Manichaean Morality

Norman Geras writes in the current issue of Dissent magazine about The Reductions of the Left. From his reflective essay's conclusion:

I have written about the political dispositions of a significant segment of the left, some of it of Marxist persuasion or formation, and some of it not, although the latter also socialist and sharing with the Marxist part the same tendencies to practical reductionism and deficiency of moral imagination that I have here set out. I would suggest also, however, that within the international "peace" movement, as it flatters itself to be, there is an even wider constituency, not only not Marxist but not recognizably socialist either - liberals, radicals, greens, anarchists, and other progressives of one kind and another - which exhibits variants of the same double tendency I have diagnosed: on the one hand, the practical reductionism by which the wrongs of the world are lightly referred back to their alleged causes, whether in U.S. foreign policy, or economic hardship, or grievance, or whatever; on the other hand, a disinclination or refusal to acknowledge in their full magnitude and moral significance the political evils for which other states, organizations, and movements are responsible.

This wider constituency has not been my subject here, and I will not attempt to account for it at length. I offer merely this conjecture. There is a looser, progressivist, and (so to say) "sociologizing" variant of the themes I have focused on above, whereby wrongdoing in the world, and much worse than wrongdoing, has nearly always to be seen as somehow redeemable by reference to background social conditions-which may then be taken as alleviating the scale of the wrongs, or the worse-than-wrongs, in question. (I say "nearly" always, because the forever blameworthy are excluded from this explanatory indulgence.) You only have to attend for a few weeks to the left-liberal press and the traffic on the opinion and letters pages there in order to find this wider constituency, most of it unattached to Marxist doctrine of any kind, yet very attached to the thematic couple that has been the subject of this essay. There is, of course, another way of characterizing its outlook. It is Manichaean: everything bad in the world drains away from one side of it toward the other.