Left or Right? Pick one!
As the parlamental elections just happened here in Portugal, I found myself reflecting on a topic I normally don’t fuss about too much: my political stance. After so much thought about my boxing stance, I decided to switch it up a little.
When discussions came up about politics, as they inevitably do if you surround yourself with somewhat serious people, all I could do was evade what I understood as tricky questions, managing to not say much about my actual stance or partisan affiliations and sympathies. What I mean to do here is not unravel what I said in these “debates” into concrete stances: like Lomachenko, I prefer to keep my stances fluid. Rather, I will explain why I can’t commit to partisan politics in the same way as so many of the people I know. Before answering if I’m left or right, auth or lib, some other things must be settled.
What does it mean to be a person? What are the fundamental rights, principles and values attached to my political life as an individual? Answering this, to me, seems clearly logically precedent to deciding if there should be more or less taxes. Before thinking too concretely about parties, we must settle what holds the polity together. If we don’t do it consciously, we are doing it unconsciously — that is, we are accepting some preconceived notion of what society is and what it means to us. Both the left and the right wings give us pack answers to these questions.
In general, being a liberal leftist means thinking the most important value for our society, the thing we should strive to protect and maintain, is equality. To a leftist, then, justice means equality, in some shape or form (it may be equality of results or of opportunities, but this doesn’t matter for my purposes). We need a strong State to perform the heavy social fuctions required to make sure there is the least amount of unnecessary inequality possible. The sovereign individual inherently has a number of human rights, so that civilization is only legitimate to the extent it respects and guarantees them. John Ralws is the most famous example of someone who defends that this is the only version of a State that is rationally acceptable.
In general, again, being a liberal right winger means valuing liberty the most. By nature, libertarians will say, every individual is free to choose as he wishes, in accordance with his own self interest. This is the right to the pursuit of happiness, commonly conceived. The State can only be legitimate if this fundamental right is respected. Because of this, taxation should be kept to a minimum, as it would mean taking the power to decide what to do with the value produced by the individual away from him, and into the State. The sovereign individual must be responsible for his own fate, and if he ends up in a lesser position, he can blame no one but himself. Robert Nozick is a famous example of an exponent of this view: less regulation means more meritocracy, so the rationale goes.
If these are the options, broadly speaking, some issues seem to take precedence. First, concrete questions, such as: Can the free market actually allow for meritocracy? Is taxation an actually effective method of reducing inequality? Are the problems we see now related to capitalism and free market economy or with corporativism and State regulations? Later, we might ask some normative questions: Is equality a better value than liberty? Why are they in conflict? Should the State be responsible for the less advantageous? Or should everyone be responsible for only himself?
It is in the normative questions that we start to get a glimpse of the problem. Indeed, why the conflict between liberty and equality? The answer might go something like: “Well, you see, because people left to their own devices use everything in their capacity to their advantage. And when they are put in a system of competition, their advantage might pressupose the other’s disadvantage. In free competition, people will want to be above the others, they strive to be ‘better than’. Being ‘better than’ pressuposes inequality.”
If we see shadows of Rousseau and Kant loom large in the cage of liberal leftism, the same goes for the echoes we hear of Hobbes and Mill in the cage of the liberal right. Both products of the Modern Era, they share some interesting assumptions, that I left unquestioned so far (and normally are left that way too, in generic political discourse). In the last two questions I mentioned above, there is a false dillema: either the State is responsible for the disadvantaged, or they are responsible for themselves. Why only these two alternatives? What else could be considered?
If you’ll allow me a small detour, I will talk about ethics in this paragraph. Among the many common assumptions shared by both Kant and Mill, is the idea that morality is something that exists from an individual perspective: either we understand a rational moral law that each one may deduce a priori and by himself (to universalize the maxims of our actions), following the Law he imposes on himself, or we calculate the consequences of our actions considering how it affects the pleasure of all those involved in it (every pleasure-capable creature counting the same as any other, of course). Morality needs to be impartial and universal to be rational, they assume. Cultural values are partial and therefore irrational, then. So customs and traditions can’t support rational morality. Only the individual, specifically insofar as his rational capabilities go (to calculate and deduce — the only thing left of rationality in Modernity), can achieve moral reasoning.
This individualism is what is behind the philosophy of “contractualism”, represented by Hobbes and Rousseau. In a state of nature, they assume, morality does not (cannot) exist. Men are alone and either in a war against everyone (for Hobbes and his offspring, the psychos at Wall Street), or in a pure state of blissful ignorance that is put in danger as soon as men organize politically, putting in motion the conditions for exploitation and evil (for Rousseau and his offspring, the psychos at Antifa ralleys).
The thing that needs to be clear here is that both of them assume, and wrongly so, that in his natural state, every individual man is alone and can only trust himself. But that is obviously not true. As the mammals we are, our natural state is living in groups. Aristotle, the father of Western biology, already knew this long, long ago. Human beings are not like eagles or lone wolfs that live alone and “agree” or “consent” to participate in society, if it is advantageous. There is no consent involved: without being in a group first, the capacity to consent would never be developed. We need other people and other people need us. Human rationality can never develop without education, which requires initiaiton into a tradition and group. The impartiality to which Kant and Mill aspire is delusional.
