Brace, brace, comrades ... I'm letting go
Answering a reader's question turns out to be kind of liberating
Preface: the actual politics of this writer is a matter of zero import. The business of Rarely Certain is to explore the process of making sense of ideology-inflected controversies, rather than where one should be landing on things. Explorations of how to think, rather than what to think. Sometimes by personal example, which may or may not be a good example.
So, what follows is an exploration of a personal process insofar as it relates to a political label. Part confessional, part surprising realisation. Perhaps readers will relate ... or object to certain framings. A comment thread will be open to all users of the Substack Reader app.
A reader (call them 'J') asks a question
'On reading your latest piece I have became further intrigued. Could you please explain how you are of the left, who you characterise as of the right and how they are of the right? To me a traditional left and right no longer exist so would like to know how you feel so confident flagrantly throwing these terms around?'
The first thing to note is a certain internal defensiveness.
Something that roughly translates to this person is questioning my bona fides as a lefty and suggesting that my ideas about the political spectrum are anachronistic. Even worse, they might be suggesting that I'm covertly right-wing.
Vanity related to identity.
Of course I'm a lefty, but I'm a proper lefty.
And...of course I know that 'populism' leads to apparent alliances between right and left, but there still is a left to identify with, so I need to get on with defining that, so that this mistaken person understands.
A few weeks of reflection has led to a more nuanced - and perhaps confused - conclusion.
Interrogating where I stand reveals that I'm not actually at all confident about 'throwing these terms around' at this point, let alone identifying with them. Not really. Those terms might just be more of a shorthand at this point, for vague values-related compound views, rather than useful descriptions or meaningful in any significant sense.
And if that's the case, can I personally really be a lefty?
Two things go on when I ponder this question.
One is that I realise that being a lefty seems to be important in some way to my identity as an ok person.
Educated. Insightful. Cosmopolitan. In tune with the times. Unselfish. Caring. Forward-looking. Good. Maybe even cool. Or, at least cooler than the gammon.
Things I'd guess that left-identifying people see themselves as (thereby necessarily framing conservatives as the opposite).
The other thing is that I'm forced to confront the fact that many of my specific views have moved 'rightward' in quite a short space of time.
For example, rejecting the notion that preferring to be among one's own cultural kind is racist. Or believing that money spent on trying to make people be nicer to each other would be better invested in training people to care less about 'micro-aggressions' supposedly committed against them.
Hating the proliferation of 'hate speech' legislation that's obviously designed to instil cultural values, rather than maintain public order. The stupid and counter-productive aspects of the 'trans rights' conversation and 'anti-racism' ideology that seeks to demonise 'whiteness'. Or noticing that - as Jonathan Haidt once again points out - coddling people makes them less happy.
In Britain there is a label for those, like me, who might argue for more equitable distribution of economic gain while balking at accelerated social liberalism. Blue Labour. Mostly a Twitter phrase beloved of one side, who'd prefer Britain's Labour Party to reflect the values of people like The Squad, rather than Bernie Sanders. It's actually most often used as a smear, because blue is the colour of Britain's Conservative Party.
But I notice that it's also what gets branded as 'right wing populism', of which there seem to be two versions; one described by academics and their media disciples as authoritarian, dangerous and hateful and another version which seems to me to be a reasonable reaction to the hyper-financialisation of neoliberal corporatism.
I guess this may be what J is getting at. I keep professing to be a lefty, while espousing opinions that are being squeezed out of left-coded spaces but enthusiastically promoted by the right.
Clearly, there are many of us like this, now. Those who stopped to look around and felt that something was off. Those who suddenly didn't care about belonging to a tribe, served with off-the-shelf value sets. That segment of the self-identifying political left who refuse to conform but are maybe still afraid to stop identifying as 'left'. As I find myself afraid to.
And yet, after a few weeks of reflection, perhaps I'm finding the courage.
Also, to insist that nor am I of the right, the centre or any other construction that might serve to put me into a convenient box. At this point it’s a pox on all houses, for me.
