We live in an age where hypertext has made the memory hole irrelevant and totalitarian attitudes transcend state or party or even capital apparatuses. Ideology does not need a state of church or factory to enforce the dictates of an ideology now, and, perhaps, it never did. In a time of hyper-abundant information, truth does not need to be destroyed, just discredited. The heretic does not need to be killed or purified, just made a laughing stock. In many situations, discrediting is not necessary. The perpetual loop of credulity itself reinforced by the shame of feeling wrong is all that is needed for a man or woman to lie themselves into a goosestep. Once a heuristic is imposed through an ideology, a cultural bias, a class bias, or whatever overarching framework a person attaches to his or her thoughts, the cognitive tendencies to block out counter-information and to find confirmation of what one already believes starts one on a mission to discredit as self-evident disinformation anything that does not fit with the heuristic. Propaganda becomes an internal mechanism even without any forced or coercive actors.
In a strange way, in this is a paradox of multiculturalism and pluralism. John N. Gray says this more completely than me when commenting on Isaiah Berlin in Two Faces of Liberalism:
"To affirm that humans thrive in many different ways is not to deny that there are universal human values. Nor is it to reject the claim that there should be universal human rights. It is to deny that universal values can only be fully realized in a universal regime. Human rights can be respected in a variety of regimes, liberal and otherwise. Universal human rights are not an ideal constitution for a single regime throughout the world, but a set of minimum standards for peaceful coexistence among regimes that will always remain different. "
At first glance that quote seems unrelated to my generalizations about the function of ideology, but they are directly related. The fact that conservatives and liberals both opine about the lack of a monoculture isn't as vapid as it generally seems at first. The fact that monocultures generally have never existed outside of small tribes may beside the fact. As Gary Marcus discusses in his book Kluge, the human mind may not be evolved past the level of a small tribe. In a plural system, one protects the "otherness" of a culture, even if one is not a relativist, because we see this as a minimum for coexistence as thus we praise it as a virtue. Yet as information has become more abundant and our plural frameworks more isolated, we do co-exist only by alienation. This enables us to build counter-establishments to formally propagate the ideas of various counter-cultures, to expand their information grinds, and to even make the real points of agreement between groups obscured expounding adopting differing focuses and language frameworks. From when American Heritage Institute brought the social conservatives and the Neo-conservatives together to form the Reagan coalition, as Sidney Blumenthal documented in The Rise of the Counter-Establishment, to the way the Center for American Progress has been used to provide former second tier Clinton staffers to Obama—it is arguable that there is no mainstream consensus anymore.
Before I continue, I should point out that this is not so much an attack on the concept of ideology, which may be well be inseparable from any way of ordering the perceived world into something that is understandable. Indeed facts must be put into something systemic for those facts to be useful as knowledge, and that ordering almost always implies some epistemic, cultural, political, and metaphysical assumptions that are axiomatic and cannot be proven or disproven. Ideology is not the problem. It is also an abstract and to blame an abstract for something is deflect the human agency in the issue.
Let's go back to one of Gray's focuses: human rights. The language of human rights is fundamentally either dishonest or imperialist: dishonest in that it assumes universality when there is almost no way to justify it without appealing to the God (or, more subtly, natural law) or it is imperialist in that framework of rights given by the state should be exported to the world. Isaiah Berlin is VERY instructive here: positive and negative rights are important in a legal and social framework, but one does not have to be relativist to see the problems with the language of universal rights. If they are self-evident, such rights would not have to be defended. If these rights were truly universal, they would have developed across all cultures at the near the same time without outside influence. This is not to say that some things are not right and wrong, even if human values are both valid and real, there is no way to say that those values mean the same thing without hollowing those values out. Human rights are created by the state force, or, to paraphrase Carl Schmitt, whatever sovereign power can create exceptions to its use of coercion. We speak in terms of rights because we are more comfortable dealing with law—even in the situations where law does not really apply—than dealing with values. While Nietzsche's critique of good and evil is something that I can accept in a secular state—absolute values are always arbitrary to those outside of the absolute ideologies that created those values—these values are fundamentally more honest than the way most of us speak of rights.
