In Tom Stoppard's new play on Broadway, "Rock and Roll," a character named Max, a professor at Cambridge University in 1968, remains an unreconstructed old-school communist. In his review in the New York Sun, Nicholas Wapshott compares him to our own intellectuals blinded today by tunnel-vision ideology, "trapped in their entrenched positions, too proud to admit a mistake, too closed in their minds to appraise the mounting evidence against their case."
In modern times, such blindness proliferates among so-called intellectuals who insist on blaming America first and George W. Bush foremost for everything that goes wrong in Afghanistan and Iraq. Hating the president is as old as the presidency itself, possibly excepting the first one. Blamemongering is particularly virulent today, often preventing rational discussion. "Bush hatred compels its progressive victims -- who pride themselves on their sophistication and sensitivity to nuance -- to reduce complicated events and multilayered issues to simple matters of good and evil," writes Peter Berkowitz, professor at George Mason University School of Law, in the Wall Street Journal. "Like all hatred in politics, Bush-hatred blinds to the other sides of the argument, and constrains the hater to see a monster instead of a political opponent."
Politics often resonates in polarities, but today the polarities are infused with fanatical loathing that distorts everything, enabling moral preening. Hatred becomes the handmaiden of illogical argument and impairs both judgment and the pursuit of creative solutions. It clouds our humanity.
In a transformative scene in the movie "The Lives of Others," an evil Stasi agent shares an elevator with a little boy. Just as the door closes, the boy's soccer ball rolls between them. As the boy picks it up, he asks the agent if he is a member of Stasi: "My dad says you're a bad man who throws people in jail." The agent replies with a question: "What is the name of . . . " The audience tenses, waiting for the agent to finish the sentence. Like Satan confronting Eve, the agent is suddenly disarmed by the boy's purity and innocence. Like Satan confronting Eve, he stands "stupidly good." Then he finishes the sentence with a surprise that lacks malevolence. "What is the name of your ball?" Illumination can learn to wear a human face, too.