law to this case, the force of international law, the demands of solidarity in the face of tyranny, the proper circumstances of humanitarian intervention - that do not map neatly on to any simple story about the occurrence of an act of adultery or theft or political kidnapping. But never mind all that, hey. The truth is just as we declare it to be. That has been the arrogance of anti-war groupthink in the last few years. In the mouth of any liberal it is a precious victory handed to the partisans of the one and only Party Line.

I don't mean to be gratuitously insulting but Macintyre's column belongs in the pages of the Guardian.

Eventually the whole thing becomes very depressing. There's a whole class of Brits, apparently, who have lost the ability to think, or even to recognize the right of others to do so. If you don't see things our way, you must be deranged. Worse: evil. (Merely deranged is to be pitied; there's no pity in this discussion).

There's a noticeable overlap, of course, between the educated British elites who have surrendered their cognitive abilities for the fuzzy warm feeling of righteousness on Iraq, and the educated British elites who have surrendered their cognitive abilities for the warm fuzzy feeling of moral superiority regarding the Jews as actors in history.

Originally posted by Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations