I don't wanna be French

Or why "Left" and "Right" are dumb and bad

In the United States, we have been an independent nation for almost three centuries. And yet, for some incomprehensible quirk of history and memes, we’re still living under the tyranny of political labels created by guillotine-happy Frenchmen in 1789. If the goal of life is to understand and live in concord with truth and reality to the greatest extent possible, we can’t keep living in the fever dreams of 18th Century continental Europe. We must describe reality in more accurate terms.

In case you’ve never gone down this particular idiomatic rabbit hole, the terms “left” and “right” hail from the be-heady days of the French Revolution, when those sympathetic to the Church and Crown congregated on the right side of the room (relative to the chairman’s position), and the more raucous revolutionaries on the left. For some reason, this momentarily convenient metaphor sticks around.

The left/right dichotomy is one of the dumbest and longest-enduring cultural frames ever created. It has obscured the nature of political reality for so long that now the terms “left” and “right” only serve as snarls towards opponents or rallying cries for allies. It demands that we believe there is one axis on which people disagree about politics - their desire to defend or overthrow authority. That might have been good enough in a world of kings joined at the hip with powerful church authorities, but it’s completely insufficient to describe politics in a world of democratic republics.

A Foucouldian might say “hon hon hon,” (in between munches on some crusty bread) “you’ve fallen into the trap - power is power, and the divine right of kings has just been transmogrified into authority granted by the consent of the governed. Nothing changes except the ideologies that justify the exercise of power.” While I admire the commitment to never admitting that anything can ever get better for humans, this view requires a studious ignorance of history to maintain. The Enlightenment and revolutions in governance and what can be considered legitimate authority changed the world, and made the critical theory traditions that assail its foundations possible. This all happened a long time ago, and we still haven’t updated our maps of the most important questions that politics can address.

A quick historical refresher: The greatest change that The Enlightenment brought was the idea that while people could believe whatever they want about the universe, there are only certain sorts of statements that can be considered to be compelling evidence when someone makes a claim about truth. After the Classical revival of the Renaissance, the philosophy and rhetoric of the Ancient Greek and Roman world were heavy on the minds of European thinkers. They wedded these ideas to the burgeoning world of natural sciences, and eventually developed empiricism - the idea that all knowledge is derived from the senses (including tools that enhance the senses), and that claims to knowledge can be tested through the scientific method. 

These new ideas rocked the foundations of the world’s powers. Some European kings claimed that their authority flowed from God’s power, and the church (or churches) frequently agreed. Both Protestant and Catholic churches claimed that their authority came from God, either through the succession from Peter or through his direct communication via the Bible or personal revelations. These claims were… difficult to test. And they were spectacularly dismantled in the second half of the 20th century as critical thinkers wrestled with basic questions like Theodicy and the possibility of any divine authority in the wake of two earth-rending world wars.

So back to the present. Yes, there are still people who believe in the authority of divine revelation, but our modern forms of government are structured to exercise legitimate authority, deriving from the consent of the governed. Libertarian protestations that “I didn’t sign the social contract” aside, our governing institutions are built to protect the rights of the people. And while no government can perfectly represent every individual human, the federalist Constitutional system in America is one of the best systems devised so far to protect individual rights.

So What Spectrum Should We Use, Mr. Fancy Pants?

Theoretically (at least in the model that the US is supposed to run on according to the Constitution) power is no longer arbitrarily assigned, and the power of religious groups who claim their authority from divine revelation has shrunk to a factional power instead of a hegemonic force.

Of course, there’s a lot of disagreement on the best policies to pursue with the power that federal, state, and local governments wield, and that’s the space where we need a more sensible description of the opposing poles of political orientation. In an ideal world, we’d have a shorthand cluster system to describe someone’s political instincts across different aspects of personal, economic, and cultural liberty, but that would require a lot of people to learn a lot of new terminology and seems pretty unlikely to self-replicate. 

[Removed snarky aside about how I could probably make this happen if political positions were construed as identities, lest I destroy the world by unleashing a horde of people who self-identify as “Jim Smith, Medicare/Medicareself, SPQROMGWTFBBQ”]

To really understand where people are coming from and where they want to go, a more apt model might be a cross/grid rather than a single line going to left and right. The x axis would be “Free Thinker” and “Tribal Teammate,” and the y axis would be “Constrained” and “Unconstrained.” These are just two axes that you could use. If there’s a fault in this set, it’s that almost everyone can reasonably be placed on the positive side of the “Tribal Teammate” ledger, but I think it’s a worthwhile metric while trying to understand where people are coming from and how they view the world.

Constrained vs Unconstrained

Thomas Sowell’s idea of a “constrained" and “unconstrained” worldview is a useful lens in distinguishing the main competing visions of human society and culture’s ability to improve the lives of individual humans. 

In a “constrained” worldview, we live in a world with finite resources and frequently must make the best of several bad choices. “Constrained” thinkers believe that there are always tradeoffs when implementing new initiatives, and believe that weighing those tradeoffs against the expected benefits of any new initiative is crucial in determining the right course of action. 

In an “unconstrained” worldview, people tend to talk about end goals rather than tradeoffs. People who want to “end poverty,” “eradicate transgenderism,” or enact “zero COVID” policies are “unconstrained.” They believe that the moral imperative to act outweighs any potential costs or tradeoffs, and that the historical persistence of certain cultural and political paradigms is a matter of chance or elite choice, not the organic outgrowth of uncountable trillions of individual decisions in a fumbling global quest for agency. More than that, they believe that we have the expertise and wisdom to correct any flaw that we identify in society, if we just put the spurs to ‘er.

