Jul 19, 2023·edited Jul 19, 2023Liked by Yastreblyansky
Time is linear, so conflict between the past and the future — whether it's best to "conserve" or to "progress" — is always going to be one-dimensional.
How much of political conflict is about that past/future struggle? Probably not all of it, but time — the only true inescapable master of the universe — determines nearly everything in human affairs, including the movement of civilization (it's impossible to find a value neutral term: "progress"? "advancement"? "development"?).
Human mastery of the planet and its immediate surroundings is a manifestation of intelligence and imagination, the "big brains" Vonnegut correctly called out as the feature that separates us arbitrarily but fatally from the rest of nature. Imagination and intellect lead to society and art (aesthetics begins as early as flint arrowheads, as J. M. Roberts' omnibus world history stresses in its opening pages) and to religion, and to the first attempts to overcome nature's constraints — tribalism giving way to society; agriculture replacing hunting/gathering; the crossing of oceans etc. and then eventually to philosophy, morality, egalitarianism; the invention of concepts like "human rights" and "freedom" and "tolerance" and "crimes against humanity," all progressive monuments as enacted in 1215 and 1776 and 1799 and 1945 and onward.
Timothy Snyder interprets Mein Kampf as insisting that racial struggle for land and food is the only human truth and that all additional imposed social ideas, from Christianity to Capitalism to Communism, are Jewish (Hitler equates St. Peter with Trotsky) — so everything named above as monuments of civilization and progress is lumped together as a literally super-natural force (as he saw the Jews) to be eradicated; this is why Nazism can correctly be identified by Ian Kershaw as "a collapse of civilization."
These collapses, or retrograde movements, are obviously an unavoidable manifestation of the human condition, from the fall of Rome to the Reformation to Trumpism, but their very existence itself emphasizes the inescapability of that relentless progressive drive, away from superstition and "natural" (or animal/tribal) concretized behavior towards abstraction; science; the metaphysical and sublime. (William F. Buckley therefore was correct to say that a Conservative is someone who "stands athwart history yelling 'stop'!".) Reagan and Trump and Hitler all overtly want to go backwards, to return to something "great" that has been lost.
In the present context of "family and faith" vs. "woke-ism," the manifestation of that primary time-based historical linearity couldn't be more clear: as I argue relentlessly here and elsewhere, it's always about the question of human authority vs. the "natural" and the "divine" (both manifestations of pre-civilizational or early civilizational frameworks for determining the arrangement of society and the conception of the Good). David Brooks, Clarence Thomas, Tucker Carlson and all the rest are overtly rejecting intellect-based and enlightenment-based constructions of justice (we "social justice warriors," who presume to know better than God or Nature) — it's only by a deft re-arrangement of historical philosophy that they can use "Originalism" to put the Divine back into the American experiment and overturn its enlightenment foundations.
Obviously the dimensionality you're advocating — today and in the past — is meaningful and useful, and the strict linearity I'm advocating doesn't explain everything (even Timothy Snyder, my new favorite, allows that history, while not "repeating," does get into near-repetitive patterns, and Futurism can be right-wing, as can the effects of technological advancement). But I just don't see how Left vs. Right can be built without starting with past vs. future, and there's nothing more one-dimensional than that.
> (I don’t know what other kind of metaphor it would be; not light, or electromagnetism)
"Polarization" can mean a dynamic distortion of an electrically-neutral bound system so that it gains a dipole moment, deduced from the existence of the adjective "polarizable" as used in chemistry. Large atoms with diffuse electron clouds are "polarizable" in that when they become bound, their electron clouds can be distorted in this way. But in a sense, that is like your geographic metaphor, just in 3 dimensions.
> ... opposition becoming more perspicuous; it’s a decline in the number of undecideds, as the need to take sides gets clearer.
<nitpick>I think that's a misuse of "perspicuous," because perspicuity is a characteristic of utterances or minds, not of situations. "Focused" or even "obvious" would have been better.</nitpick>
A longer explanation of where the left-right distinction comes from than I've ever seen. I liked it.
IDK how deeply you looked into the assorted attempts at 2-D representations of political variation. Of the various attempts, I still like the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pournelle_chart">Pournelle Chart</a>, which eschews axes like "totalitarian/libertarian" and "collectivism/individualism" in favor of "attitude toward the State" and "attitude toward planned social transformation." It has the advantage of not requiring that you treat "libertarians" as a real category, though they appear on the chart.
The physical phrasing of left vs, right has always implied a unanimity that never existed in the political world. The sans-coulettes would wave their tools but the pros understood their job was to make deals and keep the train on the tracks. It's when the amateurs get involved that the blood starts to flow. It's ironic that the more democratic a democracy gets the more violent it gets, since the cannon fodder don't understand the goal is to keep the machine working, not round up and eliminate your enemies. In a fight between Good and Evil, left and right become banners for warring armies, not simplistic descriptions of political philosophies.
