The Waiting Room Of Meaning...

[motg]

(Not my phrase. It's Judy Horacek's. One of her better cartoons. The PA announces 'It's Been Deferred Again' and her protagonist comments: 'Damn That Derrida.' Comedy gold.)

People are still using the words Left and Right. As though they actually meant something. I'm so silly I don't even know what they are. But there, it seems impossible to walk across the waiting room of meaning without tripping over the shards of broken epistemologies these days. No wonder folks are so confused.

I recall, long ago in the student cafe at A Certain University, hanging out with Mr S where we worked out a 3-D continuum which might better explain people's political views. The three axes we came up with were Progressive/Conservative, Materialist/Spiritualist, and Libertarian/Authoritarian. And we thought it would be a good idea if folks could roughly guess where they stood in this trimensional block.

He was an Oz Democrat, later Green. I was (and am) a Tory. But we liked talking because we were both interested in ideas. And I don't think our model has yet been superseded. What I hadn't quite grasped at the time was how much each needs the other end of the axis. As if the ghost of Hegel still hovered over our joint project after all. I expect S knew it already. He is one really smart guy.

Without a sense of history, progressives easily degenerate into neophiliacs. It's new! It's shiny! Let's go there! Toryism without openness to new ideas ossifies into reaction. If you're a Tory, you always want someone else to dip their toe into the water first. But if we watch it for a while and it works, then yeah: we should look at this. No Tory would ever be the first to decriminalize drugs. But a Tory would ask what the hell we are doing fighting a war which enriches criminals and terrorists, costs the earth, and we're losing. How's Portugal going with their little experiment? Really? Well, maybe we wait a little longer to see it doesn't go pear-shaped. But yeah. We should probably do this.

And of course gay rights are a no-brainer for a British Tory. We have a very gay-friendly monarchy, ever since the Queen Mum. If you take your social cues from Buckingham Palace, then the time to shut up about the Gay Peril was when HM tapped an ageing pop star on the shoulder and dubbed him Sir Elton. Looking at you, Senator Bernardi. The rest of the Queer Ascendancy? Well, yeah, OK. I suppose it follows. Some of you folks are a bit intolerant, though. But perhaps this will shake down in due course.

Spiritual vs materialistic? Well, I'm sorry if you're still in the Dawkins camp, but religion of some sort is hard-wired in. And if you have ever seen the hordes of holy-rolling, hot-gospelling soi-disant Skeptics congratulating themselves on how Enlightened they all are... gee. It's a great look, isn't it? It's still religion. Just not a very good one. Get over it and accept it. What you should be more concerned about is quality control of spiritual experience. Because that's currently all over the place. How lucky was I, to have had an Anglican upbringing! Probably best seen as a vaccination against the more virulent forms of lunacy which infest the planet. And yet.... historical materialism? Yeah, it's a thing. The fact that Marx was horribly wrong about so many things should not blind us to his successes. (And has anyone read Eagleton's Why Marx Was Right? He always was crazy-brave. An interesting guy at all times, and a great exemplar of how old-fashioned Marxists are a cut above their successors.)

The most thorny one is libertarian vs authoritarian. The latter has become awfully fashionable of late and I don't like it one bit. Bloody Foucault again, I expect. And yet. Show me a libertarian who does not believe in the rule of law and I'll show you a Galt-Going liar. The question, as always, is what laws; where do they come from; who gets to enforce them; and why? Hence the British compromise of the idea of the Nightwatchman State. But there are many intractable issues here, with no easy answers.

Happily for us, we have a simpler tool available to us. Are you pro-Enlightenment (in the 18th century sense) or not? Would you rather follow Voltaire, or Rousseau? John Locke or Thom Paine? If you ticked the former in each of these pairs, then you are on the side of Enlightenment. If the latter, you belong to the Counter-Enlightenment. And good luck with that.

But to attempt to think down from here to the level of left, right, left right... it makes my brain hurt. So if you speak of left and right as though it matters who sat where in the French National Assembly.... then I will stop reading. I'll probably still like you, but you're wasting my time and yours.

Comments

[anthraxia.livejournal.com]

There was an ok movie in the late 80s starring Gerard Depardieu and Andy McDowell called 'Greencard'. It had a quote I have carried with me, far longer than the rest of the movie deserved. McDowell plays a stereotypical upper-middle class liberal New Yorker and Depardieu the American idea of a stereotypical Frenchman. At one point, she is outraged by something he says, and says "ugh, you're so right wing!"

He replies "Wing? You're the one with the wing. All your ideas come from the one place."

