Friday 4 November 2011

And The Wisdom To Know The Difference?


I heard the other day some pundit in the finance industry opining that the concepts of Left and Right in politics have become largely meaningless. It seems to be a popular view and I see what they're getting at - with the demise of the Iron Curtain back in the 80s and the much-vaunted Triumph of Capitalism and the fact that the main political leaders, at least in the UK, have become eerily interchangeable since then (though apparently not in the US where politics has become more polarised than ever.) It seems as if the old Left/Right wing Labour/Conservative debates have become largely redundant.
And yet... I still see the difference. It may not be discernible in the Houses of Parliament and it may be harder to define than it used to be in the old Communist-Block/Free-World era, but I reckon it's one of those things where, like pornography, you know it when you see it.

"...to change the things I can... accept the things I can't... and the wisdom to know the difference", so the old saw goes. That last line was always intoned to me as a teenager with added emphasis, as if the difference was obvious and I should just shut up about it and get a proper job. I grew up in a rather conservative working class family and Mrs Thatcher would have been proud. Conservatism is very much about accepting the world as it is and making the best of it.
Some accept it with regret. It would be nice if things were different they say, 'in an Ideal World', but 'Life's not fair.' Best to just keep your head down and get on with it. Conservatism and being working class have this in common - it's all about knowing your place, not making a fuss. It's the whole Protestant Work Ethic thing - very Calvinist.
Others of course like the world being as it is - life is about getting all you can, while you can, and sod everyone else.

I've always found Conservatism, at least in the UK, an odd paradox. Conservatives used to be all about The Establishment - landed gentry, hereditary wealth and all that. It was about the established church, obedience to time-honoured status and authority - to the monarchy, the gentry, the clergy, the courts, and beneath them the police, the teachers, the doctors and ultimately the husbands and fathers, who's homes of course were their castles. In extremis there was the military. The assumption was that these men (and it was all men) knew best. To defy them was at best highly irregular, at worst, illegal, immoral or unnatural. Conservatism and Conservation joined forces to preserve the time-honoured traditional landscapes and ways of life of the British People.
Then, around about the 80s, Conservatism came to mean something completely different, in some ways, completely the opposite. It was all about making money, at any cost to society (even if it meant dismissing the entire concept), morality or legality. If you could get away with it it was ok - as long as it resulted in profits and growth. (The legal system could be modified accordingly.) Everything and anything was for sale. Meritocracy, Social Mobility and Competition were the governing ideals. Cutting edge technology was the means. In theory at least, if you could do the job better than anyone else you could have it - wherever you came from, no matter what class, sex, race or age. There would be no point in discriminating against, say, a black lesbian over a bunch of white guys if she was the best for the job. You'd only be limiting your profitability. Old Conservatives no doubt would have had something quite different to say about it.
How these two 'Conservatisms' could possibly get on in the same party still baffles me. Sure, the Establishment were by far the wealthiest people in the country, like the new breed of global entrepreneurs, but there the resemblance ends. Old Conservatism has by and large ended up snoozing in the Upper House but their ideals still surface, apologetically, with Back to Basics, Caring Capitalism and The Big Society, and probably most stridently in Euro-Scepticism and UKIP.
There's nothing wrong with being sceptical about the EU. I make it my business to be sceptical about politics and economics generally but the Euro-Sceptic seems to be more in the grand old Conservative tradition of blaming the foreigners when things get tough - be they EU bureaucrats or immigrants. Right Wing politics, including old style Conservatism seems to be very much about defining one's self against outsiders - whether it be at the family level, the gender level (all us men together), racial, national or even species level (Right-Wingers are far less likely to worry about the 'rights' of animals unless they're their pets.) Changing the things you can and accepting the things you can't naturally focusses you on your immediate surroundings - the people and place you grew up with. Everything else is quite literally beyond you. Under extreme circumstances the consequences can be dire - most obviously in pre-war Germany where The 'Other' was simply to be exterminated.
But I don't want to suggest that Conservatives are Nazis. God knows, Left Wing politics has its own monsters.

