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Today is a FREE taste of an Insight Politics article by Chris Trotter that was first published 24 February 2020.
Distinguishing the Political Left From the Political Right?
WHAT IS IT that distinguishes the conservative from the radical? Beyond the arguments over taxes, law and order, and the desirability (or otherwise) of deficits; what is it that separates fundamentally the Right from the Left? The answer to this question explains why partisans of the ideological poles find it so difficult to simply live and let live. Also explained is why, ultimately, the institutions of democracy are more at risk from the Left than the Right.
It is generally accepted that the ideas we still characterise as “left-wing” have their origins in the Eighteenth Century – often referred to as the Age of Enlightenment. It was a time when intelligent men and women were searching for a way of explaining and living in the world that did not leave them at the mercy of religion and its superstitious ecclesiastical guardians.
The previous two centuries had seen Europe torn apart by religious wars. In the heart of the continent, the 30-year-long struggle between the Catholic and Protestant powers had left one-third of those living in the German lands dead. Three centuries would pass before Europe witnessed slaughter on anything like the same scale. Convinced that all this bloodletting was the inevitable consequence of superstition and tradition, the men and women of the Enlightenment sought refuge in the application of reason and in the new advances in natural science, mathematics and philosophy.
Properly applied, argued these philosophes, reason and science held out the intoxicating possibility that humankind could be shaped for and guided towards a state of perfection. If the natural scientists could transform matter, then surely a new generation of philosopher-kings could transform their subjects? Or, if kings and queens were ultimately too compromised to follow Reason to the end of the argument, then the people could seize control of the state and transform themselves. At that point, humankind would finally be ready to inhabit the “new heaven” and the “new earth” which the priests had falsely promised their forebears.
In one form or another, this promise of social and moral transformation has lain at the heart of the Left’s political appeal ever since the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789. In 1848, student revolutionaries proclaimed the birth of a new, liberated, Europe. In January 1919, the German communist, Karl Liebknecht, urged on his working-class followers with the battle-cry: “Forward Comrades! We are storming the Gates of Paradise!”
Gates of Paradise they weren’t, of course, merely the positions of the Freikorps, whose victorious troops would toss Liebknecht’s battered body into a Berlin canal. Things went better for the Left’s perfectionists further to the east, in Russia, where, by the 1920s, the Bolsheviks were proclaiming the birth of an entirely new kind of human-being, homo sovieticus – Soviet Man.
All stuff and nonsense to those conservative thinkers who paid far less attention to what revolutionaries said, than they did to the practical consequences of their plans for erecting heaven on earth. As the father of British conservatism, Edmund Burke (1729-1797) presciently observes in his magisterial Reflections Upon the Revolution in France:
“In a democracy, the majority of the citizens is capable of exercising the most cruel oppressions upon the minority, whenever strong divisions prevail in that kind of polity, as they often must; and that oppression of the minority will extend to far greater numbers, and will be carried on with much greater fury, than can almost ever be apprehended from the dominion of a single sceptre. In such a popular persecution, individual sufferers are in a much more deplorable condition than in any other. Under a cruel prince they have the balmy compassion of mankind to assuage the smart of their wounds; they have the plaudits of the people to animate their generous constancy under their sufferings; but those who are subjected to wrong under multitudes, are deprived of all external consolation. They seem deserted by mankind; overpowered by a conspiracy of their whole species.”
Informed of the Revolution’s steady descent into what history would later call “The Reign of Terror”, Burke observed furiously:
“Massacre, torture, hanging! These are your rights of men!”
Burke’s enduring influence on the thinking of conservatives is unsurprising. At the core of his political philosophy was a profound wariness of human nature. It was not a matter of his believing all men and women to be corrupt, but of accepting that all but the most saintly among us are corruptible. As he put it: “There is no safety for honest men except by believing all possible evil of evil men.”
A Burkean worldview reposes more faith in the accumulation of wisdom over many generations, and in the institutions arising out of its tried and tested application, than it does in the spirit of radical innovation in human affairs. In all societies, Burkeans would argue, there exists an irreducible number of evil men and women, against whom society is obliged to protect itself. Such people are not perfectible, by any means, and those who institute reforms promising to make them so only put their fellow citizens at risk. Likewise with the vicissitudes of human existence. Here, too, perfection is a pipe dream. Life is not always fair. Life is not always pretty. People get hurt. The measures required to rescue every last human-being from the possibility of harm would not only be unacceptably onerous, they would be unbearably oppressive. Small wonder, then, that conservatives would rather cultivate a prudent stoicism than imbibe the intoxicating vapours of radicalism.
Not that the Left has shown itself to be even slightly persuadable on these matters. The prospect of rooting out all that is decrepit and rotten; of bursting asunder the intolerable restraints fastened upon human aspiration by a working knowledge of human history; of allowing all human beings to become acquainted with their new and better selves: who would not risk all for such an incandescent future? And what would these midwives of a better tomorrow not hazard for its safe delivery? What rights would they not curtail? What dissenting minds would they not subdue? What protesting tongues would they not cut out? What unconvinced hearts would they not stop forever? To force open the Gates of Paradise?
To the radicals of the Left, Burke’s ideas of continuity and humility will always be anathema. To the moderate, conservative Right, however, his simple observation that “Society is a partnership of the dead, the living and the unborn”, will always carry the unmistakable accent of political wisdom.
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