I Don't Know My Right From My Left

The following is a guest post from my colleague, classics scholar and philosopher, and accomplished musician (Sly Stone, Grateful Dead), Steve Schuster.

As I grow older, many things , that I once felt were simple, now seem to grow more complex. One of the political concepts I felt I understood as a younger person was summarized by the terms "right" and "left." As I learn more of the world, I find the terms less and less meaningful. I discover the terms are being consciously used to obfuscate clarity and to trigger "knee jerk" emotional reactions. Once one realizes that one is being manipulated, it becomes important to defuse the mechanisms used to perform the manipulation by understanding the process.

Trying to find a consensus for the meanings of "right " and "left" mirrors the difficulty in nailing down a consensus about the processes these simple terms supposedly represent. Before trying to analyze the implied meanings of our terms, it is worth trying to understand how and why we, and the holders of political power, use them.

Manichaeism pervades our public (and private) thought process. It is the nature of our physical brain process to reduce complex questions to bipolar simplicity to expedite finding solutions. However, the number of bipolar decisions we use to make up our perceptual models is dependent on our interest, our intellectual curiosity, and our training. We are trained to think in state run schools and many of us appear to be intentionally badly trained so that we use only very simplified and crude components in our political reasoning.

We are constantly presented with complex ethical situations interpreted in black and white, good and bad. Greys are not presented as options. There are pragmatic reasons that make this simple dualistic view of the world valuable to those in power. Those in power, in a democracy, must control public opinion in order to continue to hold legal power. Using dualistic concepts and terms makes a consolidation of opinions easier. It can create an illusion of a consensus where more accurate, more careful reasoning might present a multiplicity of opinions and choices that would be much more difficult to forge into a unified power bloc. By dividing all questions into only two possible answers, there will always appear to be a majority and a minority answer, rather than a number of nonaligned opinions. Thus , there can always be the illusion of a consensus in a pluralistic society, no matter how fragmented the true feelings of the citizens may be. "Right and left" are shorthand terms for polarizing the possible answers to all political questions. Unfortunately most problems are so complex that breaking everything into two opposing forces merely prevents a real understanding, much less a real solution.

Many of us believe that we can escape extreme distortions of right or left positions by finding a "middle/moderate" position. However, a reasonable position may bear no relationship to either of the polar views presented by the government and the media. It is as though one were offered the option of living in either Los Angeles or New York. Professing a desire to keep to the middle ground would suggest living in Omaha, while one's natural inclinations might suggest San Francisco or Atlanta to be a better personal choice. If the polar ends of the decision are presented only as L.A. or N.Y. C., the attractive options of S.F. or Atlanta are not presented as middle ground.

Since the forces and choices of political alignment are so complex, no one can long embody an unambiguous right or left position. An extreme position in either direction seems to take one full circle. Stalin, for example, seems a paradigm of the most extreme right and left. Recent reports of the attempted coup in the Soviet Union labeled those espousing continued socialized ownership as the "right" wing, and those promoting privatization as "left."

The complexity of government makes a pure, unconflicted right or left position impossible to define, much less hold. Many seem to feel that a belief in the paramount importance of "the rights of property" precludes a support of the rights of the individual. It is odd that the same "right " which espouses freedom of the marketplace appears more likely to support constraints on the freedoms of speech, religion, and the press. A current anomaly of the Left concerns the recent attempts at gun control. Here the left appears ready to concede the individual's rights hitherto guaranteed by the Bill of Rights.

Another example of an anomaly is the relationship of the right and left with the military. While privatization of the military (or police) is a dream of only the most extreme right, a strong military, (which is after all an extreme of both common ownership and government control) is frequently claimed as a characteristic of the right. This espousal of a strong military also necessitates an intense redistribution of wealth by the government, from the many (taxpayers) to the few (large industrialists). This entrance of the government into the economic lives of the community is oddly not often objected to by the right. On the other hand we might also remember that the Vietnam "conflict" was conceived and pursued by the "liberal" segment of the government. "Liberal" Kennedy escalated Eisenhower's modest involvement. Lyndon Johnson, whose "Great Society" domestic economic policies were seen as socialist by the right , happily destroyed Viet Nam with the help of his Harvard "left" think tank, before Nixon continued the slaughter with his Harvard "right" think tank.

Realizing that while "right and left" do represent some sort of shorthand for generalizing predictable answers to carefully framed questions, nailing down the true characters of these amorphous terms still remains difficult or impossible. The innumerable anomalies created by the division of complex political thought into "right and left" renders the bipolar model functionally unsupportable. As the terms become less and less intellectually justifiable, the emotional intent of the terminology becomes clearer. Let us try to revolt against the prejudgments created by both the media's and our own internalized use of these terms .