Being Left Wing, as I suppose I broadly am, is not an exact mirror image of the Right. Left wingers, it seems to me, tend not to see the world so much in terms of Them and Us. There is a vague, possibly Utopian sense that we really are all in this together (all of us - men, women and children, all races, creeds and nationalities, sexualities, ages and states of health, even other species, even The Environment), and that, even if we're not all equal (whatever that means) we are somehow all deserving of (that hackneyed phrase) Equal Opportunities - The Pursuit of Happiness and all that. Democracy, Human Rights, The Rule of Law...
But wait - isn't that what the modern Global Entrepreneur believes too? Well yes and no, because the Capitalist sees this freedom and happiness only in terms of material wealth, markets, competition. The left-winger sees this 'deserving' being in spite of differences in material wealth, even of the poorest and most powerless, even in those, to some extent, who have brought their misfortune on themselves, through crime or negligence. Right-wingers are typically far less forgiving - assuming an uncompromising notion of the freedom and power of the human will. Whatever mess you may end up in you have no one but yourself to blame. Get over it. Left-wingers believe in giving people the benefit of the doubt, of rehabilitation, of mitigating circumstances, of second chances. If this all sounds terribly idealistic and airy-fairy, it is. It's an ideal. Something to aim at.

I've deliberately couched my characterisations of Left and Right in caricature, but the obvious point here is that hardly anyone is either entirely left or right wing. They're useful labels for broad tendencies and a useful shorthand for describing some extreme individuals and groups. If there's a parallel on the Left to the changes in Conservatism over the last 30 years it's that no one over here seriously believes in the kind of faceless grey uniformity advocated by Mao and Lenin (but not, I'm pretty sure, by Marx.) The big change is toward much more individualism on both sides. The difference is once again that the Left do not see their individualism expressed purely in what they can buy.
Much was made for a while of the likes of Michael Portillo's move from Marxist student activist to Tory MP, as if this exemplified the demise of socialism as a viable political force, when for me, all it meant was that some people tend to think in extremes and assume that if the answer doesn't lie at one end of the spectrum, that it must be at the other. When I was at Brighton Poly back in the 80s I'd have been accused of being a Woolly Liberal for this but if Mr Blair hadn't hijacked the term I'd have been quite happy to talk here about some sort of Third Way.
Some see this as evidence of weakness - as an inability to make up one's mind. Being a real Leftie is extremely hard work and I have no such aspirations. We all, to some extent, have to live in The Real World, because we only have one life, we have to make the most of it. In my experience the very committed left wing activists are not the most self-sacrificing individuals but those who really enjoy what they do. Those who dismiss all protesters who are not utterly committed, true to the cause and without contradictions miss the point. It is necessary, no, essential that the Anti-Capitalist protesters outside St Paul's both pitch their tents outside the cathedral, getting attention by making a minor nuisance of themselves, but also nip off to the pub (or even home) in the evening (as the infamous heat scan photo suggested a few weeks back) because they have lives too. It doesn't make them any less right to make a fuss. The Bankers certainly won't feel compelled to stick to any coherent ethical standards in their endeavours. They'll both try to make as much money as possible at the office and perhaps go to church or give to charity as well.
What bothers me much more is that whatever the individual practitioners get up to in their time off, the logic of the market they serve is inexorable. It is an amoral machine for making money. And modern politics has hitched itself to this machine.
This is why I sometimes find I have more in common with old-style conservatives than one might expect (and why some of my most enjoyable debates have always been with them) - because we both have a sense that something is wrong, and it's a moral sense, not rational, not economic.
The difference, going back to Serenity Prayer at the top, is our differing notions of what can and can't be changed. The Leftie almost of necessity remains open to the possibility of making things better. It's almost an article of faith, no matter how unformed our strategy might be, or how futile our efforts. The Triumph of Capitalism is not the success of some great moral humanist system of progress and development, it's what's left after everything else has failed. It's Natural Selection, red in tooth and claw. Its strength is that it thrives when you stop trying to do something better. Left-wing politics goes against the grain, a constant uphill struggle against just giving in and doing what comes naturally. And since the old totalitarianisms have been discredited, it's piece-meal, incremental, a process, not a goal, and demands constant vigilance.

