So, despite hating wading into identity politics and constant drama on the left, I often feel like I'm forced to discuss these issues due to their extreme prevalence in our modern political system. However, rather than just complaining, I want to discuss how the left should focus on social issues, and what I think would be both a philosophically consistent and winning platform for the left. All in all, my views socially are more libertarian than anything, but at the same time I always thought that libertarians and liberals were not that much different on social issues anyway. I always understood, traditionally, these these ideologies were about liberty and doing what you want, rather than being forced to do what other people want you to do. However, it is quite clear this does not refer to the modern left, nor the right, consistently. That said...
How my ideas vary from other ideologies
The key principles for how the left should act socially is to stay out of each others way, unless harm comes from such an arrangement. However, my vision for this is uniquely different than most other ideologies.
Conservatives like to get involved in peoples' lives on a moral level. They support traditionalism and believe in things like religious morality, defined gender roles, and the "life script" (marriage, kids, etc.). They believe that deviation from the way things are and have always been will bring a downfall to society. This made sense in ancient society. If you didn't have everyone blindly obedient to a moral code, where they all popped out kids and behaved in certain ways, society would fall apart. The thing is, today, these morals provide little guidance in peoples' lives and we no longer need to live this way. We have technology and scientific advancement and social systems that have radically transformed our society in ways where maybe it doesn't matter if people don't have tons of kids. If anything tons of kids in modern society leads to overpopulation and climate change, which is harmful. Maybe it doesn't matter if women are empowered. Maybe it doesn't matter if gay marriage and abortion are legal. To some of these guys, such things represent weakness to society but in a modern context they just lack the rational and evidential backing to justify the heavy handedness on the issues. In modern times, we can have a society where people can do what they want, without harming others. They just seem to want everyone to live like them.
Some conservatives, although not all, also have problematic racial views in their perspective. They fear their culture being displaced by minorities coming in from other countries and believe in a form of supremacy for white anglo saxon Christians. Once again, these guys seem to have views that are irrational. In my view, people should be able to do what they want. Someone wanting to celebrate their own culture or live their own lives should be able to do so. That said, I see the conservative right as a threat to individual freedom, and any restrictions on human behavior should be justified by demonstrating harm that comes to society or others that outweigh the inherent benefits of the freedom to commit such actions.
Libertarians don't represent my views either though. They tend to understand the whole "everyone should leave me alone unless they harm others thing", but they tend to take it way too far. Libertarian freedom is the freedom of that annoying kid who sticks their finger 2 inches from your face and says "I'm not touching you". Technically they're right, but they're still doing something that is violating your personal space and making you uncomfortable. It might not be a direct violation to your freedom, but the fact that you have that freedom is disruptive to others and harmful to them.
Libertarians might be more laid back on certain issues, like drugs, prostitution, gay marriage, etc., but their views are...naive. Libertarian views don't really lead to true freedom. Because to them, they have the freedom to pollute the earth, and everyone just has to live with the consequences. They have the freedom to pay workers $1 an hour, and they better be grateful for it or they starve. They have the right to do what they want with their land despite it causing possible issues that zoning laws try to solve. They believe in a right to association that involves discriminating against racial minorities, depriving them of things they need to live. Their views of freedom are very childish and lack foresight. Clearly, we need to ensure that others are treated fairly and equally. I don't want to get too much into economics, but I believe people cannot be free unless they have enough economic security to participate in the system in truly voluntary ways. And people do have rights, ie, social constructs that guarantee them certain kinds of treatment in society. Libertarians don't understand that while an action may not cause immediate harm to people in a direct way, when approached from a big picture, systemic way, they are quite harmful and lead to structural/systemic violence against certain groups. The rights of all groups should be protected in society.
This brings me to the modern left. On many social issues, the left is kind of dead on on a lot of topics. It allows freedom of choice on many social issues. It also balances this freedom against harm caused to society and marginalized groups. However, the left is kind of going off the rails too, despite being right in principle most of the time. Modern identity politics are extreme divisive and dare I say it, authoritarian. It's not enough to be for freedom of individuals and wanting to protect marginalized groups any more. Everyone must constantly obsess over these topics and sacrifice other priorities on the altar of white liberal guilt. It's not enough to be okay with immigration, or diversity in culture, we have to actively celebrate it. People have to actively "signal" these "virtues" and express a positive reinforcement of them in an almost circlejerky way. Moreover, and this is the big issue, people who are not affected by these politics are seemingly pressured into betraying their own interests in the advancement of these politics, being told to "check their privilege" if they dare assert their own interests over them. While the issues definitely deserve some concern, the lack of attention given to other, in my opinion, more pressing issues that are more universal in scale, are what is really problematic. We have seen this a lot with Bernie in 2016 in which people who advocated for economic interests over social ones were called "Bernie bros", and more recently, we've seen this to an extent with the Andrew Yang movement, where people are expected to abandon support of Yang and UBI simply because some bad egg white supremacists are latching onto the movement. You should not be pressured into betraying core principles or concerns or speaking out about what's in your best interest simply because others have it worse. This isn't to say that there are not valid points on the left. Issues involving minority groups, privilege, etc. are structural and sociological, and should be treated as real issues that we try to solve like anything else. My problem is that the modern left goes far beyond that, devolving the issue into this circlejerky guilt fest in which we all talk about how our interests don't matter because someone else has it worse and we should just get on social media and talk about those issues in a cult like manner while pushing out everything else. This is toxic and should be stopped. If you want to know what I really think the left should be doing, look at Andrew Yang. He talked about issues white people face on Joe Rogan, which is something rare on the left these days, and as such, is winning over some Trump voters. On the flip side, on another podcast he talked about African American issues and how his policies would help them too. We need to tone down the BS rhetoric and focus on defining problems and advocating for actual solutions to them, not just circlejerking about how much we care without doing anything productively about it.
