In Defence of My Irritable Mental Gestures

I had the pleasure of meeting the excellent journalist and commentator Fred Skulthorp in Katowice this week¹. During our conversation we spoke about the difficulty of forming a worldview — or, at least, a substantial and cohesive one. Fred recommended a very entertaining essay by Kevin Power in the Dublin Review of Books, which considers a collection of essays and articles by Lionel Shriver.

Shriver, Power writes, does not have a worldview crafted from ideas but formed out of impulses:

It is difficult not to read Shriver’s laundry list of supposedly out-there views without being reminded of another Lionel’s phrase about mid-century American conservatives dealing not in ideas but in “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas” (From Trilling to Shriver: The Decline of the Liberal Imagination). Irritability underwrites Shriver’s political opinions just as it underwrites, or perhaps I should say overwrites, her prose. Supporting Brexit, opposing lockdowns: these are not ideas. Rather, they are views which might arise from ideas, or which might, just as plausibly, arise from emotions of various kinds. Since Shriver does not give us a coherent account of the political ideas from which her views derive (the best she can do in this line is an essay describing herself as a “libertarian”), we must perforce treat those views as, precisely, irritable mental gestures.

Hey, I resemble those remarks! I don’t have a “coherent account of [my] political ideas” either. Indeed, unlike Shriver I don’t even have a word to cling to. “Conservative”? I did. But history has now locked us a course of such tremendous change, whatever direction we take, that it seems futile to define one’s project by conservation². “Post-liberal”? I like post-liberals — but I think they have discovered that the average voter is “economically left and socially right” and mistakenly supposed that this makes them pipe-smoking Chestertonians rather than people who love the NHS and want to hang paedophiles. “Libertarian”? Please.

In my defence, I’m not an intellectual, being neither especially erudite or exceptionally rigorous. The grandest term I will lay claim to is “writer”, which carries less of a demand for Great Theories About the Meaning of Everything. I’ll add that a lot of leftists express “irritable mental gestures” as well. He/she/they have not studied Marx, Keynes and Rawls. He/she/they just thinks in terms of Tory toffs and banker bonuses.

Indeed, there is the whiff of contrivance, if not insincerity, to anyone who does claim to have a genuinely coherent worldview. Perhaps the purest and the most extreme ideologues could do so (Pentti Linkola, say?). But anyone who thinks their set of moral and epistemological beliefs is neatly applicable to a world of eight billion people with rapidly evolving technological capacities seems like a fantasist or liar.

Most political decisions inevitably involve unhappy compromises — not the glorious implementation of some grand idea. For example, I hate to see pleasant natural, or semi-natural, spaces concreted over. On the other hand, many young and not-so-young people, myself included, want to live in a house without being compelled to sell our car, our dog, one of our kidneys and part of our lungs. No delicate idea provides a neat solution here.

But this has all been handwaving (if, I hope, with hands waving in a moderately elegant and diverting fashion). What do I — and you? — have in terms of ideas?

We do need ideas, after all. For example, I am anti-war. I hate war. We need less of it in the world. But unless we have some idea of why and how it starts and why and how finishes one might as well say “I’m anti-cold” for all the good it does.

A history of Ben Sixsmith thought could stop a charging rhino in its tracks and send it nodding off into a blissful sleep. Still, I hope that as I drifted rightwards it was not entirely on a raft of irritable mental gestures.

Take the “irritable”. For me, that points towards a political worldview that consists entirely of negative responses to the outgroup. [Insert video of Mike Graham rambling on TalkTV about his “plank of the week”.] Well, if we didn’t have negative responses to an outgroup they wouldn’t be an outgroup. But a right-wing perspective should have warmer roots as well: the love of home, the admiration of excellence et cetera. On a self-absorbed note, if anyone accused me of knee-jerk anti-leftism I would ask them to contemplate the awkwardness of rocking up to a right-wing cultural conference and inquiring about the vegetarian option (it was bread). I suspect the owners of superfarms lean rightwards but I still want many of them on the unemployment line.

As for “mental gestures” — where do beliefs end and ideas begin? I have beliefs, in broader and more specific forms. I believe, for example, in human and worldly imperfectibility. This is a very old idea indeed. Christians might call it “original sin”. I believe in civilisational progress — albeit reversible and incomprehensive. I believe that humans beings are different, in outlook and aptitude, and will have different outcomes (which does not mean that differences cannot be artificial and outcomes cannot be undeserved and unjust). I believe in the complementary grandeur and groundedness of the national and the local.

Perhaps you could call these ideas, if expressed in more detail, but they are not very concrete and useful ones. Imagine a politician saying, “We are the party of human imperfectibility!” Well, they’ve got my vote! Okay. But they can inform more specific views. If malice, selfishness, corruption et cetera are to some extent natural rather than acquired phenomena, for example, that has implications when it comes to criminal justice. If human differences are real that has implications when it comes to higher learning. If national character matters that has consequences for immigration. If local community matters, on the other hand, that’s one reason to value some forms of redistribution.

What I do not have are systematic explanations for how societies have developed and will develop. It was, and is, not simply “ideas”, after all, as if everyone got together and said “let’s give this capitalism thing a try.” Any half-decent Marxist or anarcho-capitalist could run rings around me when it comes to economic history.

I don’t have a coherent analysis of how to balance the good and bad potential of technology. (Frankly, I’m not sure anyone does, aside from principled anarcho-primitivists.) I don’t have a rock-solid idea of what could lead to lasting peace in Ukraine. Given that our post-war solution to long-term territorial disputes was ethnic cleansing, who does?

There’s a lot I don’t know! That’s the best excuse I have for sometimes offering irritable mental gestures. I do my best not to pretend that they are ideas. Besides, having no ideas — to use a grand conception of the term — is better than having a bad one. If your premises are wrong it doesn’t matter how sophisticated it is. You can build the most elaborate construction that you like but if you make it out of paper it will still collapse.

1. Read his wonderful, disturbing report from Ukraine.

2. Even if there is in fact much to conserve — as I’m sure you can agree if you have a full stomach, a sophisticated electronic device on which to read everything from the London Review of Books to some idiot in Silesia, and no imminent risk of being shot.