Moving Beyond The Right Wing - Left Wing Dichotomy

Moving Beyond The Right Wing — Left Wing Dichotomy

I would like to make the argument that the right-left dichotomy is a false one and that they share many things in common and so we need to get past them both.

Overtly, the difference of right and left consists in this — the right believes that history of a particular group of people is special and determines the identity and the values of that group of people and this history cannot be overturned. They agree with enlightenment that reason cannot ground religion and tradition, we cannot prove many things that are nevertheless still valuable to us and so reason is not sovereign. Some things have a sentimental value and they are not the less if no proof of them is forthcoming.

The split between right and left can be traced back to the period of enlightenment when Pascal reacted against Descartes’s rationalism by arguing that religion is grounded in the ‘heart’ and not in reason. Pietism inspired by this line of thought emphasizes personal relationship with God and emphasizes the value of feeling but this is the formal aspect, as regards the content pietism depends dictates of the scripture which are revelations and have no rational grounding. This wisdom is given as a gift to people, it is not something they are intrinsically capable of knowing. But something in the receiver must know what it has received and for this we require appeal to non-rational sources of knowledge. Pietism is ironically the ancestor of Existentialism which began to abstract more and more from the content of scriptures to feeling of intensity.

There is another strand of right-wing thought according to which history and tradition is not the only factor that explains cultural differences. Genius, talent, capacity, everything that makes one individual different from another is a product of mother nature and this explains why we have different outcomes. This conservatism is a scientific materialism that believes religion and culture can be explained through laws of evolution and that biology grounds culture. This is not to demonstrate the rationality of culture but to show its inevitability. Moral law is also in the end a physical law but this is not their justification because religion and ethics spring from prejudices hard-wired into us by nature. So moral laws are no longer prescriptive but descriptive laws. 

The problem with both these strands is that feelings and evolutionary psychology can justify any content because the historical origin or the presence of a content is taken to be sufficient justification of it. So any current belief of the society can be justified by appeal to science, at one point of time slavery and colonialism were considered to have scientific justification.

Following Nietzsche we can make a distinction between order of ranks morality and the morality of pity. Nietzsche weighs in, in favor of the former and against the latter. According to the morality of pity, what is good for one cannot be bad for another and everyone should be treated fairly. The order of ranks is based on individual differences caused by evolution and what is true and moral for one set of people is not so for another. There is a reason some people do better than others and we should not pull them down. Cruel as this sounds there is an ethical intuition to back it up, morality is care for the individual and by making everyone the same we stifle the individual by obliterating individual differences. One ethic believes in ending suffering and another sees suffering as a condition of growth. But while Nietzsche et al take these two types of morality to be exclusive, philosophers like Plato, Aristotle and Hegel have strived to show otherwise. The necessity of reconciling them can be emphasized in the following way, if only order of ranks morality is emphasized then it means that there are no universal moral standards applicable and what is moral for me need not be so for you, I because I am stronger and special in some way can and should be able to hurt you while the you the weaker party have no such justification. If only order of pity is emphasized then it means that I have to treat you the same and this leads to obliterating individual differences because it is the equality of the graveyard.

Coming to the Left, it commits itself against anything particular or local because that is an expression of limitation on freedom. What is real is the universal, universal brotherhood and universal humanity implying a world without boundaries where there is no ownership but all resources are shared. The family, the society and nationalism are anathema because they narrow down the scope of activity of humans confining their ethical beliefs and conduct to a narrow field of activity leading to their not extending those ethics to other groups of people. Here we see an agreement between right and the left, the particular has no grounding in the universal, it is an aberration and something historically contingent but while this makes the historical expression of a people valuable to the right, it discredits culture and tradition is the eyes of the left. The proper way to categorize the world is in terms of classes, races, ethnicity groups that emerge due to material factors in the course of history. Both the right and the left are moral relativists since they believe that the values embodied in a culture is peculiar to that culture, so values are ‘western’ or ‘white’, for instance. Furthermore, values are instruments of domination of society over individuals and of one race over another, it is the means through which the slave is made to acquiesce to his slavery. It is the means through which one group of people deny the freedom of another.

It is an indication of the inherent unity of right-left that right-wing philosophers like Heidegger and Nietzsche have been well utilized by Marxist philosophers (see Herbert Marcuse’s appropriation of Heidegger and Sartre’s combination of existentialism and Marxism). This leads us to the next stage of the left.

While materialism denies the right of subjectivity and Marxism seeks the establishment of a communist utopian state which is the ultimate triumph of human reason where it has forged equality by stifling all individual differences, post-modernism positions itself against reason. Episteme is knowledge around which a society organizes itself and this always involves including some and excluding other. Knowledge as Foucault points out is an expression of power, historical processes are meaning-forming processes that do not depend on solely material factors but involve a subjective take. What is important is to straddle the paradigm that leads us to a new episteme and a new age. No episteme however has absolute truth and no paradigm can prove its own validity. The essence of post-modernism is anti-essentialism, there are no meta-narratives and Marxism’s problem is that it too is a meta-narrative and seeks the triumph of its version of truth over others, but its version has no greater validity than any other, useful as it may be in other respects. The talk of universal friendship is fine but at any given point a society will organize itself around an episteme and this will involve inclusion of some and exclusion of others and post-modernists are at peace with it. The point is not to get trapped in this particular expression or the limiting ego but to free oneself from these limits once they have served their utility and move to a new expression. Foucault points out to gays that the gay identity is determined by or has meaning in terms of its opposite and so one should not be trapped in this identity but when it has served its purpose, one needs to shed it off like old skin and move to another new identity. There is no inner-truth to any identity, to be a woman for instance is to be like a woman, to appear to be a woman — beyond this external appearance there is no truth to the distinction of man-woman. Since there is no inner essence, one thing can be made into another and this ‘making’ is the truth of the thing. It is the triumph of subjectivism over reality, practical reason overhauls theoretical reason. Now everything is a construct, rights, values, cultures — the will reigns supreme and everything is made up.

