Community — Left and Right

Community Right & Left - English


Just casually glancing around at the world, it seems that everyone agrees that community is a valuable part of the human social world. Even capitalism agrees that community is valuable. Well, profitable, anyway. Companies like to sell identities and get people to latch onto them and defend them. The organic industry has done a pretty good job of that. The NRA has done a phenomenal job of that.

Taking a step back from the economic sphere, we can see that the left and the right, speaking sociopolitically, also value the idea of community, but approach it from very different perspectives. It appears to be the same old differences: collectivism on the left versus hierarchism on the right.

The left favors a stateless approach, a non-governmental approach. This doesn’t mean there’s no organization, no structures in place, though I don’t fully understand this approach yet. However, that’s the anarchist model, and there are other leftist models that don’t abandon government (though most seem to dislike the idea of nation-states). In the end, the leftist approach treats all people as equal, and all authority or power as temporary and provisional. The left is fundamentally democratic in its approach to social organization and planning.

The right is very much not these things. In many ways, the right is opposed to them, especially as you get further to the right. The right-wing approach to community is hierarchical and authoritarian. At the top of the social pyramid you find the strong-man, the leader, the god-king, the authority figure. From there you have a series of steps down the pyramid, with each rank having more prestige, money, privilege, and power than the ranks below. Indeed, each rank has direct authority over all the ranks below. Then, at the bottom, you get the slaves. Or serfs, or peasants, or help, or whatever they’re called in that time and place. They’re the people who have little or no power or hope to change their status for the better.

Perhaps I’ve made my preferences clear. Perhaps not.

It seems each of us has moral emotions driving us toward both of these worldviews. We have the moral emotions that drive us to empathise with other people, to take their pain and desires into account, to consider them as equally worthy to ourselves. We also have moral emotions that tend toward hierarchy, bowing to authority figures, and dominating our inferiors. It may well be that we can’t escape some form of hierarchy even as/if we move toward a more socialist democratic system.