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Well OK.<br>
<br>
I have always described myself as 'left' and I have been described as
everything from a Marxist to a 'moderate socialist and radical
democrat'. I have run politically from the left side of the spectrum,
and when asked to describe my politics, will either choose 'very
liberal' or 'socialist', depending on what the choices are. So I am in
a position to offer a response.<br>
<br>
But a response to what? "What is left?" That is, in the first instance,
an empirical question. What do the people who collectively lable
themselves 'left' believe, in the aggregate? But the result is not
likely to be anything I believe, nor is it very likely to be anything a
majority of left-leaning people believe, unless it is defined at such a
level of vagueness as to be uninformative. Moreover, the answers from
such a survey will vary with the questions asked, as Burmeister's post
shows. Is 'left' the party of change? Looked at from one perspective,
perhaps. Looked at from another, perhaps not.<br>
<br>
In any case, we are in such a state of flux that it probably makes more
sense to speak, not of what the left is, but what it ought to be. Not
so much from the perspective of political advocacy - as in, 'we ought
to save the environment' and 'we ought to support labour' - but as in
what ought to be thought of as the foundational views of the left.
Because it's very easy to get this wrong, and misleadingly wrong, by
glossing what is the fundamental distinction.<br>
<br>
To take an example, we hear that that the left is the party of the
poor, the 'working class', while the
right is the party of the rich. Such a definition automatically
disenfranchises any person of means from leaning left. But more
importantly, and more significantly, it separates people from their
aspirations. Mostly people do not want to be poor, do not want to be a
part of the working class, and insofar as the left represents such
people, it is because being poor or being a worker is associated with
bad things, like poverty and death. The left needs to be able to speak
to a person's aspirations as well and as clearly as it does to their
status or to their class, and identifying supporters of the left as
'the working class' fails to do this.<br>
<br>
Or another example, a commonly made distinction between right and left,
specifically, that the right is about 'individuals' while the left is
about the 'collective'. It is very tempting to take this definition,
and the term 'socialism' suggests that the left concerns itself mostly
with society, mostly with the affairs of groups, or more, in advocating
the rights of groups over those of the individual. But to simply state
the distinction thus is to miss some important differences between the
right and the left. Because the right will advocate for the rights of
the group when it suits them - when promoting nationalism and
patriotism, for example, or when appealing to people's religious
convictions. And it leaves the left open to a straw man attack, that it
is not concerned with the rights of the individual, which is simply
false.<br>
<br>
Another common way of distinguishing between left and right is to
characterize the left as the party of 'equality' while thinking of the
right as the party of 'privilege'. This certainly has historical
origins. But it again allows for misinterpretation. We are familiar
with the misuse of 'equality' as a means of preserving privilege, for
example. Opponents of affirmative action argue against the practice on
the grounds that it results in 'unequal' treatment. The simple doctrine
of 'equality' needs to be refined, to become something like 'equality
of opportunity' or 'proportionality'. With each refinement the basic
justice of the position is obscured, as the practice seems to allow
more and more unequal treatment. And then there is the clincher, that
to any simple observation, people in fact <i>are</i> unequal, and that
no amount of 'social engineering' is going to change that.<br>
<br>
And yet, if we reject all three principles, we get a rich individualist
who believes his position is the result of innate ability rather than
social injustice. Exactly, it seems, the opposite of what we would call
a representative of the left. And therefore, while these principles
cannot stand as definitive of the left, it certainly seems that there
is something captured by these principles that we would call
characteristically left.<br>
<br>
If I had to characterize what it is about right-wing political
philosophy that bothers people from the left, I would characterize this
aspect as the inherent 'atomism' of the right. This is the atomism that
informs classic liberalism, the idea of each individual agent striving
for his or her own personal advantage. This atomism is what informs
social darwinism, the 'survival of the fittest' mantra we so frequently
hear from the right (which is why they also declare that collective
action is 'unfair', since it distorts this <i>mano-a-mano</i>
competition). This is the individualism of Ayn Rand and the
libertarians, the elevation of 'genius' as a natural category, the
exaltation of CEOs and political leaders, the suggestion that people -
even the children - are in their station in life because of choices
they have made. "Take responsibility" and "don't be a victim."<br>
<br>
Atomism is an important doctrine and is at the heart of most of our
contemporary structures and institutions, which is why parties of the
right are today characterized as 'conservatives'. Atomism is, at heart,
the doctrine that the qualities of the whole are are not the
consequence of properties of the whole, but rather, are a consequence
of the properties of the individuals that make up the whole. Just as,
say, the nature of the bar of lead is not the 'leadness' that the bar
as a whole somehow possesses, but rather, is the result of the nature
of the individual lead atoms that make up the bar. In the same way, if
a society is, say, 'just', it is not because of some obscure property
of being a 'just society', but rather, is made up of the 'justice' in
each individual member of society.<br>
<br>
This way of viewing the right wing allows us to understand some of its
most perplexing attributes. We hear, repeated over and over, for
example, the doctrine of individuality. The right criticizes the left
because of the left's advocacy of 'central government' - and then turns
out to be the party encouraging nationalism and patriotism and
conformance to a central doctrine, whether it be religious truth or
hatred of a common enemy or instilling the values of good citizenship.
