Cassilis

For someone who makes a living with words Martin Amis is peculiarly reckless with them. In his interview with Johan Hari in today’s Independent there’s plenty of ammunition for those inclined to lazily tag Amis as a racist. I have to say though, despite Hari’s obvious affection for the younger, more left-wing Amis his intention here appears to have been simply continuing the Eagleton row rather than getting to any explanation or deeper understanding of Amis’s position.

Hari takes Amis to task for what he describes as his ‘cognitive dissonance’:

“With the right lobe of his brain, Amis tells me he loves our multiracial society, and he says it with vigour and rigour. I don’t for a second think he’s lying. But then, with his left lobe he passionately praises a write who seems to me to be an outright racist, one who damns virtually all Muslims as secret Sharia-carriers and brags that the “white” birth-rate is still higher in the US. It is as though Amis has been fractured by the kerosene blast of September 11 into two people – and they aren’t talking”

If there is any ‘dissonance’ here it’s between Amis’s fairly straightforward attitude to race (which he shares with Hari) and Hari’s rather simplistic and over-the-top characterisation of Mark Steyn (which he doesn’t). The sentiments Hari attributes to Steyn represent his take on the Canadian polemicist and clearly not one that Amis shares - it’s hardly fair then to call this out as an inconsistency on Amis’s part.

As far as I can see there’s nothing dishonourable or particularly complicated about Amis’s position – certainly nothing ‘dissonant’. He has a fairly straightforward liberal attitude to race and culture as aspects of his background touched on by Hari illustrate. But as a thinking man he’s simply trying to acknowledge that there are serious problems that these attitudes don’t address and we should say so. Arguably Hari has a dissonance all his own in that he acknowledges he doesn’t believe Amis to be racist but then seems remarkably hostile to Amis’s attempts to broaden the conversation a little, introduce alternatives and hypotheticals - at this point Hari retreats to his ‘Amis is a racist’ position and seems curiously reluctant to engage him on any of the issues he raises.

Referring back to the quote that Eagleton uncovered and that caused last years row Hari suggests that Amis might be prepared to advocate racial profiling:

“If you make a list of all the people who have committed terrorist acts and see what their provenance is, and if they turn out to be white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, search them. It's not a moral question - its expediency, and something you hate to do, but if this increases, if this goes up a magnitude, these are questions we will face."

The key phrase is ‘questions we will face’ – Amis is highlighting the tensions between a standard liberal outlook on things like profiling and a potential set of circumstances that might cause us to question them at some point. It seems to me that he’s trying to engage Hari in discussion about these things but he (Hari) just stages this as some sort of irreconcilable position and moves on.

Amis himself has a good quote on the dangers of marking some areas off-limits for discussion:

"[Discussing Islamic fundamentalism is] so saturated in revulsions that people can't go near it. But we should go near it... Just because there have been horrible abuses based on this way of thinking doesn't mean that it's not worth considering, or that it's so radioactive that you don't dare go near it. That is the defeat of reason."

Arguably, of course, this was a more general interview rather than a specific attempt to go over the original row but I just wish Hari had been a little braver and more willing to engage with Amis – we might have learned a little more about both men.

Labels: Politics