Gordon McLauchlan: Save us from ploys of social tidiers

A large group of foreign writers at an informal meeting were discussing the intellectually flimsy nature of the case the Bush Administration was making for war against Iraq and the almost weekly change of its thread and emphasis.

An Argentine, perplexed as all of us are that politicians can get away with such sophistry, asked why American "intellectuals" weren't taking up the argument.

There was a pause, which I filled with: "Where I come from, to be called an intellectual is to be faintly insulted." An American and an Englishman quickly concurred that the same applied to their countries.

Writers from other countries looked mystified, which highlighted a cultural difference between those countries that could loosely be called Anglo-Saxon democracies and the rest.

I tried to explain that while the anti-intellectualism of New Zealand exasperates me often enough, egalitarianism is close to the surface of our tradition and the idea that someone should get special respect simply by being proclaimed an intellectual is anathema.

Commonsense is often at least as intellectually muscular as erudition. Of all the Utopias I'm acquainted with, Plato's Republic is the one I would least like to live in.

Let me not suggest my argument routed all others. The young Argentine is a professor of mathematics as well as a respected fiction writer, with a formidable intellect and an especially agreeable personality. It's just that there was a narrow cultural gap we couldn't quite bridge.

Interestingly enough, the bad press for "intellectuals" in the United States is not improved by that label being given to people like the Deputy Secretary of Defence, Paul Wolfowitz, often described as the intellectual behind the Government's foreign policy.

A learned and intelligent man and a brilliant analyst, Wolfowitz comes across in a long but by no means critical magazine profile as what I call a "social tidier". The world is a chessboard, with countries and people as pieces to be moved. And he moves them brilliantly, if certainly not bloodlessly.

I once wrote a short story in the voice of a boy who, with his mother, is at the mercy of a social reformer. It contains this passage: "He is looking at her [his mother] with distaste and as I watch him I learn something I've never forgotten. He is neurotically shifting papers all the time on his desk, running his fingertips along the edge of paper piles to tap their edges into perfect line, and putting his pens straight and moving a ruler to bring it exactly parallel to his blotter pad.

"I learn that social reformers, of which he is one of the most noted and outspoken, are usually not motivated by compassion. They are tidiers. They don't dislike poverty or crime because it cripples people's lives but because it is not neat. It is the overt dirtiness of poverty, the un-uniformity of injustice that offends them."

As I read Wolfowitz's opinions on how the Administration could and should reform the politics and national attitudes of the Middle East by changing the regime in Iraq, I recognised a tidier of the first water.

But democracy is a cumbersome thing that sometimes arrives at commonsense huffing and puffing, having taken the long way round.

I was having breakfast with a group of South American writers one morning a few weeks ago when I felt a tap on the shoulder and was greeted with: "I thought I recognised that voice." It was Sir Geoffrey Palmer, who was in Iowa lecturing post-graduate students. We had a chat and agreed to have dinner.

When I sat down, I was asked who it was and I told them, adding that he had been Prime Minister of New Zealand for a while. It was clear that the concept of a Prime Minister, current or former, wandering around chatting amiably to writers without security, caution or pomposity was a novel and amusing one.

For days, when I met the droll and cheerful Colombian writer, he would grin and say something like, "And how is the Prime Minister today?" and walk away shaking his head.

I mention this because when we had dinner and a long walk along the Iowa River, I said I was perhaps the only foreign writer who didn't believe the US would attack Iraq. Palmer said he didn't either. Perhaps many of my colleagues didn't understand deeply enough the processes of democracy. He had put his finger on it.

Maybe we will be proved wrong, but what we understood was the long way the US and British Governments had to go before they could be confident of enough public support for their pre-emptive strike. Hence the drawn-out campaign to convince the public, some of it tinged with desperation.

And they would have to convince themselves that such a move would not turn into a disaster and shorten if not terminate their political careers.

What is happening now in the US is a gradual marshalling of opinion against such an attack. It is based not only on a moral anathema for war but also on the practical effects it will have on the future of the Middle East, which more and more people realise are far from as clear as Mr Wolfowitz's game of foreign policy chess would suggest.

Further reading
Feature: War with Iraq

Iraq links and resources