Unconstrained thinkers believe we can make the world anew, constrained thinkers believe we may be able to make human experience better. You could also call them the “tragic worldview” and the “romantic worldview,” with the former focusing the need to control and account for ubiquitous human failings and the latter focusing on the inspirational visions of what man could possibly be (or sometimes, what man could possibly avoid).

From my description of the two groups, it may be obvious that I lean more toward the “constrained” than “unconstrained” view. I depart from Rousseau and Jefferson and their belief in the ultimate perfectibility of mankind. I tend to think that we have a human nature, in the same way that a dog has a dog nature and a squirrel has a squirrel nature, that’s both written into every cell in our body and reinforced in every moment as our consciousness propels our bodies through space-time. I’m not sure what a “perfect dog” would be, but any definition we have of the “perfect dog” would reflect more about what we could gain from the relationship with the dog than about what the dog itself wanted. Perfection is a standard from the outside, and claiming that mankind can become perfect demands that the speaker place himself outside of our filthy, roiling animal existence. I think there are some things that humans can’t change about themselves without losing their humanity.

One shorthand to separate constrained thinkers from unconstrained thinkers is to look at what they focus on. Do they discuss policy, or do they harp on the problems that demand a policy solution? If they’re simply sermonizing about how terrible “X” is and how it shouldn’t exist, whether “x” is drag queens or billionaire wealth, it’s likely that you're dealing with an unconstrained thinker. 

And this isn’t some sneaky way to make a synonym for “conservative” be seen as the “sane” end of this polarity - there are constrained and unconstrained thinkers of all stripes. For example, anarcho-capitalists are unconstrained libertarians - they think that we can remake society in the image of an abstract ideology, and that it’ll pretty much all be an improvement on how things are. Same for radical Marxists who have a clear blueprint for an equitable society, and think impressing that blueprint on the world would be an unalloyed good without attendant oppression and suffering. This isn’t ideological, it’s about temperament and what you think is possible.

Free Thinker vs Tribal Teammate

This axis might be a little harder to place people on, and it’s likely that people might perceive themselves as occupying a different position than their audience/interlocutors would. But in general, the free thinker/tribal teammate axis is about orientation towards the groups that someone identifies with. I think “tribalism” has been beaten to death as a topic so I won’t go out of my way to define it, but it’s obvious when you see it - if someone is using all their intellect as a defense attorney for a group, idea, or abstraction rather than approaching ideas with curiosity and appropriate suspicion, they are likely in the throes of tribalism.

This can manifest in all sorts of different aspects of the human experience, from relatively benign instantiations like music and sports fandom to deadly fracturing of communities along religious, ethnic, or ideological lines. The explosion of romantic nationalism from the middle to the end of the 19th Century birthed some of the greatest horrors of the 20th, as people brought old fashioned tribalism worldwide in modern warfare.

Why these two?

I think that taken together, these two axes can help us figure out how interested a person is in living in reality. As I mentioned before, people can’t avoid being tribal to some extent, unless they reach some sort of Zen nirvana after extinguishing their id - but there are varying degrees of tribalism. A belief in some set of principles doesn’t necessarily blind you to reality, but it can make it harder to see clearly when discussing the principles you hold dear.

And unconstrained thinking can be visionary and inspirational. Imagining a different way of being can provide direction to the actual, incremental movement that makes up political and social change.

But when you take the two dispositions together, the further you get towards the “unconstrained” and “tribal teammate” quadrant of the chart, the greater the distance from human experience in the real world. On the “unconstrained” axis’ endpoint, we find utopian theorists who have a perfect plan for humanity. On the “tribal teammate” axis’ endpoint, we find brutal beasts ready to destroy the enemies of their team at any cost, truth and reality be damned. When they merge, we get the horrors of the 20th Century.

I think being on the other end of the distribution (highly constrained and highly free thinking) can also run the risk of living out of reality. At its worst, extreme constrained thinking looks just like depressed impotence, unable to conceive of anything that could be done to improve the lot of mankind. It’s more difficult for me to come up with what would be negative about the extreme end of “free thinker”, but it could look like endlessly litigating questions that the rest of the world considers settles in a fruitless quest for personal fulfillment.

The risk of the extreme unconstrained tribal teammate is too much action that will end up being harmful, and the risk of the extreme constrained free thinker is little or no action, meaning that harm that may have been prevented remains unprevented.

Given that the harms of the former are more immediate and real than the theoretical harms of the latter, it would be most beneficial for people to spot and shame unconstrained tribal teammates when they enter the public discourse. Tragically, it’s exactly these people who have leveraged the dynamics of social media to get their tribal teammates to swarm people who violate their taboos.

Unconstrained thinkers can come to their senses when they see the unconstrained ideas of their ideological opposites. Some of the most wild-eyed devotees of one ideology will remember that legislation can have unintended consequences when their opponents introduce it, only to deny that it’s a possibility when their allies introduce bills. This free-floating hypocrisy is part of being a human, but it’s especially evident when you look at areas with high concentrations of tribalism.

Is this a good idea?

You tell me! I think that if I made a list of writers and thinkers I trust, they would mostly cluster on near the middle of the chart, with some of my favorite intellectual weirdos occupying the furthest reaches of “Free Thinker” and “Unconstrained”. What other axes/scatterplots that map a relationship between two worldviews might help illuminate political discourse and get us closer to reality and truth?