I was brought up very strongly with the notion that very little could be changed and that the sooner I realised that and got on with getting a job, getting married and having kids, buying a mortgage and the insurance and the pension and all the rest of it, the better, because everything else was just Cloud Cuckoo Land.
My dad was a Trades-Unionist (a shop-steward actually) in the 70s and an old-fashioned Labour man. He believed that there was not much to be done with the world except to try to get fairer slice of the pie for your self and your family through negotiations and, if it came to it, industrial action. He thought a lot of his colleagues were layabouts and spongers. He believed you couldn't expect to have a voice unless you put yourself up for election. Otherwise all you could do was vote and accept the consequences. I don't agree with a lot of that but he had a powerful (sometimes intimidating) belief that people really ought to do better but I don't think he thought there was much point in trying to change the world (at least not when I was old enough to debate with him) and I think that was a terrible shame and a waste, because he had so much more energy than I do for these things. My dad was a force for the good. I'm sure everyone who knew him would agree with that.
Still as just one in seven billion (give or take) I'll be happy if I can make just slightly more than one 7,000,000,000th of a difference, and that will have to do.

14 comments:

Vincent said...

Steve, this is a wonderful wise balanced panorama. Fair, full of the nuances that make both Left and Right multi-dimensional spectra of ideas about society, economics, morality & belief (e.g. in the possibility that things are improvable by concerted human effort).

My own conservatism is to believe that change should come organically through evolution and consensus and not revolution fired by a quasi-religious sense of righteousness of the cause. It's a conservatism that has no love for capitalism, but no faith in any immediate revolutionary alternative, either. And I have in me a strong streak of anarchism, especially against the notion that the State is a kind of super-daddy that is there to tell us what's right.
I'm currently reading T H White's The Once and Future King, which apart from being wonderful entertaining prose tackles problems such as violence, greed, Might, Right, chivalrous behaviour and the paradoxes of human psychology, all in a mid-twentieth-century retelling of Malory's Morte D'Arthur.

All praise to those efforts to punch slightly above your statistical weight, so to speak. I'd like to think I could make a difference too, but as I don't know which direction I'd have to go, I'll have to settle with just "living as the spirit moves me" - which is not as easy as it sounds, at all, & I'm far from it.

But your analysis is uplifting, paradoxically because it has its feet so firmly planted on the ground.

Steve Law said...

Good God you're quick off the mark!
Good day Vincent.
I had a funny feeling we'd end up discovering a lot more in common than might once have been supposed.
I'm no revolutionary either, and have more than a tad of the anarchist about me. Certainly I avoid anything religious - quasi or otherwise.
The only thing I'd maybe take issue with is your "I don't know which direction I'd have to go" because I'm not sure there is "a direction" as such, but I suspect you'd agree with me on that too. I take it on a case by case basis most of the time. I must have a look at that book you mention.

John Myste said...

You inspired thoughts, with American examples at their core, because I am an America. What is Europe? Is that a sauce?

There would be no point in discriminating against, say, a black lesbian over a bunch of white guys if she was the best for the job. You'd only be limiting your profitability. Old Conservatives no doubt would have had something quite different to say about it.

This is very profound. Even today, in America, there are some conservatives who make this one exception. Discrimination is often a more powerful goal than unfettered capitalism. Capitalism is a close second, for those people, though, and as you stated, I think it ranks first among the majority.

Radical change is dangerous, just as stagnation is. I am a liberal by just about any definition you could use, but I have the philosophy of Sandra Day O’Connor, a liberal Republican in America, which is as odd of a concept as it sounds.

If tradition is more precious to us than change, then we are content not to improve and content not to evolve, which will be death. All things that don’t bend over time are known to break (and good riddance).

However, if our policy is such that we expect and want sweeping change overnight, then one false step will eventually lead to disaster. An impetuous general may swiftly win his battles, but the way he dies is mostly decided: the same spontaneity that carries him to victory also becomes a pall bearer that takes him to his final defeat.

We have had sudden reversals for the better, such as Brown vs. The Board of Education, or some may say Marbury vs. Madison, but these are always forced, not embraced, and you can impose a law on a citizen, but you cannot impose it upon his heart.

Baby steps are absorbed naturally, and are how the social evolution liberals want to keep alive really happens. Desegregating the schools did not free black citizens of a large amount of oppression. It gave them legal authority to experience more, first hand. The incremental footprints of liberal ideology effected the actual change.

Many conservatives resisted the Supreme Court’s ruling, which worked, but was very dangerous. What if Congress had passed an Amendment overruling the ruling? What if state and local governments had refused to enforce the law? It was a good law, but a dangerous one. When you force social justice on a people who have guns and wills, you take a chance. Thankfully, we won that liberal battle. This time.

