The Revolt of the Pendulum

A commentator has indeed great temptations to supply by turbulence what he wants of dignity, to beat his little gold to a spacious surface, to work that
to foam which no art or diligence can exalt to spirit.

Johnson,
Preface to Shakespeare

Many times, unsettled by his own astonishment, Golo Mann returned to the question of how, in the 1960s, there could have been such a remarkable renaissance of Marxism, whose
recipe for health had already, for a generation, been laden with intellectual compromise and victims by the million. To him, it was as if a spectre had reawakened. And if that filled him with
anxiety, he also had the counter-spectre before his eyes, together with the knowledge that it had been in their competition with each other that they had both first grown strong. From the common
experience of the older generation, the ruins and the traces of suffering were still visible, indeed written in the wind. Most frightening of all, it had become obvious that no historical disaster
could quell the longing for one or another of the world-burning ideologies; that even the bloodiest of evidence could do nothing against it; and that there seemed to be no horizon where such a
no-man’s-land might end.

Joachim Fest,
Begegnungen

Introduction

Originating in my homeland, like the smile of Kylie Minogue and Rod Laver’s cross-court running forehand, the phrase ‘the revolt of the pendulum’ is an
invention surely destined to conquer the world. In Australia in late 2007, when the Liberal government of John Howard, after eleven years in power, was finally replaced by the Labor government of
Kevin Rudd, a Liberal Party politician said that the change had not been a landslide victory for the incoming party. He said that it was just ‘the revolt of the pendulum’. He was right,
but his language was imprecise. A pendulum doesn’t revolt. But it does swing, and a swing of the pendulum was the most that had happened. The change took place within the limits of modern
democratic politics, in which one party concerned with national wealth and public welfare contends against another party concerned with the same two things, but in different proportions.

This is the balance which obtains in the three leading English-speaking democracies, the US, the UK and Australia, and we usually measure the other English-speaking democracies, and all the
non-English-speaking democracies, by the extent to which they come near equalling it, or at least aspire to. There may be more than two main parties, but if there are fewer than two, namely one,
then we are usually talking about an elected dictatorship which won’t be liberal, and will be democratic only in the sense that the people periodically get a chance to re-elect their
oppressor. A free liberal democracy in its full sense is governed by the pendulum. It might fall short of the principles of justice enunciated by John Rawls in his
Theory of Justice
, but if
its government can be changed at the whim of the people then it fulfils the minimum requirement of a liberal democracy set by Karl Popper in his years of exile to faraway New Zealand, an open
society where he was free to consider how human liberty could best hold its enemies at bay. When Francis Fukuyama announced the end of history, he was really talking about the arrival of a general
recognition – spurred by the full development and final discrediting of the horrors unleashed by some of the alternatives – that the free liberal democracy was the most desirable state.
He was right to the extent that the argument was settled. He was wrong only in supposing that history might listen.

Devoid of a mind of its own, history doesn’t care about a reasonable conclusion. Unfortunately both parts of that sentence apply to many of the public intellectuals who concern themselves
with world affairs. For them, a political system which has attained a condition of vibrating stasis provides an insufficient resonance. Briefly, they find it boring. Bored, they play with fire.
Those on the left, almost invariably living in a liberal democracy or something like it, would prefer to believe that the liberal democracies, by their nature, are invariably the instigators of any
contrary forces that might arise. In the same free countries, those on the right would prefer to believe that liberal democracy must modify its system of justice in order to defend itself against
extremism. (They don’t see themselves as extremists, although they patently are.) Faced, in the democracy we happen to inhabit, with these two contrary aberrations, we are forced to conclude
that the old system of placing the intellectual life of liberal democracy on a continuum from left to right is obsolete.

Such a conclusion, if all could reach it, would usefully reflect the facts about the whole life of liberal democracy, the chief fact being that it can no longer be viewed as being on a continuum
either: ever since Nazi totalitarianism and Communist totalitarianism stood revealed as being essentially similar, the old tripartite horizontal distinction, with liberal democracy in the middle,
has looked less and less realistic. Better to think of liberal democracy as the breathable atmosphere of a planet. Above the breathable atmosphere there is an unbreathable stratosphere called
extremism, trying to get in. In this stratosphere of extremism, suffocating and invasive, what used to be the far left and what used to be the far right are continuous. The extremes not only touch,
they blend. In that sense, and in that sense only, totalitarianism has finally become global. On the ground, it has only a few states left to call its own. But in the air, it is everywhere.

