The Snail - reflections on the Left

Roland's said I can blog some of his musings over "The Left", prompted no doubt by those appalling election losses to two men who deserve to be publicly flogged. He came up with this poem:

It's by a Romanian poet named Marin Sorescu, and was written about 1965:

THE SNAIL

The snail carefully seals his eyes
With wax
And tucks his chin tightly to his chest.
He stares
Into himself.

Above him
Is his shell -
His perfect creation
Which disgusts him -

Arrayed about the shell
Is the world,
All the rest of the world,
Distributed everywhere
According to irrefutable laws,
Which disgust him -

And in the centre of this
Cosmological disgust
Is himself -
Snail -
Which disgusts him.

Now, I think this is a beautiful poem, and I can sort of see the connection to left-wing behaviour, but I asked Roland to spell it out for me and got this:

Given that Sorescu was writing in Romania in 1965 (in the early stages of the rule of the Communist dictator Cealcescu), and that Romania has no concept of Left/Right in the western sense, I think I'd have to be pushing it to suggest that he was describing a crisis of the pre-1968 Left, who, incidently, don't suffer from this problem.

My commentary would suggest that the Left is screwed because they don't see beauty anywhere, and fail to recognise their achievements. The Right is attractive because they exude confidence in themselves, their world, and their creations. The Left is very introspective, and consequently completely fails to do this. In their introspection, however, the Left is not encouraged, they are only disgusted.

God has created a beautiful world and He sustains it day by day. We are beautiful creations of the living God. Granted, this world has been corrupted by sin, but it still remains a beautiful creation, and I mean that people are beautiful as well as the cute animals. The Left seems to forget this too often. When we look at ourselves and at what we're doing, we just see the injustice, and the corruption. We do not rejoice, but we weep instead.

Habbakuk (3:18) says that we should rejoice despite how fucked up the situation is. We need to focus more on the good things that God is doing and less on the bad things that people are doing. With this focus, we lose hope less easily, are built up in faith more frequently, and are empowered to achieve ever greater victories.

That was all in Sorescu.

I wonder about the source of this disgust. Other people see the same world and are not disgusted. Is it simply that the Right is ignorant and the Left is informed? I don't think that's all there is to it.

Having attended seminars, forums and rallies organised and dominated by far Left groups I get the impression that the Left is a group of people who likes being angry. Attempts to generate enthusiasm and involvement invariably rely on hatred, anger and disgust - speakers at best recite a litany of crimes and at worst just a string of swear words to whip up angry hysteria - but never propose a positive alternative vision.

What's more worrying is the underlying feeling that these groups don't want to win over new recruits (and to be sure conversion isn't a popular idea on the Left) that they'd prefer to be the small group of special people who got it right, who can point the finger at everyone else.

What's disturbing is the amazing parallel between popular Left and popular Right. Both appeal to a dualistic good/evil dichotomy. The Right say "We are good, they are evil" outright and resort to shodily cannabilized Christian-sounding language to back it up. The Left are a little more subtle but leave no doubt through their litanies of crimes and sins of "the corporations" about who is "good" and who is "bad" - sometimes the "Enlightened" and the rest. The Right radically reinterpret and develop apocalyptic themes to construct a system of thought in which it is clear-cut who is good and who is bad and what will happen to the good and what will happen to the bad, and then they devote book after book to examining just how the "bad" are going to suffer. Again the Left are more subtle but the story is again one of a well-defined group of worthy individuals who will triumph over and destroy the evil powerful people.

What's completely absent is any attempt to find common ground or redeem or persuade those on the other side. No one on the Left is telling the story of how the right-wing shock-jock could be 'enlightened' and made to feel the despair and suffering of those he has previously despised and belittled. On the Right no one suggests that they could talk to the radical activist and explain their concerns about their children and the kind of society they will be left with.

What brought this home to me was one time when Roland brought a friend to our church. He introduced her, somewhat cheekily, as a Liberal. I didn't say anything, but I could tell from her reaction that the look that had crossed my face was not a friendly one. She seemed a little shocked and asked where I was coming from and I mumbled something about global justice and didn't say much more. Needless to say she never came back.

Now regardless of your politics that was a terrible way to treat a person. It achieved nothing in terms of political (or religious) progress and may have produced one slightly more bitter and resentful - and stubborn - Liberal.

The idea of victory that people in this conflict have seems to be the humiliation and casting aside of the opponent - John Howard and George W Bush swept from power and scorned for years to come, or David Marr and Bob Brown clapped in irons. To me that's not progress, that's just another casualty. And if you'd heard any of the stories of student politicians there are plenty of those on both sides, and they are often - not to be too melodramatic - permeanantly scarred.

I suspect that in that kind of self-destroying deadlock the Right will be able to continue to pay for lobbying, while the Left will be abandoned. Perhaps this is an explanation for the global shift to the Right we are experiencing.