The same goes for Ralws and Nozick. The veil of ignorance that supposedly allows us to choose the perfect society impartially, ignores the fact that it still is someone choosing — someone with particular values, someone initiated in a particular tradition that just so happens to value liberty and equality and so on. The pursuit of “self interest” that Nozick and right wingers spout about, on the other hand, is a conveniently elastic concept: we pursue whatever it is that we think is important. Oh, gee! Who would have thought?! The real question is: what is it that we value, specifically, and why? We will find that all values are constructed in a group setting. Inevitably, our interest involves the well being and flourishing of those around us. Ethics cannot be “impartial”: it comes from Love — a thing both rational and partial at the same time.
The idea that the State should help the disadvantaged implies that no one will if there is no burocratic institution using compulsion through force as a threat (incentive!). After all, people are selfish and are only out for themselves. The idea that people are fully and only responsible for their own fate pressuposes that living in society with other people implies no sense of responsibility for them and for the group to which one belongs. But these things are not true.
Most people know, despite the failure of modern ethical theories to point out the obvious, that caring for those near us is a very big part of what it means to be a good person. There are selfish people, it is true — and the individualism implicit in the contractualism of our way of thinking might push us to that, make us feel that this is just “how things are”. But that there are selfish people doesn’t mean that everyone is, or should be (in fact, we should not!).
Our “self interest” is not so contained in our atomized “self” as liberals might assume. If I give free philosophy lessons to my friends or help people I love however I can, that doesn’t make me either selfless and altruistic or manipulative and expectant of something in return. It just means I care about my friends and want them to learn. It means I want them to share my passion. Being capable of Love means widening the range of both interest and responsibility for my self. If I love, being me means caring for that which I love. If I love, my self interest is not confined “egoistically” to my self.
But some think that the State, that cold and distant entity, the absent Father of our society, is the only thing that can have other people’s interests in mind. People are mere selfish children who can see no further than the candy they want. The State must decide for them, the State must proveide and take care, through a series of impersonal contracts and documents that legitimize our right (!) to some social help or other. Others think that we must eliminate the need for that absent Father and go out into the world on our own: we are grown teens now, we can take proper care of ourselves! If we fail, we fail. We don’t need that dirty money from Father, or his limitations on how much candy we can eat. We can earn our own money and spend it in however much candy we want!
Growing up into adulthood, of course, means learning that candy is, obviously, very nice, but other things are more important. Spending money with “whatever you want” is infantile. We also learn that as we get bigger, more and more people are smaller than us. As we get more capable, it is increasingly on us to provide for them. Delegating this responsability to a distant patron or political sugar daddy is the political equivalent of Peter Pan Syndrome. It is not the State that is responsible for the well being of all people. It is not the individual’s own responsibility alone to carry the burden of his own weight — unless he isolates himself and chooses to live this way. Rather, living in community, in society, means caring for those around us. Being part of a school means assuming responsibility for that institution and the people there. The same goes for church, our family, our neighbourhood and even (albeit only in a wider sense) the nation and the world.
Where society is not centered and “legitimized” by some weird form of passive consent through a fake contract, it must be centered around shared values. The liberal idea of “what I do is up to me and no one else” holds no ground any longer. The “impartial” procedimentalist ethics of Kant and Mill, that tell us the rules of the game without pointing us toward an end (since the individual is “free” to choose or make up — or not — his own ends), must come to an end. Society must revolve around an agreed upon conception of what is human flourishing: it cannot be governed by an impartial State. (It is about time we admit that no State is impartial, that liberalism’s impartiality is a facade for subreptitously held values under the cover of “objetive impartiality”).
Every individual might be seen, not as an “egoist gene”, not as a burden to other’s freedom and rights, but as a centre from which Love emmanates. The stronger the Love, the more it encompasses. First, we must love only what is closest, for we might not be strong enough to carry the burden of a whole nation on our backs. Only after caring for our families, might we start to care for the neighbourhood, the school, the city, the country. We must humble ourselves and restrict our actions to where they have palpable effect. It will be a very select few who will be able to affect a nation.
But the system now does not work that way. Now we have “democratic elections”, which means counting (not hearing) every single person, turning them into a number, and deciding who rules the State based on this number. No wonder civic participation is low. No wonder people don’t care about elections unless they are lost in the circus puppet show that is put on. Campaigns to encourage voters say that “every vote counts”, but we know that’s not true. Statistically, our vote makes maybe 0.00000001% difference. But hey, it’s not literally 0%!
People think that, to be moral and to participate in civil society, they must decentralize themselves and count as if no one matters more than anyone else (which is almost identical to saying that no one matters at all). This is, I think, the reason for disullusionment with politics nowadays. This is the reason we have so many alt-right guys who want a strong State to protect their values and traditions. Authoritarians too, can’t conceive of their values and traditions holding up for themselves without the threat of force behind them.
So this is why I hesitate to affiliate with parties. Taxation and the State programs that stem from it treats everyone like a number. I have no sympathy for meddling burocracy of this kind. But the free market mentality of kill or be killed, foolishly “legitimized” by Darwin and the “survival of the fittest”, is also morally abhorrent to me. So, if a kid goes to a sports tournament, the only options are trophies for everyone or a coach who peaked in highschool telling his athletes to “do whatever it takes to win”? Fair competition without making of adversaries enemies is a kind of maturity that our adolescent ideologies can’t fathom yet.
Until we get there, I just abstain from engaging and try to send some love from my side.
