Worth the Bother

I'm not watching the Super Bowl. As you will have noticed, I have opinions about climate change, rights and duties, questions and answers, winning and losing, and so on. Life is more interesting than the Super Bowl. Those who disagree with me will ignore my reasons and dismiss me with a label because they are busy with important stuff. You probably have a label for me, since you are often busy with important stuff. What do you think? Whose team am I on, the Left or the Right? 

Since I often have time, I am more inclined to give reasons than adopt a label. Nevertheless, I was curious to know where I stand, so I looked up the bias rating of my favourite news sources (CBC, BBC, PBS) and found out I would be placed slightly left of centre by MBFC (Media Bias / Fact Check). An article in The Tyee, gives some additional depth to what it means to be on the left. It ain't necessarily what you or I would think. 

Left and right as political labels were first used to distinguish revolutionaries and monarchists (France, ~1789), referring to where they sat in the assembly. The aristocrats refused to sit with the noisy rabble, and common folk didn't much like the privileged nobility, so they sat on opposite sides. Whether we eat bread or cake, that distinction is passé, although Thomas Picketty proposes that it has evolved into a contest of the educated versus the wealthy. I don't see it that way. Where would you position Mark Carney and Jordan Peterson, both well educated in their fields and neither impoverished. I could make a guess, but giving reasons would take some time, and even then I wouldn't be too sure. 

We aren't sure because we have moved on to other dichotomies: socialist-individualist, egalitarian-capitalist, liberal-conservative, progressive-traditional, inclusive-exclusive, relativist-absolutist, libertarian-authoritarian. Lots of room for confusion depending on which categories you include in your choice. 

It's quite like the Super Bowl. Who are you cheering for, Chiefs or Eagles? How did you decide? Maybe you live closer to Philadelphia than Kansas City, or you have a nephew on one of the teams, or you bet against the odds, or you flipped a coin because everybody else in the bar is going to be cheering and you don't want to be left out. Actually it makes no difference who wins, not even whether they endorse their cheques with the left hand or the right. There just has to be a contest because this game is all about winning or losing, exorcising raw instincts so we can continue to live together without actually killing each other.

Just so with the left-right contest. It seems to me that we use fuzzy categories to distinguish us (the in-group with whom we agree) from them  (the outsiders who have other opinions), not fully aware of the roots of our bias or theirs. The win-lose dynamic is part of standard human equipment that needs to be managed so we can coexist. And so we have Question Time and cynical rhetoric and media taking sides, and voting, and winners and losers. 

Instead, we could examine the issues and discuss reasons. If we knew more about the history, biology, psychology, group affinities, and circumstances that shape intuition, our contrasting views might soften into blended nuances. Then, focusing on reasons, we might find shared motives, pull together and get things done instead of wasting words feeding the win-lose beast from which we have evolved. 

Imagine democracy without losers. If Socrates were present and in a positive mood, he would remind us that the well-examined life may be worth the bother.

More on this theme next time.

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Left-Right Political Spectrum: Wikipedia