We should change what we can, and what we cannot. The things we cannot change should be changed more slowly, that’s all. The things we can change, should also be changed more slowly.

What bothers me much more is that whatever the individual practitioners get up to in their time off, the logic of the market they serve is inexorable. It is an amoral machine for making money. And modern politics has hitched itself to this machine.

If you don’t have stringent campaign finance laws, this is the inevitable effect of a democracy driven by capitalism, as is the consolidation of goods in the hands of a few, because money makes money and lack of money has the opposite effect.

I am very much a capitalist, but not without regulation. Unfettered capitalism is incompatible with democracy.

Steve Law said...

Hi John
Good to hear from you again.
Capitalism/Discrimination is I think at the fault line between new and old conservatisms. It'll be interesting to see how it plays out, especially in the Islamic world.

Your main point seems to be about the value of change. I can't generalise on that. Change can be wonderfully liberating but things that haven't changed in millennia can be the most precious. Don't we need both? Shouldn't we be able to choose? Progress for progress's sake is a kind of totalitarianism and modernism has become idiotic.

The patronage of presidential candidates by the wealthy is legal corruption. A huge threat.

I actually don't know what Liberal means. It means quite different things here and in your part of the world. In Aus I think it means Conservative. Does Liberal approximate to Pluralist in this context?

Europe fyi, is a region to the north-west of Asia, home to a race of war-like peoples with pale skins and peculiarly intolerant monotheistic religions. Some consider Europe a continent in its own right but this seems unwarranted.

Vincent said...

I'd merely like to add a postscript to Steve's fyi and say that the English Channel which separates us from mainland Europe is culturally wider than the Atlantic which separates us from USA

Steve Law said...

Well of course another unusual feature of the Europeans has been their tendency to go off and take over other parts of the world.

I'm not sure about the breadths of the cultural divides. I think it might be a matter of temperament. I'm often shocked at how foreign Americans and Australians are but feel very at home in Europe.

John Myste said...

Your main point seems to be about the value of change. I can't generalise on that. Change can be wonderfully liberating but things that haven't changed in millennia can be the most precious. Don't we need both? Shouldn't we be able to choose? Progress for progress's sake is a kind of totalitarianism and modernism has become idiotic.

I believe that is my point. I never advocate change for the sake of change.

Does Liberal approximate to Pluralist in this context?

To me, liberal means nothing more than doing what works and trying to make sure everyone has a necessary minimum to survive while preserving the capitalist dream.

Europe fyi, is a region to the north-west of Asia, home to a race of war-like peoples with pale skins and peculiarly intolerant monotheistic religions. Some consider Europe a continent in its own right but this seems unwarranted.

I have never understood how Europe is its own continent, but I certainly see its distinction from most of what we call Asia. I have to believe that you see it also.

Steve Law said...

'I never advocate change for the sake of change'
And yet you said 'We should change what we can, and what we cannot'
How do you square those two statements?

'Doing what works'?
That phrase alone begs more questions than it answers.

'I certainly see its distinction from most of what we call Asia. I have to believe that you see it also'
Not really. I'm no orientalist but Asia is hardly a coherent whole. The Middle East is more different from China than it is from Europe. India (s.l.) forms another obvious sub continent. I might concede Europe as being equivalent to China, with all its cultural and linguistic and religious 'minorities' or if not then perhaps in it's older larger manifestation (ie incorporating large parts of SE Asia)
And then there's Siberia, and Indonesia, and all those Central Asian 'stans. No. I think Europe is just one among many but it has had the hubris in the past to define itself as somehow better than all of them put together.

Steve Law said...

Actually before you reply to that, I must add that the opposite holds true too. We in the thick of it tend to think of Europe as this wonderfully/infuriatingly diverse place but I can promise you it doesn't look that way from outside. Every single country follows (nominally) the same faith. All, with one or two odd exceptions, speak variants of the same language.
A very multi-lingual friend once told me how easy it is to pick up European languages once you've got two or three under your belt. You couldn't do that in India or China (or Indonesia apparently).

John Myste said...

'I never advocate change for the sake of change'
And yet you said 'We should change what we can, and what we cannot'
How do you square those two statements?


With common sense. We should do what we can to change things that need changing. The question we were addressing is whether you should worry about what cannot change and to what degree. There is a conservative talking point that says liberals want change for the sake of change. Not a single liberal I have ever met or ever heard of wants this. Conservatives made this concept up as a talking point.

