We just aren’t very good at it, are we? Humans, I mean. As Karen put it in comments to the previous post, we “like simple solutions. and simple solutions don’t exist in complex systems.”
Stuff’s “Have your say” on John key’s boot camp proposal is instructive. It is full of just what you’d expect, but nestled among the nonsense is this revealing comment by a “Dave Smith”: “This hippie flower-power Nanny State the Labour and Greens have produced just does not work – We have given it a try for long enough.”
And this from “Amanda”: “the next few years we will start to see the effects of the disrespectful, mouthy, selfish little savages bleating about “rights” that the Labour government has created!”
Labour came into (coalition) government at the end of 1999. That’s eight years of labour governance so far. Is eight years really enough for society to be changed so utterly? Especially following the neo-liberal economic changes pursued in an unbroken chain from 1984 through to the end of 1999? We are still, as a nation, discovering the effect of those changes (which are in some ways perpetuated by the current government).
I have a notion that politics – left and right, conservative and liberal, however you choose to frame it – are not really about different kinds of governance. I think they are about different perceptions of people, and different perceptions of how systems work.
Many rightish ideologies (and particularly the libertarian strain) at their core view people as fully capable of being masters of their own destinies, and somehow immune to context and systemic influence or pressure.
Many leftish ideologies at their core view people as structured by the systems in which they inhabit. Behaviour can be explained, and some would say excused, by systemic pressures. Also, cleverly designed systems can encourage socially beneficial behaviours.
So, the kinds of political views that make sense to you emerge from your understanding of human behaviour.
These are of course very rough sketches. (They’re not even necessarily contradictory views, if you’re willing to interpret them both just so.) In a sense, these are folk-politics that exist in the community in relationship with politics-as-she-is-done in the big house of government. (Lakoff enthusiasts can compare his family-metaphors to the above – I think Lakoff’s right, but I think that his level of explanation is wrong – his metaphors emerge from these ideas.)
Here’s the kick, though: I think they’re unequal. Rightish ideologies are just simpler at their core than leftish ones. More than that: rightish ideologies, at their core, are just wrong. They’re wrong about us and about society and they’re wrong about themselves. They don’t understand what it is to be human. (Libertarianism, I’m pointing at you for the most explicit incidence of this.)
Systems are complex. Change takes time. The picture is always bigger than you think. Leftish ideologies, for all their many flaws and weaknesses, tend to have a much better grasp on that than rightish ones; and that in itself makes them vulnerable.
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It is left as an exercise for the reader* how my notion above is not undermined by the fact that capitalism, a system founded on profoundly rightish notions of how humans and systems act, works so much more effectively than any form of socialism I’ve heard of.
* i.e. I’m not sure myself
3 thoughts on “Big Picture Thinking”
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Just to evilly pick on your aside and hassle you (cos I agree with the main thrust of your argument :-))
1. Do you think capitalism really works in a global sense, or just in wealthier countries? To what extent is the system propped up by extreme poverty and cheap labour, and by social unrest and war in other parts of the world? Is this acceptable?
2. Does capitalism “work” in-so-far as it does (and I really would question that in the wider context), partly because the rightist views of human nature are wrong, and many (if not most) people behave in an altruistic manner some of the time, at least within their own communities?
To paraphrase what you have written above we are defining the right as extolling the virtues of the individual and self determination (in other words, you deserve what you work towards); while the left emphasises equality and equity with a “fair” distribution of rewards.
Placing capitalism on the right and socialism to the left, I reckon extreme capitalism doesn’t work either. We live in a democracy with laws governing behaviour and commerce, and noone is suggests we get rid of those. The communist countries were (and are) not really socialist, as the idea of socialism doesn’t really gel with a political elite. We all tend to live in societies with a mix of the two, with the differences between countries reflecting our own morality.
Right now, the individual is on the rise. The appeal of the evangelical Christian churches (in my opinion yesterday) is not in the salvation of the soul but rather, you can love one another as the Lord (praise Jesus) commanded, but also get a Porsche and a couple of investment properties in the process.
What this says to me is individuals are fundamentally selfish. We want social justice and, in New Zealand, we are proud of our social welfare system, but we also want everyone to work towards the betterment of our society, and dole bludgers and other groups who don’t need to be punished.
But that is a sidebar – I agree that the right is more simple than the left, but only insofar as it only addresses an individual rather than tries to deal with society as a whole. We can pinpoint “youth gangs” and “dole bludgers” as antithetical to the ethos of the right easily enough, but finding effective policies to that actually solve the “problem” is as hard for the right as the left.
Really, we all in the end want to get to “heaven”, but it tends to be that some of us deserve to get there in a BMW rather than all of us get there in a Skoda.