an allegory of politics

 

I am not a great fan of the left-right distinction. The reason is not that my “opinions” don’t fit within it – the reason is that its very grounding, in  opinion, and not in practice, is a right tending structure. As a right-tending structure, it finds the end of politics is in voting, and the end of ideology is in arguments over the dinner table. Far be it from me to diss arguments over the dinner table – I was raised among them! – but politics and one’s leftness or rightness is as much a matter of practices. Many of those practices are embedded in situations that severely limit one’s degree of freedom. If I administer a workforce or invest in a 401K or do any of the innumerable things that constitute living a middle class lifestyle, that style is going to chose my politics much more than I am going to chose it. Which means that saying whether I tend “left” or “right” is a matter of existential analysis, more than a survey question about who I think is a greater human being, Donald Trump or Batman. That analysis is both of one’s choices and of the structures in which one is embedded without them necessarily being responsive to one’s choices. To choose to use less plastic, for instance, is a nice healthy practice, personally, but is likely to have zero effect on the sum total of plastic in the world. A conservative engineer who discovers, purely for profit, a less ecologically intrusive substitute for plastic would be objectively a much greater environmentalist, in spite of everything he or she thinks.

The way such a substitute would spread out in the world would, of course, depend on other objective structures that are “left” or “right” – and so on.

Tomorrow I am going to vote for a leftis . This is a very very minor political act. As I grow older, I become much more pessimistic about the meaning of such things; in America, even when I have voted for winners, they turned out – as I should have known they would – into net losers in relation to my “opinions.”

Opinions are epiphenomenal. Spinoza wrote that a thrown stone, if it could think, would think it was arcing through the air of its own free will. That’s a political allegory.