It would make sense to assert this. To write as much as I do about the brain-twisting, stupidifying effects of ideological commitment and then to keep labelling myself as a thing does seem to contain an inherent contradiction.
The conclusion I'm drawing is that one's political stances may really be more tightly bound up with self-image and 'identity' than values as such.
Weirdly, this process of detachment coincided with emerging from a particularly difficult personal period (aka my entire life until 2020) to then find that improved wellbeing makes one less rigid in worldview, more curious about and - above all, more tolerant of - other perspectives. And that most of the more intelligent and insightful middlebrow socio-cultural analysis seems to emanate from sources like Quillette or Unherd.
Feeling better in this life seems to have put me in touch with something I might call my inner conservative. Where 'conservative' is not political at all. Then the pandemic blew everyone’s minds on the left and right, leaving me with even less taste for alignment with either side.
Is this improvement in day-to-day well-being and thinning of ties with traditional political discourse correlational or causative? Further reflection needed. But, one of the most amusing controversies in the social sciences is around differences in the self-reported mental health of people who identify on the left or right.
Despite the best efforts of left-leaning researchers to describe this as a trope, caused by nothing more than survey artefacts, the evidence stubbornly keeps mounting that liberal/leftish people are more disposed to depression and anxiety than those on the right. This feels potentially relevant, when you’ve found yourself simultaneously becoming happier and less ‘left’-feeling.
What J was asking is why I identify as left, given my disdain for what the left has become, under the influence of postmodern theoreticians in the anglosphere academy, now fully allied with the neoliberal 'elites' of the political and corporate world.
The short answer to J is ... thanks. I think you were right to make the challenge.
I also think you're right that a traditional left and right no longer exist.
This is why I saw it as somewhat pathetic when Elon Musk made news by encouraging his Twitter followers to vote Republican, in last year's mid-term elections.
This just seemed childish. That gang were mean to me so I'm joining this one instead.
The more I interrogate my value leanings the less relevant both right and left seem at this point. Which speaks to J's point about the meaninglessness of those terms.
My relationship to the 'big questions' seems to have become more esoteric and subtle since finding, perhaps, the first place in my life that feels like home and spending more time than at any previous life point wishing for no more than this moment.
Those factors are connected.
To grasp this, read people like Paul Kingsnorth or Mary Harrington. Almost everything I might have to say about the 'no limits' vision of liberalism's endgame, the absence of meaning in modernity or the rootlessness of the utopian objective of a borderless world would only be parroting those writers. They have been persuasive for me.
Doomerism, the post-secular religiosity of scientism, human atomisation in line with theories that conflate material reality with language, those are some of the things that seem to undermine human flourishing more than a few people making more money than they can spend, so that people with no grounding in such things can moan about 'capitalism, man'. Of course (the dull but essential throat-clear) there are always good things to be done for people who are struggling. That’s not the point here.
(Incidentally, Freddie deBoer (inevitably) remains the best writer for railing against the influx of born again 'socialists', who saw some good memes on Insta and decided to start a TikTok talking about something something billionaires.)
Between the left's focus on social theories of justice, the right's obsession with the left's focus on social theories of justice and the neoliberal centre's obsession with technocratic control of people, enabling borderless capital flows, accelerating resource depletion and overseeing PR campaigns to show how much they care about the planet and mass extinctions, politics as practiced at the granular level feels increasingly inconsequential to me as a being.
I suppose it still matters for the day to day. Why else have elections? Maybe don't answer that, when 'the markets' can force someone out of office anyway, saving the bother of even having one.
The Political Compass test I've regularly taken over recent years just revealed again that I remain able to identify plausibly as left wing. If I wish to. But I care much less to identify that way than before.
There I am. In the bottom left box. That's me. The red dot on the left. It says so, right there.
But I'm inclined to begin practicing in earnest not saying I am.
Perhaps it's just time to let go. Just be the person who Political Compass slots into the the quadrant called 'left libertarian' and call it good.