As a pluralist I only wish to create a space for us to hash out these values, but tolerance is merely the regulating of aversion. Tolerance may be necessary, but it is not a virtue. It is a mere mechanism of dealing with plural values without the eruptions of violence or the alienation of large sections of society, but a virtue is something that makes society better or makes the individual better... not merely allows one or both to function. Indeed, tolerance is often the justification for dealing with a rights-based framework, instead of justifying with values because to condemn a value is seen as intolerance, but to condemn a violation of "rights" is to appeal to a legal fact. It is the easy answer because it avoids dealing with our own unquestioned assumptions.
In fact, I'll turn from John Gray to a completely different kind of ideological alien to make this point more clear. As Slavoj Zizek says in his "The Obscenity of Human Rights":
"So, to put it in the Leninist way: what today, in the predominant Western discourse, the 'Human Rights of the Third World suffering victims' effectively mean is the right of the Western powers themselves to intervene - politically, economically, culturally, militarily - in the Third World countries of their choice on behalf of the defense of Human Rights. The reference to Lacan's formula of communication (in which the sender gets back from the receiver-addressee his own message in its inverted, i.e. true, form) is here up to the point: in the reigning discourse of humanitarian interventionism, the developed West is effectively getting back from the victimized Third World its own message in its true form. And the moment Human Rights are thus depoliticized, the discourse dealing with them has to change to ethics: reference to the pre-political opposition of Good and Evil has to be mobilized"
The attempt to strip human rights of their values judgments, the philosophical and political underpinnings, is an attempt to hide one's real agenda.
This finally brings me to why I entitled this "beyond left and right." This, however, requires both context and specifics. I have been struck by the idea that, from the days that Paul Krugman stated it in the beginning of the Bush administration, what passes for conservatism in the Anglo-American world is not conservative. If one traces conservatism back to Russell Kirk's theory or Barry Goldwater's practice, or if dipping into a deeper tradition into pre-Churchill Tory orientation, as a sort of protector of an admittedly arbitrary moral standard from either religious traditions or fear of radical utopianism... conservative ideology is not found in the right anymore.
Thomas Sowell, one of the few mainstream American conservatives who I personally respect enough not to throw his books across the room or burn his columns in effigy, said in The Vision of the Anointed:
Different visions, of course, have different assumptions, so it is not uncommon for people whose visions to find themselves in opposition to one another across a vast spectrum of unrelated issues, in such disparate fields as law, foreign policy, the environment, racial policy, military defense, education and many others. To a remarkable extent, however, empirical evidence is neither sought beforehand nor consulted after a policy already has been instituted.
This sort of view can be found in "conservative thought" from when President Eisenhower quoted Eric Hoffer in the 1950s. Yet, Sowell who was so good at calling the left and liberals out when he wrote the above in 1996, has been largely silent on the conservative movement's own failings in that regard. Social conservatives, libertarians, and neo-conservatives have all seen massive social policy failures in the last four years of the George W. Bush regime. Sowell may have been right about the anointed missionary posture of both liberals and leftists (two positions that have been confused together in the specter of Reagan)
John N. Gray points out that neo-conservatism takes profoundly negative elements of neo-liberalism and the profoundly negative social and cultural impulses of "blood and soil" [and implied king] that radicalizes adds them together in ways that are generally more opposed by nativist and paleo-conservatives than by liberals. One of the biggest ironies of the 2000s is that liberals attack Bushites as "neo-conservatives"—a term coined as a slander against Straussian and ex-Trotskyist "middle way" conservatives. Why is it ironic? The term was something I saw used as an attack first by Lew Rockwell, Ron Paul, Pat Buchanan, etc in the first two years of the Bush administration. While I realize that neo-conservatives originally used to term as a moniker for themselves, its use as an attack has largely come from the right itself.
Proof of how this spectrum has been broken down: John N. Gray, who is no liberal by any means other than he believes that we are destroying our environment, defends Naomi Klein. Lew Rockwell, a Catholic anarchist and Ron Paul supporter, speaks highly of Naomi Wolfe and Glenn Greenwald. I have seen MANY friends of Goldwater defect from the Republican party: John Dean turning on the Bush Administration, Jude Wanniski denouncing some of the ideologues who pushed his supply-side economics in the Reagan administration, Kevin Philips writing three exposes on the Bush administration, and the various Bush administration defectors often trace their GOP pedigree back to the age of Nixon. I see progressives and even anarchists calling more on actual historical traditions than the "compassionate conservatives" do: it is often progressives who defend traditional cultures and pre-capitalist family arrangements.
