The dilemma of the post-Soviet Left

After the collapse of the Soviets, the Left have no alternative to capitalism so they deny reality instead. Some excerpts below from an article by George Watson on their sad state:

The commonest form of subjectivism in our times, moral or cultural, is to deny that any value judgment counts as knowledge. Moral scepticism in that familiar style is most commonly multiculturalist, and holds that all judgments are born of circumstance and conditioning. In departments of literature, by now, it is difficult to hear any other view. Gender studies and black studies are its children, not to mention gay studies, and by now the children have grown middle-aged. Such are the views of many who once assured the world, and with enormous certainty, that capitalism was wicked-which certainly sounds like a value judgment-or that America was wrong to be in Vietnam or Iraq, which sounds like another. It is a cosy place the Left has retreated to, as to a Masada, in the hope of finding it impregnable. Subjectivism is the last bunker of the intellectual Left.

Consider this counter-instance to subjectivism. A mindless murder occurred a few years ago in Dunblane, in Scotland, when sixteen schoolchildren were shot dead by a maniac who then committed suicide. Worldwide condemnation was instant and universal. Did anyone, at that moment of anguish, stop to consider what the theoretical basis for that judgment might be? Did those who insist that there is no moral agreement in the world ever admit that they might have been mistaken? To be a subjectivist, at least for long, you have to shut your mind, and keep it shut. It is like being a solipsist, or believing that nothing exists but yourself.

Years ago, in Human Knowledge, Bertrand Russell told how he once had a letter from an eminent American logician, Mrs Christina Dadd Franklin, explaining that she was a solipsist: why were there so few of them? But if she had noticed there were so few, she must have noticed, or thought she had noticed, something that was not herself. Russell was content to tell his little story ungarnished, leaving the point to sink in, and you could do the same with moral and cultural subjectivism. Just think about it. If you cannot judge anything, then you cannot judge that you cannot judge. As a great philosopher once said centuries ago-he was called Pascal-it is not certain that nothing is certain.

Subjectivism, it is widely believed, means tolerance and openness. Nobody can say you are wrong: it all depends on where you are coming from. It is a cosy place to be-until, that is, somebody points out that belief in social justice is a judgment; so if all judgments are merely personal, so is that.

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