On Bigotry; or, Politics
In politics as in life (and let us never confuse the two), there's a middle and a center.
The "sides" of the political "spectrum" take different forms across times and states. They may be consistently distinguished from rational sects in that they advocate state violence to advance some set of internally inconsistent social goals. They differ over the question of who is the proper object of the state's indecent attentions.
Those who are more fearful of authority figures per se tend to side with the left, willing to excuse its intolerance and imtemperance. Those more fearful of the concept of authority, rather than its embodiment in individuals, more commonly side with the right.
The left may be socialist, anarchist, communist, communitarian, or otherwise. The right may be nationalist, nationalist-socialist, anarchocapitalist, corporatist, or otherwise. But almost always they are there: the red team and the blue team.
Those who see the problems of the left-right narrative, but still accept its legitimacy, see themselves as a noble and impartial center. Centrists pick their policies -- usually based on a pragmatic morality, which arguably is no morality at all -- from the confining menus offered by right and left. They justify each policy on the basis the right or left uses to justify it. The policy and its justification are a package.
I count myself as a member of the middle. It isn't the center: it doesn't exist between extremes, and it isn't a pastiche scrounged from bits of ideologies. Like centrism, it is based upon principle, but is realistic. To be in the middle, though, is to step beyond accepting packaged bits of left and right. No one's narrative is large enough to encompass the middle, nor small enough to fit in it. One in the middle believes there are principles that ought not be compromised, but that no principle can understand humanity like a human can.
Leftists and partisans of the right mostly believe, whether they realize it or not, that truth can be profitably reduced to a handful of truths within a consistent and easily understood system. Centrists believe that is not so, and they construct reactive, provisional, and often unstable and dangerous, systems. All these systems, of left and right and center, because they are not self-sustaining, require the invention of bigotries to explain behaviors and propositions put forth by the opposition that are rational but incomptatible with one's own narrative. All righties are at last called corporatists, even if they are not. All leftists are billed as totalitarians, even if they are not. All centrists are made out to be linguini-spined moderates, even if they are not.
To be in the middle is to identify one's own bigotry, rather than identifying with it.
The "sides" of the political "spectrum" take different forms across times and states. They may be consistently distinguished from rational sects in that they advocate state violence to advance some set of internally inconsistent social goals. They differ over the question of who is the proper object of the state's indecent attentions.
Those who are more fearful of authority figures per se tend to side with the left, willing to excuse its intolerance and imtemperance. Those more fearful of the concept of authority, rather than its embodiment in individuals, more commonly side with the right.
The left may be socialist, anarchist, communist, communitarian, or otherwise. The right may be nationalist, nationalist-socialist, anarchocapitalist, corporatist, or otherwise. But almost always they are there: the red team and the blue team.
Those who see the problems of the left-right narrative, but still accept its legitimacy, see themselves as a noble and impartial center. Centrists pick their policies -- usually based on a pragmatic morality, which arguably is no morality at all -- from the confining menus offered by right and left. They justify each policy on the basis the right or left uses to justify it. The policy and its justification are a package.
I count myself as a member of the middle. It isn't the center: it doesn't exist between extremes, and it isn't a pastiche scrounged from bits of ideologies. Like centrism, it is based upon principle, but is realistic. To be in the middle, though, is to step beyond accepting packaged bits of left and right. No one's narrative is large enough to encompass the middle, nor small enough to fit in it. One in the middle believes there are principles that ought not be compromised, but that no principle can understand humanity like a human can.
Leftists and partisans of the right mostly believe, whether they realize it or not, that truth can be profitably reduced to a handful of truths within a consistent and easily understood system. Centrists believe that is not so, and they construct reactive, provisional, and often unstable and dangerous, systems. All these systems, of left and right and center, because they are not self-sustaining, require the invention of bigotries to explain behaviors and propositions put forth by the opposition that are rational but incomptatible with one's own narrative. All righties are at last called corporatists, even if they are not. All leftists are billed as totalitarians, even if they are not. All centrists are made out to be linguini-spined moderates, even if they are not.
To be in the middle is to identify one's own bigotry, rather than identifying with it.
posted by Q at 3:36 PM
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