In almost every way, the decentralization-oriented progressive is more conservative than the neo-Conservative is. It is also true that while progressives do have a teleological orientation politically—most are not utopians or apocalyptics anymore. Most of the left has learned something about completely utopian orientations. Many of the liberal teachers I work with are the harshest critics of the "decline of cultural standards."
Indeed, in this way, much of the center left is more conservative than real libertarians. (I say real libertarians to break them apart from mere neo-liberals). Even Ron Paul realized the revolutionary aspects of his ideas, despite his Protestant Christian orientation, and used this in his marketing of himself to the left. Indeed, one can say that the utopian agenda of the Bush regime put people as diverse as Lew Rockwell, Noam Chomsky, and Pat Buchanan together as anti-imperialists. Kevin Philips and Andrew Bacevich are popular speakers on both left and right-wing talk shows. Andrew Sullivan, in the same sentence in which he'll attack Naomi Klein on Bill Maher's show in October of 2008, agrees with her on who they would like to see win the Obama/McCain race.
And while the right (paleo and otherwise) has always been given to finding scapegoats and making attacks in a fetish (but so has the left in its socialist and marxist manifestations)... one cannot help put be struck at the vapidity of right-oriented rhetoric in the last twenty years: the only real intellectual figures that the mainstream right has are either piss-poor and theologically illiterate Christians or Norman Podhoretz or Jonah Goldberg and Thomas Sowell. That's it. You listen to the average "intellectual right-wing podcast" and the best you're going to get is some Catholic rhetoric or maybe some European conservatives that actually have something to say OR you're going to get a libertarian.
I posit that the ideological coalitions that have made the orientations of the left and right in America have been broken down by continuity of Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush in globalized economic policies and "humanitarian" invention. Both coalitions have been fractured at the core and both their intellectual and popular understanding has been hollowed out. Indeed, the only reason that Democrats currently have such a clear identity is that they have spent so much time in the metaphorical woodshed. The "left" is often working cross purposes as much as the right is, but progressives have been out of framing the mainline dialogue for sometime and thus there differences aren't obvious. In Obama's election, one can see a moment in which a breath of relief hides the sighs of disappointment as he appoints his cabinet.
In the last years, I've seen anarcho-capitalists attack intellectual property, corporatization, and interest finance. I've seen MANY Marxists defend market mechanisms. I've seen anarcho-syndicalists defend the right of locality secession with near confederate arguments. I've seen libertarians and liberals temporarily stop hating each other to take on the GOP in ways that Rothbard thought would happen in the 1960s. The fact I can quote John Gray and Zizek, two European intellectuals on what most would be considered as alternate ends of the spectrum, as saying nearly the same thing should be telling.
In short, particularly as people question neo-liberalism economic paradigm, the meaning of left and right no longer really make that much sense or mean much other than an emotive orientation. The feedback loops they create are more aesthetic charged than consistent with ideological dictates. The large numbers of my friends who have jumped between liberal and libertarian or who speak in hybrid rhetoric prove this to me.
I personally think our moral orientation has changed in a way that I don't see as healthy in the long term, but most of what conservatives define as signs of this remain largely irrelevant to me: I have no problems with immigrants, gays, transexuals, minorities, and empowering women (or conservative minorities such as Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Jewish, or secular traditionalists). But I don't think homogenizing these subcultures or eroding the plural virtues that make up our composite culture in an attempt to clean up the differences between various groups is remotely desirable.
I believe in pluralism as Isaiah Berlin did—multiple valid value systems that contradict with each other and we have to hash out space for one another—but I do think some things are wrong, in that they are counter-intuitive and destructive. I see offenders on both sides of the isle. In fact, the vapidity of the political spectrum and the lesser of two evils mentality extend to far more than politics. In large part we really are separated more than difference in jargon and focuses of where to look than the critique of current society. By buying into a bipolar paradigm, we have enabled our natural tendency towards unreflective and uncritical acceptance tie us to a system that clearly frustrates most people.
Derick sincerely believes that everyone needs to dance around their house naked at least once a week; in addition to that, being declared an ethicist has made him a general misanthrope. Most good ethicists are. He loves tomatoes and thinks that loving such fruit is profound. He does not like to speak in third-person because he understands that it is a sign of true insanity, but so is literature. He has vowed no longer to be witty in biographies that are included in literary journals of any medium.