Pertinent observations from Terry Eagleton:
For a long time, they were quite divergent politically: Hitchens was still some kind of socialist and Amis was vehemently anti-communist in an uninteresting, cold war kind of way. But they've since converged. And now they're old cronies backing each other up - instant responses to attacks on the other.
I'm interested in the way a whole stratum of the liberal literati (Rushdie, to some extent Ian McEwan, A C Grayling, obviously Amis and Hitchens) - the very people you'd have expected to be guardians of the liberal flame of tolerance and understanding - have, at the very first assault, rushed into these caricatured postures driven by panic. I'm very struck by how those who are making ugly, illiberal, supremacist noises about the superiority of the west are precisely the sort of literary and liberal characters from whom you'd expect more imagination, openness and sensitivity.
My opinion on the matter is that it's too challenging for the members of what Eagleton calls the liberal liberati to remain liberal all the time and to remain radicals, bold and fresh writers. It helps when you write to be angry and to feel the need to aim it intolerantly at somebody.
Comments