That really hit me - "All your ideas come from the one place".

That made me open my eyes to a hellalot of my assumptions about people and shared beliefs. I came to realise that grass-roots trade unionists and Labor voters sadly too often harbour some of the most racist and homophobic views. Well-off middle class Liberal voters produce some of the most passionate environmentalists and animal rights activists. Gay people can be bigots. Not all Aboriginal people support land rights, and some actively distance themselves from traditional culture. Feminists can be chauvinists. Thieves can have a sense of honour and duty and those who dedicate their lives to God can prey on the most vulnerable in their flock.

I adapt the original quote these days to "people's ideals rarely all come from the one place. When they do, it's fairly safe to say they've never really challenged their own assumptions."

It was a good lesson to learn.

[bar-barra.livejournal.com]

That all seems very reasonable to me. As you can tell, my ideas come from all over. As do yours, I expect. But when FB suggested to me that I might like to make friends with Senator B, I thought... um. Really? I'd like to pick him up and shake him, but that isn't the same thing.

But I wanted to share Stephen's and my 3-D continuum theory. It helps explain why lots of people's ideas come from different places.

And we REALLY wish this would catch on a bit more (:

[anthraxia.livejournal.com]

I agree it's a much better model.

[bar-barra.livejournal.com]

Hope things are OK with you (:

(I never saw that movie, but I can easily picture M. Depardieu saying it.)

[nclean.livejournal.com]

You say that politics is multi-dimensional, but the historical evidence, internationally, is that this normally isn't the case, not to any significant extent.

Take your examination of what issues mean out of the picture for a minute. Then look at who votes with who how often. If there were two issues that dominate things (e.g. bigtax/littletax; morally-prescriptive/morally-liberal) we would expect significant spread on two dimensions. If, however, one issue dominates, then spread is minimal along the second dimension.

What we see is that almost all of politicians' voting behaviour in the US and Europe is explained by a single variable. Call that variable what you will, but they line up along with declared socioeconomic concerns. The occasional person / politician will have an issue where two groups from different parties will agree out of that main alignment (European "non-centrist" groups partnering up on national protections such as tariffs), but such items are usually overwhelmed by the single-axis lineup.


In the recent Australian context, such analysis doesn't work well, since we had two parties that were effective caucuses. Other two-party systems like the US aren't so disciplined, and Europe has plenty of multi-party legislatures, and their evidence is pretty strong.

Poole and Rosenthal's analyisis of US patterns are at:
http://voteview.com/
It's been a while since I looked at the European stuff, so I don't know where to find it off-hand

[bar-barra.livejournal.com]

I suspect you are largely correct, and have put your finger on why Oz politics is such a grotesque pantomime long emptied of any significance to speak of. But this is, may one suggest, putting the cart before the horse.

Because people (broadly speaking) decide to pay their subscription to one or other of these idiotic boxes, they have thereby disqualified themselves from making much of a worthwhile contribution to what might possibly constitute an actual debate. We constantly see bewildered pollies half-aware that they appear to have signed up to something even more bizarre than usual. And then comes the Shrug. Yeah, OK. It doesn't make any sense but apparently it's what we do.

I ought to have been more precise. A 3-D continuum is what people's politics OUGHT to look like. That way they might have some vestige of a clue why they favour some things and not others. What you are telling me is yeah, maybe: but they actually don't.

A depressing thought, but I cannot fault your observation. All we can hope is that a few more folks will escape the epistemological prison-house.

[originaluddite.livejournal.com]

You are both likely familiar with my model (which is different and pretty much excludes spiritual-materialistic concepts): http://politicalobjectivestest.blogspot.com.au/2007/04/findings-of-test.html

I attempted to crush the numbers once my survey participants exceeded 100 and one of the conclusions (that a friend drew on looking at them) was that the vast majority of takers got results that could allow me to dismiss multi-dimensional models. It could go "socialist > liberal > conservative" if I wanted and very few would mind.

But I'm interested in minority perspectives and think that they matter and can potentially make a difference. A member of our choir has qualms about both free-markets and libertine mores and I would prefer if a model recognizes his existence (even if the poor fellow will never get much satisfaction from electoral politics).

I have another problem with left-and-right beyond lack of inclusiveness and that is that it is a description that changes reality. Many get introduced to it and then think "well if I believe x then I must also believe y" or even "if _they_ believe x and y then I must not believe in x and y".

[bar-barra.livejournal.com]

Goodness! That Is a meticulous piece of intelligence-gathering!

[originaluddite.livejournal.com]

I lived in the small town of Canberra back then, so had lots of spare time on my hands.