'Doing what works'?
That phrase alone begs more questions than it answers.


No, it doesn’t. A rejection of categorical imperatives does not beg questions.

Steve Law said...

Yes well, as i've said before, 'common sense' is very much in the eye of the beholder. My family's view of what I should do with my life (above) was 'common sense' as far as they were concerned.
We perhaps need to come back to this.

Ok, you seemed to be saying that everything should be changed. ('what we can change and what we cannot change' seems to cover pretty much every eventuality) That wasn't what you meant, fair enough.

It wouldn't have occurred to me to say that about Liberals so i think we can leave that.

Sorry you've lost me here. Which categorical imperative was this?

'what works' depends on what you want to achieve. It also depends on your notions of human nature and what is physically possible. Lots of questions begging.
I find pragmatism a rather dreary master.

Steve Law said...

This has been bugging me John
"A rejection of categorical imperatives does not beg questions"
You haven't responded to my response so I guess you're either bored, busy or pissed off.
I think I know what a categorical imperative is, but maybe I've misunderstood.
What were you getting at?

John Myste said...

I decided the direction we were going was more politically contentious than is the nature of your blog. Therefore, I thought I should let the conversation wind down.

Perhaps categorical imperative is the wrong term. I mean a rule that is considered true and beyond reproach based purely on one’s axiomatic worldview.

Many conservatives tell me things like these:

1. It is always wrong to take a human life except in a clear case of self-defense.

2. Fairness has nothing to do with need and everything to do with equality, not of results but in literal terms. (This is a doubly annoying since no liberal in America ever wanted equality of results).



3. Capitalism is good. Socialism is bad.


When one thinks such things, he is inventing labels, and then shaping his worldview to fit them. Without the labels, he would not make the mistakes.

“What works” does not “beg questions,” at least not in the technical sense, which is the sense I think of, because it purports no specific argument. Conservatives, at least the ones I deal with, make arguments like “gay marriage is wrong” because it violates tradition and we should not change for change’ sake. They then argue that those who support it want to change it for the sake of change.

Liberals never want to change anything for the sake of change. They don’t mind fixing things that are broken.

An area of specific interest for me is American Law. Currently on our Supreme Court, we have Scalia, who believes we should adhere to the letter of the Founder’s law, and pay absolute heed to their intentions. We also have Breyer, who interprets the Constitution the opposite way. Scalia says we should not “change for the sake of change,” but Breyer never made that argument. He argues that the intent of the Constitution was to never allow the government to rule in opposition to the will of the populace at large. If that was the intention, then, by definition, we cannot adhere to the exact letter of the Constitution because it was written 200 years ago to solve problems of a world that no longer exists and to secure the freedom of a people who no longer exist.

It did not grant full personhood to women or to blacks, yet we do today. By adding these amendments, we do not circumvent the will of the Founders and we do not change for the sake of change. We change things that aren’t good, and we make them better.

We are not looking for things to change. There are already so many things in need of change, we cannot keep up with them already. Efforts make to enforce Social Justice and Social Equality are called “change for change’ sake” in America and are often condemned on that basis when making arguments that we go too far. That reasoning is fallacious. No liberal ever suggested change for change’ sake. That is a conservative idea ascribed to liberals.

Hope that helps.

Steve Law said...

Thanks for the clarification John. I'm relieved to see that I wasn't too far wide of the mark. It's been a long time since I attempted to understand Kant.
Yes - I think the details of the law you're interested in are probably a bit beyond the scope of this blog, but the point about 'rules that are considered true and beyond reproach based purely on one’s axiomatic world view' strike me as problematic in a way analogous to the belief in Gods, souls, karma, common sense and other Givens, and as you'd expect, I'll be coming back to them in the future.
'Do what works' strikes me as different to, for example, 'Do not kill' because its application depends on what you want to achieve. Do not kill is a simple instruction.
I mean, nobody really says 'Don't do what works', or 'Do what doesn't work', do they? To that extent we are all pragmatists.
On the other hand, in practice, 'Do what works' tends to mean 'Base your decisions on purely material, economic criteria' or 'Do not base your decisions on ethical or ideological (or spiritual) criteria.'

I have no particular view, yet, on what you say about change for change's sake (I'd need to go back and read what you've said again perhaps).
Thanks again.