And when it comes to the next General Election I can vote in (Britain's, unfortunately) I'll worry about who to pick nearer the time. It will be hard to even bother voting at all, based on what I see now. Least worst is hardly an inspiring objective.
I’m calling it. What am I?
A pro-social, compassionate, independent, individual. With no idea who to vote for.
Readers, please don't be shy. How do you identify? Has it changed in recent times? Have your say. The chat will be open to those who use the app.
And thanks again to J.
For me, although it's currently fashionable to focus on 'liberal tears', I cannot help but notice that conservative despair is also quite the thing.
I'm looking forward to a time when ideology in general is accepted as bad for you. But, until then, this is still very good on the markers for one side.
Next time, perhaps
Tangential, but somewhat related, there has been a rash of hot takes on whether the rise in teenage mental health issues is because of smartphones.
What's interesting to me about this is how we always seem to need an object on which to pin blame when something is going awry with people. I'm sure gun-owners in the US will relate.
Smartphones seem to me to be a scapegoat for cultural currents that create unhappiness. Because these devices are the conduit, they get the blame. It's easy to talk about phones, though. Those bad phones.
This seems to give a free pass to the culture, which is convenient, because it removes the need to confront any actual problems.
Take the phone away and what you're really doing is disconnecting people from the culture. Implicit in this is the fact that the problem is the culture. But we only talk about the phones.
All this reminds me of the 70s when everyone blamed TV for things.
By focusing on the device that brings the culture into everyone's pocket, plugged in permanently to the neuroses, obsessions, opinions and pain of other people, we can blame this bit of plastic, metal and silicon without examining the content. Which is the babble of the hive mind and its preoccupations.
More to say on this, anon. Maybe I'll even have my thoughts straight on it. So far, the best I’ve managed was a comment on someone else’s blog that went like this:
Apart from scale (so much information close at hand through a pocket size Internet connection & craftily structured platforms) I'm not sure that most of these influences weren't always a glance away in the age of mass media.
When I grew up in the 70s & 80s there was always much hand-wringing about these kind of influences (beauty, success, wealth) and how they supposedly harmed impressionable young minds.
The thing that seems new to me is the constant opinion airing and judgement. That, for me, was the part of this article that resonated. I had one friendship group who did this, in the 80s. I came to notice that hanging out with them wasn't at all enriching & that was that.
But now, it's the scaling up of that miserable finger-wagging that I'd speculate has the most unsettling effect on people who are prone to caring. And leftishist influence, relentlessly going on about 'structural' injustice. No wonder its liberals scoring worst on self-reported wellbeing.
Now, put that phone down and talk to someone.
Don’t go quite yet…
This quote leapt out of Ian Leslie's piece last weekend about Nelson Mandela. I had wet eyes when I finished reading the story. The Ruffian is always great and you might not regret signing up for it.
In the heat of a dispute, opinion and face are bound tightly together (the novelist Rachel Cusk defines an argument as “an emergency of self-definition”). If we want someone to change their opinion, we have to help them find a way of doing so that doesn’t involve erasing themselves. Then, if and when they do start to come round to our way of thinking, we should avoid scolding them for not agreeing with us all along. (It’s amazing how often this happens - it hardly makes it more tempting for others to switch sides.) We’d do well to remember that those people have achieved something we have not: a change of mind.
I know your feelings, and I certainly went through them. It took me several years in my post-partisan path to figure out how to describe myself. What I recognized in 2008 was that an identitarian populism had taken over American politics and I wanted no part of it. So I started getting healthy instead, which is somewhat easy for me as a Californian, with my "body as message" closer to my personality.
I find it interesting that you disclaim the politics (and should the optics) and emphasize the process of thinking. This is a brilliant observation. My fallback to Reebokism was second nature as was my continual investment in philosophical thinking - adjunct to my profession in business intelligence. So while I was doing burpies, learning Ruby and searching for better processes of delivering my public spiritedness, I did one more thing that was healthy. I started hanging out with hackers and first responders. In both ways I decided that I didn't want to be in the belly of a beached whale. I saw that no banks were ringfenced. I saw that Obama didn't make us post-racial he amplified the national obsession by confessing "I am Trayvon Martin". I say without irony that he and Trump contributed to today's essentialisms. All of this was tolerable until the triple witching hour of Evergreen's "No Whites Allowed Day" in which my distrust of institutions, my expectation that politicization of anything just makes it worse and my comprehension of the failure of calm reason hit a crescendo.