The right also criticizes the left for favoring rules and regulations -
for 'fettering the marketplace' - for example, and yet at the same
time, characterizes itself as the 'law and order' party, insisting that
criminals do maximum time. How do we make sense of this?<br>
<br>
As follows: the right, on the one hand, celebrates the individualism of
each atom, but at the same time, depends on the purity of each atom. If
the 'leadness' of a lead bar is mad up of the 'leadness' of each of its
atoms, then atoms that are not lead make the bar less lead-like. The
nature of a lead bar comes from its individual atoms, but the value of
a lead bar is derived from each of its atoms being the same. This is
why it is essential, from the perspective of the right, to preach the
apparently contradictory doctrines of individualism and conformity.<br>
<br>
Again, I want to stress that this theory is what informs our social and
political structures. Essentially, our institutions are made up of
'atoms' of similar types. Hence, in a democracy, each person receives a
vote, but the government is formed by people who all vote the same way.
Similarly, religious faith is a personal decision - this is enshrined
in various constitutions - but religious faiths are characterized as
people who have all reach the same religious point of view. And
nations, being composed of people who have the same race, the same
language, the same culture, are typically depicted as people who have
the same religion as well. Which is where we get not only the idea that
the United states (say) is a 'Christian country', but also, the idea
that it would be stronger if it were more Christian.<br>
<br>
We can see here how the depiction of the left, or of left-leaning
causes, as a 'mass movement' simply plays right into this picture. By
accepting the idea of 'mass movement', we are either accepting that
political movements are made up of masses of same-thinking individuals,
or we are presenting some sort of (fictional) 'general will' that will
be ascribed to, or imposed in some way, on the individuals comprising
the mass. And there then comes to be little to choose from between a
fiction imposed by the left and some set of principles, whatever they
happen to be, articulated by the self-designated representatives from
the right. Moreover, since the representatives from the right have
generally some advantage of wealth or position, it appears that there
must be <i>something</i> to what they are saying, because they have
achieved this position and wealth.<br>
<br>
Historically, the left has achieved success by emulating the strategies
and tactics of the right. The difference has been in the determination
of the beneficiaries of those strategies and tactics. Thus, when the
industrialists made themselves wealthy by owning the means of
production, members of the left sought to seize the means of
production. When the right wing resorted to military means to assert
its dominance, the left resorted to military means in kind. When the
right adopted the mechanism of the democratic vote (supplanted by
influence-generating systems to sway voters) the left also adopted the
mechanisms of political parties and propaganda. But what is important,
is that none of these strategies - not unionism, not communism, not
social democracy - <i>defines</i> the left. <br>
<br>
So what does? My own view is that, philosophically, we could see
leftism as a blend between the ideas of Immanual Kant and John Stuart
Mill. And, specifically, the following: from Mill, the idea that the
greatest social good is achieved when each person is able to pursue his
or her own good in his or her own way; and from Kant, the idea that
each person is, and ought to be treated as, an end, and not a means.
