Some of W.B. Yeats's best lines risk becoming threadbare from over-use, ironically because they encapsulate a relentlessly recurring mood, writes Fintan O'Toole.
Listening to both George W. Bush's press conference and the EU foreign ministers' gathering in Tullamore last week, I couldn't help returning to The Second Coming:
"The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."
Amid all the bland obfuscations and comic confusions in Bush's absurd performance there was one line that was genuinely revealing. "A free Iraq," he said, "is going to be a major blow for terrorism. It will change the world." While the first part of this quote packs in two big lies (Iraq is not free and the invasion had nothing to do with combating terrorism), the second part is an honest statement of the beliefs held by Bush and the neo-conservative cult which he represents. They really do believe that they are changing the world.
The grimmest joke of our times is that the only people who hold real power and yet still believe in changing the world are the loopy right-wing ideologues who, thanks to the strange workings of the American political system, have taken control without ever standing for election. Though they are far wealthier, smoother and better dressed, they are otherwise exactly the kind of people who used to be found in the back rooms of grotty pubs, jabbing their fingers at their comrades as they denounced traitors and deviationists.
These people put immense effort into enforcing the right line because they knew that, if the correct formula was repeated often enough, the world would change. Usually they grew out of it. They got girlfriends and boyfriends, jobs and children. They learned that things change in slow, hard ways and that a passion for putting the world to rights has to co-exist with an understanding of how tenaciously the world clings to its wrongs.
The neo-conservatives, however, didn't have to go through these painful processes of adjustment. The great thing about being a right-wing ideologue is that you can retain the hard-edged innocence of your beliefs and still get rich. You can spend your life moving from plush corporate boardrooms to prestigious universities and institutes without ever having to deal with too many messy realities. Crucially, unlike the various Trots and Maoists who stood for election and learned something when they got 54 votes from the workers and peasants of Cavan-Monaghan, you can repeatedly attain senior government office without ever having to face the general public.
However privileged their route to power, though, they retain two habits of mind common to young revolutionaries everywhere. One is the notion that when reality conflicts with your ideas, it is obviously the reality that's wrong. The other is the messianic notion that there will be one great test, one defining crisis, which will alter everything. Either the moment will be seized and the world will be saved, or it will be shunned, and the world will be damned. The true revolutionary must be ready to rise to the occasion, or, if the occasion doesn't come, to invent it.
We've seen this mentality on display in the invasion of Iraq. It is equally evident in Bush's meeting with Ariel Sharon last week and the idea that, if you're having trouble negotiating with your enemies, you can just negotiate with your friends instead. Its results have been, and will be, the precise opposite of what is intended, inflicting more suffering on the region and making the West less secure.
But the inevitable failure of these policies does not make the revolutionary zeal of the neo-cons a less dynamic force. And it raises the question of what those opposed to war and neo-imperial supremacism have to offer instead.
The problem with growing out of a simplistic, messianic desire to change the world is that it is too often replaced, not by a more sober desire to change the world, but by a weary pragmatism. The conjunction of the first anniversary of the fall of Saddam Hussein with the tenth anniversary of the Rwanda genocide offers us grim examples of the consequences both of too much ideological zeal and of too little.
Which is worse, the overweening impulse to intervene and shape the world according to your own ideals of a Rumsfeld or the European, American and UN liberals who watched close to a million people hacked to death and sighed at the inescapable awfulness of the world?
An unwillingness to confront this question is the great weakness of the neo-cons' critics, including, so far, John Kerry. Listening to the insipid clichés emerging from Brian Cowen's jamboree of EU foreign ministers in Tullamore last week, it was hard not to reflect that for all their astonishing incompetence, the neo-cons are effective because they have a sense of mission. They have a vision of an ideal world (in their case, one in which everywhere is like the rich New Jersey suburb home to the Soprano family) and they pursue it with real vigour.
And against the banal cynicism and exhausted clichés of old-style diplomacy, that kind of energy will always be potent. It can only be defeated by a system of thought, however sober and astute, that acknowledges that the world does, after all, need to be changed.