Post #15: Left and Right

17 May 2023

Behold how every man, drawn with delight

Of what he doth, flatters himself in his way;

Striving to make his course seem only right

Doth his own rest and his own thoughts betray.

With flattering glasses that must show him fair

And others foul; his skill and his wit best,

Others seduced, deceived and wrong in their;

His knowledge right, all ignorant the rest,

Not seeing how these minions in the air

Present a face of things falsely expressed,

And that the glimmering of these errors shown

Are but a light to let him see his own.

—Samuel Daniel, Musophilus (1599)

It’s a frightfully fraught issue, the intersection between our religious and political commitments, on the one hand, and our wish and need to maintain harmonious, ideally even loving relations with people on the other side, who are often friends, family members, or human beings we respect for everything but being so blatantly wrong on the big questions—or so it can all-too easily look to us...

How terribly divisive and even deadly the clash of ultimate truths (or what we take for them, since it is less clear that they really do clash ultimately, and not only in our necessarily limited view of things) can be around religion, we all know only too well, and other ages illustrate it even more apocalyptically; but at least most theological system include some kind of clause—albeit often more honored in the breach than the observance—about loving others without requiring a test of faith. “Hate the sin, love the sinner” is not easy to carry out in practice, and tends to get forgotten in the heat of battle, but it is at least there as an ideal, albeit an elusive one.

Things are quite otherwise with politics. Of course there is always lip-service paid to communal unity, but this is invariably understood on one’s own partisan terms, in the expectation that the other side, if reasonable, will come around—thus usually proclaimed by the winners on election night, not the losers who know how much real unity to expect from the next four or five years. We do not like to hear it, but the essential political distinction is that between friends and enemies; who supports my vision of the good life, and the means I intend to deploy in its service, and who resists it. “Stand up and be counted” or “He who is not with me is against me” are undisguised maxims of politics; the harmony talk is mostly window-dressing, sincere perhaps, but myopic and often outright naïve or even deluded as to what is really going on.

The very common pattern, among intellectual types particularly, of moving in the course of one’s life from the left to the right (or at least to the not-left) creates some particularly challenging dynamics. If you are not on the left at eighteen you don’t have a heart, proclaimed Churchill, then went on: and if you are not on the right by the time you are forty, then you don’t have a brain. It’s not likely to be heard as tidings of comfort and joy on either the left or the right. Only Churchill’s fellow lane-changers, of which there are not a few, will chuckle with recognition, though not unmixed with bitterness, at their various degrees of removal from their political beginnings. For those who have moved on in this manner, it is hard to understand how others could fail to follow suit; after all they themselves had good reasons for changing, or at least strong reasons for thinking them good. Meanwhile those who have not changed their allegiances see little more than traitors that have betrayed the better ideals of their youth.

Those who stay put on the right or the left, again with good reasons, often have trouble seeing how someone on the other side could be in full command of his faculties, moral or intellectual, and there is something tragicomic to how much it can disconcert them when they do sometimes find much to admire and love in someone on the other side. How can someone be so benighted in his politics, yet so good, perhaps even excellent in other respects? The answer should be obvious: we are none of us made of one piece, so that there is nothing less surprising than that we would find evidence, if we only look closely enough, of real good and bad, side by side, in anyone. Yet, surprised we are, owing to a well-recognized quirk of the human mind (known as the halo effect), whereby we seem to expect different aspects of someone’s character or personality to line up far more tidily than they usually do. And just as the halo predisposes us to overlook character flaws, so spotting devil’s horns or tails makes us forget that Lucifer was once God’s most favored angel, not an also-ran, and that he retained much of his splendor even after his fall. We would see things more clearly following Goethe’s dictum that where there is much light, there is bound to be much shadow too, even if it is far from textbook physics.

In the case of political differences, however, we are not even dealing with matters of demonstrable good and bad. Of course our certainties make it seem so to us, but we do not take different sides on account of deficiencies of character or learning, let alone moral capacity, but because of the variety and divergence in our personal experience, our studies, and the judgments we arrive at from evidence that can be read (and before it is even read, selected!) very differently. As with an old-fashioned kaleidoscope, all you need to do is to shift your premises a few degrees and you see something completely different.

Those who have made the shift from one political creed to another are no different from those who stay put except in one respect: having left one side behind for biographically compelling if debatable reasons, they are not likely to reverse course now; they are just as invested in their new allegiances as the non-changers (call them stalwarts or loyalists if you prefer) are in the old, and may push back with particular vehemence against their former comrades precisely because they are so familiar with the supposed errors they think they have outgrown. Alas, they are likely to be despised for the same reason. No conflicts run deeper than internecine ones, and the lifelong non-believer is not hated half as much as the apostate: the first is merely ignorant and perhaps to be pitied, the second has repudiated a truth he once saw clearly and cannot expect to be given quarter or mercy.

One thing the deviators will not be tempted to do, however, is to imagine that there can be no good people on the other side. It is impossible for them to fall into that ubiquitous trap because they know better as a matter of biographical fact: they were once on that side themselves, after all, and had their loved and respected friends there. Now they have new friends on the other, making it easier (and more necessary) for them than for lifelong partisans not to confuse political with personal sympathy and condemnation. (The dynamic probably works in reverse just as well, from the right to the left as much as in the other direction; but it seems less conspicuous to me, and I am at any rate not personally familiar enough with its dynamics to say more about it.)

Where does all this leave us? Can’t we all just get along? I’m not sure that we can, politically; the divides and interests are too real, both ideally and materially. The commitments also run too deep; we are invested in these visions of the good life (implied in any principled political outlook) to divide the difference with an easy heart. Compromise there must be, but it can never be very satisfying to either side. Like the left and the right hand, or the left and the right halves of the brain, we may belong to the same organism and we must find a way to cooperate and keep the peace between us lest we perish together; but there will always be limits to how far the harmony can go even at the best of times. And whether these are the best of times is an open question, though they are surely not the worst either. For that sorry distinction, world history provides far too much competition, and our age, for all its faults, is remarkable for how high it ranks by most accounts, not how low. Which is not to say that it is an easier age to make sense of, and live in comfortably, than any other. Like every life, so every human epoch has its unique advantages and drawbacks. I feel lucky to be alive today; a simple visit to a contemporary hospital reminds me of that. But that does not mean I am at ease, and it is evident how many of our contemporaries seem to feel the same way.

What we can do is to remind ourselves that no matter how very misguided the other side’s commitments may seem to us, we are wearing colored glasses that distort what we are seeing and make it all-but impossible to appreciate fully the real virtues that they, as much as we, bring to the table around which we have our fierce debates and contentions. And if we lose those qualities from view, we are wrong no matter how right we are in other respects. We disagree with one another not because we are one better than the other, but because we all come at things from different angles and therefore see different things.

Real truth there may be, not just perspectives; I certainly believe so. But it hardly get us very far if we premise our unavoidable and inherently difficult negotiations with other human beings on the assumption that they are not only wrong (a conclusion we can hardly avoid if we truly believe in our own position), but intellectually, morally, or otherwise deficient into the bargain. What divides us as partisans is too real and fundamental to be overlooked; but that does not mean that we must lose sight of what unites us as human beings, and of what fine human qualities there are among those with whom we cannot help disagreeing with all the force of our contrary convictions.

(This one is for Barbara and for Wilhelm, with love.)