But I was healthy. I learned how to bandage the wounded, find network security holes and submit an administrative case to the FBI. I joined for a time, that strata of Americans that put out fires, break up fights, and otherwise get cracking when others are on crack and crack up. These were my new tribes. And they included the Intellectual Dark Web, and the stickmen. But these are all transient memberships. I didn't find my *kind* of people. I found my *sort* of people. Then I re-sorted myself into other tribes. When the Trumpists and the MeToos marched into town, I could not be positively identified as the Enemy. That's because I determined that I didn't need a home and a family on the left, on the right, in the middling middle. I didn't need to care and make my care known. I simply adhered to the best practices, the continuous process improvement. My humility became my process. I didn't need to exploit any skill at an existential level. It wasn't about be. It was about do.
One day while playing Assassin's Creed, I reached a level in which I became a 15th century Italian lord. I owned a castle, ate fresh fruit and vegetables, and cared for the security of local shopkeepers, pig farmers and mud collectors. I realized they could all be Constitutional Peasants if they bothered. And I realized as a 21st century gamer, that I needn't be bothered with 21st century politics, religion or philosophy. I wound up searching into the Western Canon, started with Epicurus and wound up with the Stoics. I imagined myself in the dirty feet of Diogenes giving Trump the finger. That worked.
Finally I discovered in Karl Popper that my attention to process and my willingness to be corrected (in fact my need to have all my code debugged) was central to the reality of science and essential to the open society. This is the transparency that saves us all, and the sooner more of us stop gauging ourselves by anything the news comedians emanate, the more of us will survive the degradation of society. Open source wins in the end. The parties are proprietary and it comes as no surprise that Fox, for example, tell the masses the precise lies they want to hear.
The hubris of today is massive. I don't want to burn it all down, but I will watch dispassionately if it does. If COVID had crippled me, I might be a bit more fearful. But there remain within the belly of America, practitioners who keep practicing. So I'm not surprised that the right stuff can be produced. Then again, you should be building aircraft carriers 10 years before you desperately need them. I don't know what exactly is going to hold American society together, but humans have survived through worse. The apocalypse isn't exactly here, but it's fairly easy to identify the zombies and robots. I hope I don't have to wear the uniform.
"Smartphones seem to me to be a scapegoat for cultural currents that create unhappiness. Because these devices are the conduit, they get the blame. It's easy to talk about phones, though. Those bad phones."
I'm going to have to disagree with this, just because I think smartphones are probably the most destructive invention since the atom bomb. They have destroyed so much of what it means to be human: I have friends visit who I haven't seen in years, and they still can't take their eyes from the phone; I visit family, and meet my cousins' children, who I could barely pick out of a lineup and no ZERO about, because they are never not on their phones (and think of all the great stories I could have told them about the lives of their parents and grandparents); I go to a music show or a sporting event, and can barely see through the sea of raised phones, not to mention the large mass of people who attend yet never take their eyes from the phone; last summer I went to the beach and while the sun was setting beautifully, I watched person after person walk by with their eyes glued to their phones.
Not to mention the larger political and social aspects: Smartphones, constant internet access, and social media are the greatest tools of social conditioning and mass-opinion control and formation ever invented, they have created a digital panopticon of docile anxious conformists constantly monitoring each other for social miscues or deviations from orthodoxy, all happy to report each other to the authorities for social credit and virtual virtue points.
I realize (and mostly agree) that all this could be solved by some self-control and self-denial, but 1) those things may be the most unAmerican traits of all; and 2) we wouldn't serve crack to middle-schoolers, have them smoke crack rock between classes, and then ask why they've all become crackheads.