It must have been some time in 2003 that I came across an
article in a Sunday newspaper, about a Marxist professor who supported the Iraq
war. Although it had been a long time since I’d called myself
any kind of Marxist, and at the time I was sceptical of the rationale for
invading Iraq, I was intrigued. Perhaps it was because I’d been having my own
internal debates with conventional Left thinking and was increasingly
disappointed and depressed by my fellow progressives’ failure to condemn (and
in some cases their tendency to find apologetic ‘explanations’ for) terror and tyranny, as long as it was
directed at the ‘imperialist’ West. To my shame, I
hadn’t heard of Norman Geras before then, despite the fact that he was a
recently retired professor at Manchester, where I’d been a postgraduate
student.
The newspaper article mentioned that Geras wrote
something called a ‘blog’ – the first time I’d come across this neologism. Curious, I looked up the eponymous normblog and was immediately
hooked. I found myself nodding in frequent agreement with Norm’s concise but
elegant posts and reading his disquisitions soon became a daily habit. From
normblog, I branched out to read the bloggers and commentators that he linked
to, many of them associated with the Euston Manifesto, of which Norm was one of
the key authors, and the broader anti-totalitarian, liberal-interventionist
Left. As well as finding myself in immediate sympathy with many of Norm’s
political opinions, I’m happy to acknowledge that he was also influential in
changing my mind on a number of important issues, most notably Israel. In fact, as
time went on, I came to see Norm as one of the key influences on my political
thinking, on a par with figures like Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall
at earlier stages in my life. Of course, it wasn’t all about politics: Norm was
just as stimulating and entertaining when writing about Jane Austen, country
and western music, John Ford movies, cricket or his beloved Manchester United.
As time went on, I decided I wanted to be a
participant in, and not just an observer of the online debates to which Norm had introduced me,
so I started my own blog. I was enormously flattered when Norm started to link
to my own posts, and like many other bloggers, I regarded being granted a
normblog profile as the highest possible accolade. I now realise that, as well as being
the inspiration and model for my blogging, Norm was also my imaginary ideal reader: on many occasions, I’ve held back from posting something, not so much because I
thought Norm would disagree with it, but because I knew the argument wouldn’t
come up to his exacting standard.
Despite his towering reputation as a political philosopher, Norm was a generous
supporter and nurturer of the talents of others, and although I had only met
him virtually, I regarded him as a mentor and a friend. Then, earlier this
year, came the opportunity to meet him in person: Norm and Adele Geras kindly invited Helen
and me to lunch at their new home in Cambridge. I was as nervous as it’s
possible to be at meeting one of my political gurus, but we were made to feel very welcome. Norm must have been
quite ill at the time, but characteristically he didn’t mention it once.
Instead, we got a guided tour of his book collection, including the unrivalled
cricket section, and the extensive ‘waiting to be read’ shelf. I was surprised to
discover that this most well-informed of bloggers, who somehow managed to read
and comment on everything before the rest of us, was in the habit of not
switching on his computer before mid-morning. Instead, he spent the first hour
of each day reading a novel – a practice that he repeated every evening.
Normblog regulars will be aware that he was a voracious reader of fiction,
something that I believe shone through in the imaginative and humane sympathy
that characterised his posts.
Nick Cohen has written about his own habit of
turning to normblog when he wanted to find a way through a difficult moral or
political issue. For many of us, ‘What does Norm think?’ became a reflexive
response to perplexing items of news or complex debates. One of the many
sadnesses of his passing is that he’ll no longer be around to help us think
things through in his characteristically clear, rational, humane and often highly amusing way. That won’t stop us from occasionally wondering 'What would Norm
have thought?’ And that won’t be a bad starting point for any debate.
