The cosmopolitan conservative

From the excellent Janan Ganesh (FT):

Often, it is fear of causing offence that stops liberal-minded people engaging with vast tracts of the world. And so cultural sensitivity turns into its own kind of parochialism. If Forsyth was a workmanlike writer, he had a grander twin in VS Naipaul, who wrote on a global canvas despite or because of personal attitudes that some call reactionary. (Others have used a different r-word about him.) A modern liberal would not be as cutting about Africa and south-east Asia as Naipaul, it is true. But then don’t assume that a modern liberal would, in either sense of the phrase, “go there” at all.

I even wonder if a small amount of jingoism helps. You have to see the world from somewhere. The branding of this column, Citizen of Nowhere, is tongue-in-cheek: a reference to an old speech by one of our lesser prime ministers here in Britain. The truth is, without a starting point to which one is attached, it is hard to even register cultural differences, let alone comment on them. The result is that weird flattening jargon in which well-meaning people address the world. Rory Stewart remembers some first-class diplomatic baloney during his time in Afghanistan. “Every Afghan is committed to a gender-sensitive, multi-ethnic centralised state . . . ” and so on.

Recommended.