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Brendan O’Neill asks why the fall-out from the terrorist attacks in Northern Ireland has been concentrated on the language used to condemn them rather than the killings themselves:

The entire political process becomes re-focused around words and gestures and statements and postures. Everything is directed towards ‘building confidence’. This is why it is called a peace process, because it’s a permanent thing, a continual process of keeping and managing the peace.

New York Times columnist David Brooks made a very similar point about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - but unlike O’Neill he seemed to favour the idea that politics is a goalless process. The difference is a fundamental one that relates to two totally divergent conceptions of politics.

Brooks is a conservative. For him, politics is never really more than a process, because it is impossible to give it a defined endpoint. The role of politics is not to “improve” human life, but to prevent catastrophe - which always lurks around the corner. Like Michael Oakeshott, whom he quotes, Brooks is profoundly suspicious of the idea of progress.

O’Neill is basically a Marxist; like Marx he wants clear goals. Underlying this desire is a belief in the possibility of utopias - and a faith in the possibilities of human progress. Like his mentor, O’Neill defends the tradition of the Enlightenment, the very thing that Brooks attacks.

I am personally with Brooks on this one. What’s more interesting to me though, is that two people from completely opposite ends of the political spectrum can reach the same conclusion about the pre-eminence of confidence.

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