Many religious theologians who have given up on reason have adopted a post-modern theology. This theology does not disprove God who is an unknowable beyond. Faith and religion can be seen as relative and peculiar to a group of people with a certain history and no one faith is superior to another nor is there any measure to measure faith. With reason all sense of measure goes. Religion is based not on reason but feelings which themselves are historically conditioned facts and which need no higher tribunal of appeal. Nothing else demonstrates the inherent unity of right and left, their inner dialectic lead them to meet one another. But while there is nothing beyond conviction to justify a set of practices and no conviction is higher than another, an order of ranks morality still creeps in. The right affirms the right of the majority or the natives over other cultures and morality, the left affirms the right of minorities, the presupposition being that the good of one section of the society is what is good for the whole. Both lack a rational framework to reconcile individual differences against the bedrock of a common code of morality. There is no common good and it is just one group of people going after another; the same game played with different identity groups.

To use Henry Kissinger’s terms (in A World Restored: Metternich and Castlereagh and I would emphasize you to look at what is said not who says it which line of thought is antithetical to both right and left), they live in an ethic of loyalty not an ethic of duty:

“The motivation of a stable order is a concept of duty — the assertion of the self-evidence of the social maxims — where alternative courses of action are not rejected but inconceivable. The motivation of a revolutionary period is a concept of loyalty, where the act of submitting the will acquires a symbolic and even ritualistic significance, because alternatives seem ever present. An ethic of duty involves a notion of responsibility which judges actions by the orientation of the will. It is for this reason an ethic of motivation, striving to achieve identification of the individual code with a standard of morality which, no matter how rigid, must become individually accepted in order to be meaningful. An ethic of loyalty involves a notion of orthodoxy, because it is a means to achieve a group identity. It does not exclude the identity of the individual with the social code, but it does not require it. “Right or wrong my country” — this is the language of loyalty. “So act that your actions could become by your will universal laws of nature” — this is the language of duty. Duty expresses the aspect of universality, loyalty that of contingency.”

In the center are classical liberals who are also labelled as conservatives these days. Liberalism did a service to humanity by emphasizing the value of subjectivity beyond his group identity making it possible for any human being to adopt a life and profession as his personal choice beyond what their surname dictate. But this comes at a cost because all forms of identity that shaped an individual were made contingent or something open to choice and the conception of subjectivity is made abstract and indeterminate because acceptance of any content would be seen as limiting and binding and also the link between individual and his community is severed. This political system is based on distinction of state and society and in a democracy people get together to choose what is best for them. But the workability of this system depends on the existence of a custom and the unity of the people (and liberalism undermines its own foundations) which unity when it is severed and devolves into an ethic of loyalty, this world-view them becomes clueless as to what to do about it. It is an unstable position that will fritter away into one of the two sides — right or left because the right-left split occurs from the vantage point of liberalism.

In practice I have noticed that what the right wing is doing in India, the left is doing the same in the West and their historical manifestations have been similar in terms of totalitarianism and violence.

To borrow some further terms from Kissinger, the conservativism I have been criticizing is called historical conservativism in contrast with rational conservativism. It is the latter position which for the lack of a better term that I am adopting here. This position as I am formulating it asserts that societies are governed by its laws just like nature is by physical laws and one is not reducible to another. These laws are laws of reason. Freedom and order are not only compatible but rather there can be no freedom without order. Authority understood as based on reason is not capricious, not reducible to will-to-power and reason, truth, morality, beauty and freedom are objective and real. This position can be called ‘normative realism’. Tradition, religion and politics are expressions of human nature which is both rational and animalistic. Historical Conservatism makes contingent factors or fortuitous circumstances of miracles, scriptures, existence of historical personalities, historical events etc. essential to religion but the ground for belief really is inner testimony of the spirit. Only rational beings are capable of having a religion. I see this philosophy as stemming from philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, Hegel (if correctly understood) and they conceive reason and finite human understanding as distinct (the distinction between reason and understanding was drawn first by Kant, utilized later by Hegel but is applicable to Plato et al) and this distinguishes their view from enlightenment which makes finite reflective understanding supreme and so distorts the content of religion and the foundations of society. Reason is the unity of subject-object, inner-outer, theory and practice, universal and particular. This is a very broad outline of my position but it steers clear of the dichotomy of right and left while retaining the best of two worlds and I invite readers to look into it with an open mind and even if they are not convinced by it I would emphasize to them the need to get past the right-left binary because it may be that even while taking a different route the two camps are still reaching the same destination.