What’s Next after Left and Right?
The editors of Prospect Magazine have asked 100 writers and thinkers to answer the question, “Left and right defined the 20th. century. What’s next?”
As you might expect the 100 respondents had no trouble coming up with their own answers to the question.
What I found interesting were the sheer number of opposing idea pairs replacing that of the left and right.
There is general agreement, and there probably always has been since the Greeks gave us Apollo and Dionysus, that our world is alive by the tension of opposites. Take away that tension and what is left? Utopia? Communism? Totalitarianism? China of the Song, Yuan and Ming Dynasties?
In any case we are not there yet, not yet in a world without tension. We still live very much within the tension of opposite pairs. In education there is public and private. In democracy there is liberty and equality. In economics there is state control and the free exchange in the market of goods and ideas.
Here are just a very few of the replacements proposed for the “left vs. right” of the century just passed:
Global vs. local, the vested interests of governmental incompetence on the one hand and the democratic urge for reform on the other, nation state vs. market state, the reality based community and the ideologically-based community, open vs. closed, liberalism vs. authoritarianism, youth vs. age, technocracy against democracy, … and there are even those who hold onto the left right opposition, (and I think I’m probably one of them).
Perhaps there is at bottom a single opposition that keeps us all alive, and perhaps the 100 pairings are only different names for the same underlying human condition. The interesting question for me is why we’re not all in the middle, seeing the truth of both sides, while only occasionally and temporarily leaning to the one side or the other.
Why instead are so many of us so much on one side or the other, even to the point of blowing oneself up in pursuit of one’s belief? Why can’t we all learn to live between opposing forces, keeping them at a distance, not allowing the one or the other to consume us with a destructive singleness of purpose and vision?
