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LEFT RIGHT OUT - THE
POLITICAL FALSE DICHOTOMY You might think there are bigger issues, but let me ask you this: How many issues can you think of that transcend it? How often do you see the left and the right come together to solve a problem that's bigger than their differences? Every grand struggle in western history - civil rights, suffrage, religious disputes, class disputes - seem to really be about one thing: Left versus right. And now, I'm hoping to thoroughly mindfuck you with the idea that this issue, this grandest of issues, does not exist. It is imaginary.  First, though, I'll go back to what I was saying about the hidden nature of the political dispute. I became interested in thinking about this when I was reading Richard Dawkins' work about atheism, and I discovered an interesting paradox in his arguments - Dawkins' central argument against religion, the scientific ethic, being that it is inherently wrong to believe an untruth, and immoral to share it. Before he even goes on to argue the God question, he posits that religious education is child abuse, and the very existence of belief in untruth, religion and superstition, is something worrying and harmful and in need of curing. Like smallpox. However, if you ask Dawkins about Buddhism, he's decidedly more polite. These Eastern, inward-looking, natury religions have some kind of interesting philosophies and really he doesn't have anything against them. He's even dabbled in it. This seems striking when held against his no-mercy assertion that religion should not be respected or tolerated by atheists, any more than atheism is by the religious. If you ask these new-wave angry atheists about the ban on depicting Mohammad in the media, they will shake their heads and ball their fists. But ask them what they think about the Aboriginal Dreamtime, or the ban on naming the deceased in the media lest we stir up ancient Indigenous spirits, they're likely to look awkwardly around the room and say something like "Well.... it's true to them." What I've come to discover is that Dawkins and the new atheists don't have a problem with religion so much as they do with conservatives. The Christianity/Judeism/Islam thing just seems to be part and parcel with that. We don't need to crush religion, we just need to trim the right side off of it. It's something that I've noticed in all of the great "-isms". I keep hearing from feminists that right wing women can't be feminists, while at the same time noticing that they will accept the intellectual leadership of a man - if he's lefty enough. In some cases it seems that female solidarity and unity isn't as important as just disposing of the right. But what do any of these issues have to do with left and right, really? Well, let's think about what these terms actually mean. In the popular lexicon, the definitions of left and right look something like this:  What we're really asserting here is, when you really think about it, absolutely absurd: There are two possible beliefs that any one person can have about every issue in society. You can be left, and believe everything in the left column, or you can be right, and believe everything in the right column. Very few people, if anyone, actually holds every belief in the column they identify with. And yet so many people don't consciously realise this, or feel a heavy guilt about it, and nevertheless think that everyone else falls into this dichotomy. I'm going to let you in on the little-known truth about what "left" and "right" actually mean. The terms emerged out of the French Revolution, and refer to the way in which wealth is distributed among the citizenry. Further to the left, wealth is owned and controlled by the state. Further to the right, it's owned by private citizens and corporations. People on the left tend to prefer taxation and generous welfare programs, while people on the right tend to prefer laissez-faire capitalism. That's pretty much it. Perhaps even lesser known is that there's another axis on this graph, adding up-and-down dimentions, which deal with how large and powerful the government gets to be. That's why the two deeply oppositional doctrines of socialism and anarchism can both exist and both be regarded left-wing:  The funny thing about this
graph is that most of the issues attributed to either column in the
image above don't even show up.
There are some that are obviously directly affected, like taxation as
opposed to welfare programs, and some others that are incidentally
affected by the level of government intervention, like substance
control and same-sex marriage. Others just seem to pop out of nowhere,
like atheism, vegetarianism and abortion.
The problem with the contemporary list of left and right-wing issues is that it's a real mixed bag of ideas. Welfare, socialisation of medicine and taxation may be purely economic issues, but whether meat is murder, fetuses have rights, and God is really a thing, are philosophical inquiries. Whether gun and drug controls are good things is a question for the social sciences. Feminism, racism and homophobia are social progress issues. Some things don't even seem to make sense, like the right-wing's desire to remove bans on guns and apply bans on drugs. Crazy conspiracy theories are a problem for everybody. The point is, there's no reason we couldn't have a right-wing state with gender, racial and sexual equality, legal abortion, and guns and drugs for everybody. An argument that might be leveled at this point is that definitions just change. Social progress and certain philosophical viewpoints just got swept up and categorised as left and right as time went on. I can't take a graph from the French Revolution and use it to invalidate a contemporary idea. To this I respond: Did you notice that I used Mussolini's chubby little head to illustrate the extreme right-hand corner up there, instead of a more recognisable square-moustached little bastard? Why is that? Well, it's because Hitler doesn't fit there. The Nazis hated capitalism just as much as Marx did, they thought it was an invention of the Jews used to keep the handsome blonde German workers down, and that's why "Nazi" is a portmanteu of "National Socialism". What I'm getting at is that the superiority of the colourful second image there is that it's a spectrum. Rather than a two-column table that asks you to pick a side, you get to float around a whole bunch of options and settle somewhere that you're comfortable. What's more is that you should notice that all four of the possible extremes - communist, fascist, anarchist and libertarian - are all concepts that carry a heavy pejorative burden. Few people want to be called any of these things. The realty is that most people are sitting somewhere close to the middle, accepting a certain degree of state influence and personal freedom. It's a far cry from the popular left-right dichotomy that assumes the state of the world is some prolonged battle between Stalin and Hitler. The question, then, is how did this false dichotomy come about, and become so enduring? Why does an opposition to abortion come packaged with an obsession with guns? Why does believing in God instil a hatred of state welfare? What do animal rights have to do with feminism and getting baked? I think it has something to do with our tendency to form groups, and fall into the ideologies of that group as a means of opposing some other group. See, no matter what our objective political graph looks like, inside our heads, the graph looks a lot more like this:  If you find your neighbours
views on state welfare abhorrent, then naturally you're going to find
everything else that person believes to be highly suspect. You find
that they have those views because they have associated with a group
that has the same views. So you find a group that supports your hatred
of everything the other group stands for, even while the other group is
doing the same thing to you. Over time and on a much larger scale, we
wind up with two enormous groups with bizarre ideological combinations
that suggest that, to stick it to the vegetarians, you have to be
extremely suspicious of the gays.
I don't tell people what to believe, because I agree with Socrates that the wisest man knows that he knows nothing. All I do ask is that you believe it for yourselves. Take seperate issues as seperate issues, and rationalise them seperately. I'll be curled up in my narrow band of common sense, quietly judging you.
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