These are, I think, principles with which proponents would agree - and
more, principles with which, when pressed, proponents of the right
would disagree. Because, while at first glance these principles appear
to be atomist principles, they are not, and they are not in the way
that signifies what (to people on the left) constitutes the fundamental
flaw of conservative philosophy.<br>
<br>
We need to look at Rousseau to understand this. "Man is born free, and
yet everywhere he is in chains." Why is this? Where does our
imprisonment, our enslavement, come from? From <i>the requirement to
be the same</i>. From the requirement that we constitute, in our
atomism, one of the whole. When proponents of the right argue for, say,
the freedom to pursue the good, they do not mean a person's '<i>his or
her own good</i>', but rather, some sort of absolutist declaration of
what constitutes 'the good', whether it be derived from religion or
from misguided sense of national purity. And when proponents of the
right consider the 'value' of a person, they see this value as
conditional, based on a person's natural abilities, based on whether
they 'contribute to society', based on whether they are of the right
faith or the right nationality. <i>People are means</i> to make a
company great, to make a nation great.<br>
<br>
The fundamental principle of the left is that each individual person is
of value in and of him or her self, that this value is unconditional,
and that derived from this value ought to be certain (socially
constructed) rights and privileges. This is the origin of the doctrine
of equality, this idea that each person ought to have an equitable
share of the pie, a fair shot at the brass ring, or a right to a say at
the meeting. This is the origin of the idea that social systems that
leave people in poverty, in starvation, dispossessed and enslaved, is
fundamentally wrong - not because of some higher principle, about the
nature of the world or of society, but because of the simple truth,
that each person, including the indigent, has a basic and fundamental
standing in society. <br>
<br>
But why? You may ask. The answer is two-fold. First, in atomism, the
who may never be more than the sum of the parts. Atomism is a <i>quantitative</i>
philosophy. We don't ask what, where or why, we ask, "how much?" And
second, because atomism is a philosophy based on sameness, the whole
may never be better than the best of its parts. The best a bar of lead
can get is to be as good (as pure) as the best lead atom in the bar.
The point of atomism is not merely individualism, but that some
individuals in society <i>set a standard</i>, to which the rest ought
to aspire. But also, it is the idea that the decisions made by such a
society, will be the decisions made by individuals, with which the rest
will concur. The best decision, the best ideas, a society can have, are
the ideas articulated by an individual, to which the rest will adhere.<br>
<br>
But we know the weaknesses of each of those two parts. First, we know
that (to use the popular slogan) <i>the whole is greater than the sum
of its parts.</i> That a population - or even a mass of metal - has
properties that are over and above the properties of its individual
atoms. And second (and crucially), we know that these properties are <i>better</i>
than the properties of any individual in society. 'Better' not so much
in the sense of 'ethically good' (though a strong case could be made
for this) but, more concretely, 'better' in the sense of 'more
accurate'. If the ship of state is governed by one person, the captain,
then it has a greater probability of hitting an iceberg than if it is
governed by the whole.<br>
<br>
What the left has lacked for many years (what it has always lacked, in
my view) is an articulation of <i>why</i> the whole is greater than
the sum of the parts, of <i>how</i> that whole comes to be expressed,
and in the context where the fundamental principles, just articulated,
are essential elements of that articulation, and not accidental
correlates that could, in a contingency, be ignored. In other words, it
needs an articulation of why the whole is greater than some of the
parts in such a way that the essential liberty and standing of the
individual is never threatened.<br>
<br>
And that is accomplished by defining the whole as the result in
autonomous, thinking, communicating, rational autonomous agents, rather
than merely passive elemental atoms. Where the whole is created, not by
what we <i>are</i>, but by what we <i>do</i>, such that where the
actions of each person are seeing always as <i>contributing</i> to the
whole, not merely 'adding to' it or 'subtracting from' it. By viewing,
in other words, society, not as a mass, not as a machine, but as an
ecology, a network.<br>
<br>
In an ecology and in a network, the properties of the whole are not
created from the sameness of the components, but rather, as a result of
the interactions of the components. Consequently, the <i>properties</i>
of the network are not contained in any one individual in the network.
The network is not some big copy of an individual of the network. Nor
does it operate under the guidance and direction of one entity in the
network. If we think of a forest, for example. It is made up of a
mixture of trees and shrubs and birds and bears. There is no one part
of the forest that the rest copies. There is no 'sameness' in a forest,
except at very superficial levels. And the forest isn't governed in any
sense by any of its members, or by anything. The forest becomes what it
is as a result of the interactions of its members, such that <i>every</i>
entity in the forest contributes to what the forest becomes.<br>
<br>