Another problem with the modern left is how some of them tend to lose respect for the rule of law and civil society. I hate to sound conservative, but this is where it fits. Many of our rules and laws exist for good reason. We have freedom of speech, for example, as we do, because we understand that if you censor unpopular speech, it will undermine that liberty, and that one day someone else might decide your views are too dangerous to hold and ban them. Yet the modern left often seems to be opposed to freedom of speech for people like, say, racists. While censorship is a way to suppress racism, it's also a way to censor any idea, and perhaps we as a society should, as I indicated, oppose censorship in principle. Racism sucks, I can't say I don't understand where the left is coming from here, but does it suck enough we're gonna chip away at our liberties to suppress it? And if we ban racism, why not other talk? What about the second amendment people and their talk about revolution against the government? What about Marxists who criticize capitalism and the state? Heck, if anything, how the left has historically been treated in this country insofar as censorship goes should be a huge red flag for why censorship is a terrible idea. The same goes with punching Nazis. Okay, who doesn't actually wanna punch a Nazi? But at the same time, if we just allow people to punch Nazis, what's to stop the Nazis from punching back? What's to stop them from retaliating and assaulting leftists for demonstrating their views? Nothing, that's what. The left does need to develop an appreciation for our civil liberties and rule of law, why they exist, and stop acting like an angry mob and advocating for things that violate just laws and legal concepts. While there is nothing wrong with disobeying unjust laws, when you disobey and advocate disobedience and repeal of just ones whose disobedience has real and dangerous real world consequences as I demonstrated, the entire fabric our society is built on begins to fall apart, for real, and that is extremely dangerous. That's how you start heading toward an actual civil war with actual violence and actual people dying, or alternatively, an actual authoritarian state.
Wrapping it up
I spent much of this article defining my values in opposition to the shortcomings of other moral systems. I felt this was necessary, because my dissatisfaction with these varying ideologies is why, in my opinion, we need a new left libertarian ideology.
My ideology is in opposition to conservatism, because conservatism is based on tradition and well, conserving things for the sake of conserving things. They fear change, and fear their culture being threatened, and on the whole I just don't value these things much. My ideas about culture is that if it's valuable, it should be preserved, but if it's not it should be abandoned, and all culture and right wing sentiment should be treated with skepticism. This skepticism, in my opinion, should provide a filter between good and bad ideas. Good ideas, like the need for civil society and freedom of speech, should be preserved, while irrational ideas like "gay people should be put to death" should be abandoned. People should be allowed to behave as they want, as long as they don't harm others, and any harm allowed by certain actions should be demonstrated in justification for any rule against ideas.
My ideology is in opposition to libertarianism because libertarians are very dogmatic and narrow minded and often ignore how their ideas do real harm. Just because someone isn't picking up a blunt object and beating someone else outright does not mean that harm is not being done. It's possible for individual actions to harm people in an indirect way. A company polluting the earth does not directly hurt someone, but it does do so indirectly, by changing the environment, which then harms people.Paying people sub par wages may not be directly hurting them, but it does lead to a systemic form of resource denial that is arguably quite unfair and coercive. Denying people services on freedom of association might not be directly harming that person, but once again, the effects of such actions do indirect harm. We need to take into account both active, direct harm, but also passive, indirect harm done to individuals, and correct these actions in the most effective but freedom loving ways possible.
My ideology is in opposition to modern liberalism, because while liberals do bring light to issues that right wing ideologies do not discuss, and this should be applauded, they often do so in a way that's toxic, that forces participation in discussing these issues in unproductive ways and undermines other issues from being discussed, and often does not respect just concepts of law. We need a form of liberalism that discusses all issues, of all people, both privileged, and nonprivileged, but does so in a way that is not particularly circlejerky or shames people for not being oppressed enough. We need to focus instead on defining problems and actually solving them in a non toxic way. And maybe liberalism has a little to learn from conservatism too. Maybe liberals need to learn that sometimes they need to better respect the rule of law, and understand that sometimes rules exist for good reason and undoing them to solve a problem in the short term is fundamentally dangerous for the long term.
That said, to sum it up, we need a form of left wing social ideology that:
1) Is skeptical toward tradition, and evaluates everything through a lens of reason and evidence.
2) Is receptive and understanding of both direct, active forms of harm, as well as big picture indirect/passive forms of harm that come from destructive individual actions or social structures.
3) Is non toxic, open to discussing issues of all people, without judging them or playing games regarding who has it worse and who has to shut up and listen to whom.
4) Is respectful of just and valid legal concepts and social structures, understanding that solving a problem short term could lead to larger long term consequences.
This does not seem to really exist in our modern spectrum. Conservatives are gung ho about tradition, the right in general tends to ignore big picture sociological analyses of society and how seemingly innocent actions do have harmful consequences, and liberals tend to see the sociological issues but tend to have heavy handed solutions and a toxic mindset toward approaching them. My views are, as you can tell, closest to the left, but also a lot more "libertarian" in nature than the left currently is, in that it supports a more laid back live and let live philosophy, rather than a more authoritarian ideology in which everyone has to participate in their toxic culture while accomplishing little. I believe my ideas take the best of all of the ideologies out there while rejecting the bad. If I had to sum up my views in a sentence, it would be very similar to that.
No comments:
Post a Comment