Left and Right: Looking to Other Places and Looking to Other Times
It seems safe to assert--painting with a rather broad brush here--that the right has an inclination to view the past with a certain kind of reverence whereas the left has some tendency to view other (contemporaneous) cultures with a roughly similar kind of reverence. For example, when push comes to shove, the right often falls back on assertions about our own traditions, whereas the left tends to fall back on assertions about how things are done elsewhere. (Again, it's more complicated than this, but I've been trying to get this germ of an idea out for quite awhile, and I'd rather get it out initially and imperfectly than not get it out at all.)
So the obvious question is: why is this? I used to have contempt for both types of arguments, but now both seem rather less crazy to me--though both types of appeals are very, very weak. Burkean conservatives apparently think that our own traditions are the outputs of long centuries of informal experimentation and, ergo, carry some epistemic and moral weight. That's not crazy, but the point seems to apply to the traditions of other cultures, too. So, it seems, if our own traditions deserve a certain degree of respect, so do the traditions of other cultures. We can run a similar point about the leftish position, but I'll make that point by reminding you of the quip that an anthropologist (most of whom are denizens of the intellectual left) is someone who respects every culture but his own...
So to the extent that I have a question here it's this: is there any way to sustain either the rightish position (considerable respect for our own traditional ways of doing things, little respect for the ways of others) or the leftish position (considerable respect for other ways of doing things, little respect for our own traditional ways)?
There'll be devils in the details here, but on the face of it one should expect these positions to stand or fall together.
Right?
It seems safe to assert--painting with a rather broad brush here--that the right has an inclination to view the past with a certain kind of reverence whereas the left has some tendency to view other (contemporaneous) cultures with a roughly similar kind of reverence. For example, when push comes to shove, the right often falls back on assertions about our own traditions, whereas the left tends to fall back on assertions about how things are done elsewhere. (Again, it's more complicated than this, but I've been trying to get this germ of an idea out for quite awhile, and I'd rather get it out initially and imperfectly than not get it out at all.)
So the obvious question is: why is this? I used to have contempt for both types of arguments, but now both seem rather less crazy to me--though both types of appeals are very, very weak. Burkean conservatives apparently think that our own traditions are the outputs of long centuries of informal experimentation and, ergo, carry some epistemic and moral weight. That's not crazy, but the point seems to apply to the traditions of other cultures, too. So, it seems, if our own traditions deserve a certain degree of respect, so do the traditions of other cultures. We can run a similar point about the leftish position, but I'll make that point by reminding you of the quip that an anthropologist (most of whom are denizens of the intellectual left) is someone who respects every culture but his own...
So to the extent that I have a question here it's this: is there any way to sustain either the rightish position (considerable respect for our own traditional ways of doing things, little respect for the ways of others) or the leftish position (considerable respect for other ways of doing things, little respect for our own traditional ways)?
There'll be devils in the details here, but on the face of it one should expect these positions to stand or fall together.
Right?
posted by Winston Smith at
4:17 AM
1 Comments:
This posting deserves comment, but I find it a very big topic, and I'm having trouble imposing any structure in a short response. But short is all I have time for...
The parallel you draw, WS, is convenient, but it's not convincing. Here's why.
Conservatives do have reverence for the past. The Constitution is not a living document, so formulations that obviously left intended room for interpretation ("cruel and unusual", "advice and consent", etc.) must mean that anything that was not tested in court in the 1790s passes Constitutional muster! History is the childhood myths (Washington and the cherry tree...), not the inconvenient facts about our slave-holding founders' feet of clay. If rote education was good enough for daddy, it's good enough for me. If God had intended man to fly, He'd have given him wings. For many, scripture is literal, not at all a subject of discussion, despite the rich original Talmudic tradition, so the earth is 6,000 years old, nevermind the evidence.
Liberals, on the other hand, do not blindly revere anything. We respect other traditions, sometimes mistakenly, true. We believe that the stroke of genius our imperfect founders did have was to construct a polity that was not schlerotic the moment it was written down, one that could adapt to waves of immigration and could rise to its own unfulfilled aspirations. RFK had it right, Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not. We know that the Great Compromise that birthed our nation had good and evil both and that it is up to each succeeding generation to improve what went before, not hearken back to the dream of a golden age that never really existed.
Conservatives are unshakably attached to American exceptionalism. True, there are ways in which America is exceptional. As a liberal, I know that some of those ways are good, some bad.
Conservatives will not open their minds to this. I have heard conservatives assert that there is nothing at all that we can learn from Europeans! I have heard them deny that white American settlers committed genocide against the native people. (Yes, many of the native peoples were nasty, too, and it is a fair criticism to level at liberals that we have often romanticized native Americans as in the classic 1970s anti-littering TV ad with the weeping Indian.) Conservatives have denied to me that previous waves of immigrants also refused to learn English, accepted government aid, and caused friction with the then established powers. They remember No Irish need apply and garlic-eaters, but they fail to identify even a little with today's Latin American immigrants.
I'd really like to know why.
(OK, not so short.)
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