It would be a good thing if the word ‘extremist’ could be taken up more widely to denote any movement which wants to deal with a contradictory opinion by silencing the voice that
dares to utter it. Among my own friends, there are several who would have been less likely to be falsely branded as ‘Islamophobes’ if they had inveighed, not against Islamism, but
against Islamic extremism. The word ‘Islam’ and the word ‘Islamism’ are easily confused, especially by those who have an interest in confusing them. The term ‘Islamic
extremism’ more intelligibly says what is meant. Islamic extremists want to silence all opposition. Especially they want to silence opposition within Islam. By saying that Islamism is the
enemy of Islam you are positively asking to be misunderstood. By saying that Islamic extremism is the enemy of Islam, you are clearly opening the way for a salient fact: there are more than a
billion Muslims in the world who don’t want to kill you for your opinions. Those who do are a minority, which can just as easily – more easily, one would have thought – be called
uncharacteristic as characteristic. As minorities go, it is quite large, but it is a very small proportion of the total population from which it emerges. That fact should gives us cause for hope.
The Islamic extremist minority’s depredations against the interests of the hated West might get a less clear run if they are seen to injure the interests of the Islamic majority as well. Some
evidence for the hope’s being well founded is already in, and has been generated under conditions that could scarcely be more intense.

When people are ready to risk their lives to argue for tolerance, those of us who are running no risk at all should be slow to insult them by treating our freedom to conduct reasoned argument as
if it were of negligible value. Better to think of it as valuable beyond price: the only guarantee of a decent life for all. If those of us growing old behind the safety of a desk are still hungry
for adventure, there is a battlefield before our eyes. It comes to us as an unrelenting barrage of print and images. It won’t kill us any faster than time does, but if we don’t play our
part then others will surely suffer, because although comprehension might have no direct effect, incomprehension will always have its consequences. Either we make the best sense we can of what we
see and hear, or we have done less than nothing. Not a very daring aim, perhaps, but it has sustained me while I have been putting this book together. My own story, as usual, is the wellspring of
what I have written: my own story with all its trivialities, petty ambitions, sad deficiencies, ludicrous failures and negligible victories, all these things the product of a curiosity that has
been allowed to operate without restriction. What has changed, as that story winds to an end, is my inclination to call it mere good fortune. It has been a blessing, conferred by a social and
political fabric that it took the whole of history to assemble. Trying to analyse how that might have happened is like trying to analyse the structure of providence. It can’t be done, but it
can’t be left alone either. Even the smallest success is a lot to wish for, but one feels obliged to try.

Most of the essays in this book were written as book reviews or commissioned pieces since my last collection of critical prose,
The Meaning of Recognition
, came out in 2005. Some of them,
in their origins, date from slightly earlier, because they were begun while my later book
Cultural Amnesia
was being composed, and for a while I thought that the themes they contained might
be incorporated into it. In each case, after I decided that an essay deserved a separate life apart from that book, I developed it as an individual piece and found a home for it in a suitably
receptive periodical, whether in Britain, Australia or the USA. If I received any requests from periodicals in Ireland, Canada, South Africa, India or New Zealand I would certainly consider them.
The idea of an Anglosphere, or international English-language commonwealth, seems very real to me: a sign, in fact, that the old Empire was something better than an aberration, if somewhat less
than an ideal.

One of the privileges of my position as a living relic of literary journalism is that I can sometimes peddle a finished article rather than just wait to be offered a commission. The range of
publications in which I might pull such a trick has thankfully widened in recent times, and not just because my market value has gone up pro rata with the increasing curiosity generated by my
continued ability to breathe. The actual number of suitable publications has increased. In Australia, for example, the
Australian Literary Review
, in its latest form, has at last been given
the editorial resources befitting its status as a supplement to the country’s leading newspaper. Rupert Murdoch will be able to brandish a copy of it when he arrives at the pearly gates and
St Peter asks him whether he really thinks his proprietorship of the
News of the World
qualifies him for entry. And the current-affairs magazine the
Monthly
, carrying the flag of the
new and vigorous Black Inc. publishing empire, has room for the longer article in a way that the now defunct
Bulletin
rarely did. It’s always good to know that such specialist
magazines as the
Australian Book Review
and
Quadrant
and the
Griffith Review
are widely read in the universities, but the
Australian Literary Review
and the
Monthly
are right out there on the newsstands, and the newsstands are where I like to operate if I can. Australia, by now, does the intellectual magazine well, but it’s the commercial
magazine for the general audience which carries the bigger prize: a readership whose attention is not automatically conferred, but has to be won.

In Britain,
Prospect
now has a rival, called
Standpoint
, on the other side of the political centre; so now there are two newsstand magazines in search of the longer essay. Two
buyers are enough to create a seller’s market. Sometimes it takes only one: under their current editorship, the cultural pages of the
New York Times
are wide open to critical prose
written at the highest level, and a literary journalist would have to be crazy not to try getting in. The question remains, however, of what one is trying to sell. I hope the pieces in this book
add up to an answer. One either does this kind of thing as journey-work, or else one tries to convey a viewpoint. For the old sweat, the chief advantage of having been around the block a few times
is that he develops a viewpoint anyway, just to make sense of the era that he has succeeded in living through. Sometimes he has succeeded in nothing else, but a grizzled enough veteran will
congratulate himself on having survived to be issued with a Freedom Pass.