Time is linear, so conflict between the past and the future — whether it's best to "conserve" or to "progress" — is always going to be one-dimensional.
How much of political conflict is about that past/future struggle? Probably not all of it, but time — the only true inescapable master of the universe — determines nearly everything in human affairs, including the movement of civilization (it's impossible to find a value neutral term: "progress"? "advancement"? "development"?).
Human mastery of the planet and its immediate surroundings is a manifestation of intelligence and imagination, the "big brains" Vonnegut correctly called out as the feature that separates us arbitrarily but fatally from the rest of nature. Imagination and intellect lead to society and art (aesthetics begins as early as flint arrowheads, as J. M. Roberts' omnibus world history stresses in its opening pages) and to religion, and to the first attempts to overcome nature's constraints — tribalism giving way to society; agriculture replacing hunting/gathering; the crossing of oceans etc. and then eventually to philosophy, morality, egalitarianism; the invention of concepts like "human rights" and "freedom" and "tolerance" and "crimes against humanity," all progressive monuments as enacted in 1215 and 1776 and 1799 and 1945 and onward.
Timothy Snyder interprets Mein Kampf as insisting that racial struggle for land and food is the only human truth and that all additional imposed social ideas, from Christianity to Capitalism to Communism, are Jewish (Hitler equates St. Peter with Trotsky) — so everything named above as monuments of civilization and progress is lumped together as a literally super-natural force (as he saw the Jews) to be eradicated; this is why Nazism can correctly be identified by Ian Kershaw as "a collapse of civilization."
These collapses, or retrograde movements, are obviously an unavoidable manifestation of the human condition, from the fall of Rome to the Reformation to Trumpism, but their very existence itself emphasizes the inescapability of that relentless progressive drive, away from superstition and "natural" (or animal/tribal) concretized behavior towards abstraction; science; the metaphysical and sublime. (William F. Buckley therefore was correct to say that a Conservative is someone who "stands athwart history yelling 'stop'!".) Reagan and Trump and Hitler all overtly want to go backwards, to return to something "great" that has been lost.
In the present context of "family and faith" vs. "woke-ism," the manifestation of that primary time-based historical linearity couldn't be more clear: as I argue relentlessly here and elsewhere, it's always about the question of human authority vs. the "natural" and the "divine" (both manifestations of pre-civilizational or early civilizational frameworks for determining the arrangement of society and the conception of the Good). David Brooks, Clarence Thomas, Tucker Carlson and all the rest are overtly rejecting intellect-based and enlightenment-based constructions of justice (we "social justice warriors," who presume to know better than God or Nature) — it's only by a deft re-arrangement of historical philosophy that they can use "Originalism" to put the Divine back into the American experiment and overturn its enlightenment foundations.
Obviously the dimensionality you're advocating — today and in the past — is meaningful and useful, and the strict linearity I'm advocating doesn't explain everything (even Timothy Snyder, my new favorite, allows that history, while not "repeating," does get into near-repetitive patterns, and Futurism can be right-wing, as can the effects of technological advancement). But I just don't see how Left vs. Right can be built without starting with past vs. future, and there's nothing more one-dimensional than that.
> (I don’t know what other kind of metaphor it would be; not light, or electromagnetism)
"Polarization" can mean a dynamic distortion of an electrically-neutral bound system so that it gains a dipole moment, deduced from the existence of the adjective "polarizable" as used in chemistry. Large atoms with diffuse electron clouds are "polarizable" in that when they become bound, their electron clouds can be distorted in this way. But in a sense, that is like your geographic metaphor, just in 3 dimensions.
> ... opposition becoming more perspicuous; it’s a decline in the number of undecideds, as the need to take sides gets clearer.
<nitpick>I think that's a misuse of "perspicuous," because perspicuity is a characteristic of utterances or minds, not of situations. "Focused" or even "obvious" would have been better.</nitpick>
A longer explanation of where the left-right distinction comes from than I've ever seen. I liked it.
IDK how deeply you looked into the assorted attempts at 2-D representations of political variation. Of the various attempts, I still like the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pournelle_chart">Pournelle Chart</a>, which eschews axes like "totalitarian/libertarian" and "collectivism/individualism" in favor of "attitude toward the State" and "attitude toward planned social transformation." It has the advantage of not requiring that you treat "libertarians" as a real category, though they appear on the chart.
I think this needs wider attention ...
The physical phrasing of left vs, right has always implied a unanimity that never existed in the political world. The sans-coulettes would wave their tools but the pros understood their job was to make deals and keep the train on the tracks. It's when the amateurs get involved that the blood starts to flow. It's ironic that the more democratic a democracy gets the more violent it gets, since the cannon fodder don't understand the goal is to keep the machine working, not round up and eliminate your enemies. In a fight between Good and Evil, left and right become banners for warring armies, not simplistic descriptions of political philosophies.
2 marks seem insufficient.