Another voice
Masquerading as progressive
Auberon Waugh
One small crumb of comfort to emerge from Ethiopia last week was the news that the 'broad mass of the people', having murdered everyone who could reasonably be described as an enemy of the revolution there, has now started murdering those suspected of `masquerading as progressives'. Of course one must not succumb to improper feelings of glee over the news, entering all the appropriate reservations about any recourse to capital punishment: intensely irritating as these masquerades may be and repugnant as they undoubtedly are, to all right-thinking people, like child-molesters, wife-beaters and rapists, one must surely ask oneself whether judicial killing is really the appropriate penalty, whether it might not simply add a new atrocity to the existing atrocity of their behaviour. Et cetera, et cetera.
But their fate, undeserved or otherwise,. might serve to give a few masqueraders pause for thought at home. If I seem to belabour the point about middle-class socialists, week after week, year after year, .this is only because I feel they may be open to reason. Some undoubtedly aren't. A few have quite simply decided that they welcome the historic shift of wealth and power towards the leaders of the working class and its accompanying shift towards proletarian cultural and moral .values in our society., Such people may be inspired by guilt over the material comfort of their existence, or they may be influenced by a faulty moral upbringing in childhood or by some personal inadequacy or character defect which it would be indelicate for us to explore. They may be reached by appropriate medication or electrical convulsive therapy, but scarcely by rational argument, and we should obviously be wary of using medical cures for diseases of the soul. Even religious exorcism is nowadays thought to have its dangers, although that was the method we used to use in the dormitories at school and I can't believe it did the young lads any lasting harm.
But as those who had the benefit of a Christian upbringing will know, the worst form of deception is self-deception. Those tempted towards this sin may draw a little strength to resist it from the knowledge that there is no material advantage to be derived from masquerading as a progressive: they may take themselves in, but they are unlikely to deceive the triumphant working class, whose struggle is a struggle for class monopoly, not a struggle to impose deferential attitudes on the middle class.
Ethiopia thus becomes the latest in a long line of object lessons to be drawn from our present century. Russia, China, Cuba and Cambodia are only the most memorable, but the message is always the same: where ver the working classes triumph, there is nothing to be gained by sucking up to them, or by having sucked up to them in the course of their struggle. From this realisation it is only a step to the great truth that the victory of the working class, whether achieved, by violent revolution on the foreign pattern or by abject and grovelling surrender to every challenge in the English manner, is a victory for the forces of stupidity, envy, idleness and ignorance over the forces of intelligence, education and truth. Above all, a proletarian culture cannot bear to be confronted by 'bourgeois' or objective truth, for fear it glimpses its own ugliness and brutality.
None of which, of course, is to deny that the English working classes — and possibly the Russian, Chinese, Cuban and Cambodian ones, too — are the most perfectly delightful people imaginable, individually and collectively. Moreover many people of more exalted station are utterly foul. I remember with particular sorrow, from my own personal experience, somebody called Captain Trevor Dawson, formerly of The Scots Guards at Caterham, and even have reservations about various members of the Douglas-Home clan. But! can't help feeling that our peculiarly English adulation of the working class —for its honesty, its frankness, its exceptional kindness and much-vaunted sexual proficiency — is both misguided and unhealthy.
The origin may be traced, as I believe, in the guilt generated by our repulsive English system of primogeniture, or it may lie more simply in the hysterical protestations of gratitude and admiration of so many middle-class London housewives for their daily women. One of its most painful manifestations, at any rate for me, is to be found in the respect which continues to be paid to the novels of D.H. Lawrence. This deference by our educated, bourgeois culture towards the humourlessness, pomposity and plain stupidity of a writer who is supposed to embody the values of the working class may go some way to explaining another, most unpleasing phenomenon of our own society — how intelligent, indus trious sons and daughters of the working class who, by their own efforts, have risen to prominent positions in the arts or pro fessions now vaunt their surviving proletarian characteristics as if they were proof of some moral and cultural superiority. It might be thought amusing or endearing for a single Cabinet Minister or editor of a pre viously respectable newspaper to eat his peas with a knife, but when they all do one begins to worry for the nation's table man' ners.
A few weeks ago Christopher Booker asked why there had been a dramatic re"i' val of interest in the works of Thornss Hardy, who seemed to have burst upon our colour supplement and television aware' ness like John Travolta, whether in
response to inchoate national yearnings or to a carefully orchestrated publicity earn'
paign. The explanation, I fear, may be both
simple and squalid. Hardy died fifty years ago on 11 January, and on that day his works came ,out of copyright, which means they can be plundered by anyone without paying royalties to his estate or seeking its, permission and submitting to its editorial, control. I provide this rather dull piece nl information in order to draw attention W a hideous threat hanging over all our lives that in less than two years we celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Lawrence's death.
Many will wish to emigrate before the great Lawrence revival hits us in Marc" 1980. Pickfords, the nationalised removals firm, took a full-page advertisement in the Daily Mail recently to inform us of its ser" vices for English people wishing to move overseas. The Daily Telegraph has Pr°,', duced its own book, available in hardbao„ or paperback, called Guide to Living all,: Working Overseas (Kogan Page Ltd and 0.35). It is plain to the smallest inter ligence now that there is a fixed deter mination to rid this country of its cleverer and more ambitious citizens, and a fatalistic acceptance on their part that they will have to go. Previous discussion of the Brain Draio has always proceeded on the false assumr tion that because it was in the government's best interest to keep its better class of dill' zens here, it might take steps to keep the° Even the Sunday Times has now caught 0,n with the absurdity of our tax system, and I5 I whining for relief on higher earnings. TheA awareness that we are simply not want has not yet dawned that the government° this country is embarrassed by the presene of independent intelligent private citizens and would sooner see the population reduced to two constituents, the union lurriP and the welfare lump. Which brings me to the third realisation which so much of our middle class seats I anxious to avoid. The first is that there Is nothing to be gained by masquerading 55a progressive; the second is that it is wrong, and a crime against truth and justice, pretend that the victory of the working ails: is a useful or pleasant development; tn` third is that there might be something to he gained by resisting it. I am not suggesting that anyone shoWri form into ranks of three or stand up to bele counted by Mr Levin, merely that we sh°°1,, all carry in our minds a firm idea of whet truth and personal advantage lie, making:1i part of all the countless decisions in wines we are involved every day. For a start, let tie combine to sabotage the dreaded Lavvrenc revival.
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