What's Left of the World by David J. Blacker;

Author:David J. Blacker;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781789040111
Publisher: John Hunt (NBN)

The egalitarian left

Before proceeding with this discussion, there is one historically influential attitude toward this entire question on the left that should be addressed. It is a kind of deflationary attitude that reflects optimism about the “science” part of “social science,” from a century or two ago when such sanguinity seemed more justified.

At least since the later writings of Marx and Engels, there has on the left existed a school of thought that denies the question of morality altogether. The idea here is that what is being described in leftist critique is merely descriptive in the manner of science. It’s not that the working class should make revolution in any approbative sense, that one should be in favor of it because it is good. Rather, because of the dialectic or historical materialism or whatever methodology, the oppressed will gain class-consciousness—and ultimately species-consciousness—because it is the inevitable outcome of causal processes having to do with the dynamics of capitalism, etc. From this point of view it would make no more sense to defend any moral imperative pertaining to socialist revolution than it would be to ascribe the advent of Spring to the Earth’s morally good intentions. It will simply occur for causal reasons pertaining to science. (Strictly speaking, from this “scientific socialism” point of view blaming capitalists—in the sense of moral opprobrium—is also wrongheaded.) In certain nineteenth-century circles there was once great optimism about how scientific, and hence predictive, the “human sciences” (e.g., anthropology, history, politics) could become. Suffice to say, however, there is decidedly less so today. There is widespread appreciation that these kinds of analyses are not analogous to the hard science as, to put it briefly, their “data” are so much more thoroughly open to interpretation). It has become axiomatic, in fact, that disciplines such as history, while they have their own recognized methodologies and quality measures, are very little akin to the hard sciences like physics, chemistry or biology. They pitifully lack predictive power, for one thing. And all historians recognize the value of new histories of previously-written about phenomena—no matter how competent was the previous scholarship—because of the need to examine the phenomenon through the lenses and with the concerns of the new generation. For such reasons it seems safe to dispense with those who claim that their politics are scientific and as such are impervious to analysis of their explicit or implicit moral claims. Pace Marx and Engels, then, no political view is above the analysis of its moral implications.

Clearing away the scientific inevitability option allows the discussion to begin.

I’ll try to define “the left” and its core views as concisely as possible. Using the frame of American politics, I define the left as those tending to emphasize “equality” more than those on the right who tend to favor “liberty.” This leaves out a lot (like foreign policy), of course, but it is the most economical way to differentiate left from right that I can manage. From liberals to the farther left, universalist principles of egalitarianism, equal protection, tolerance, inclusion and full participation are the signal norms.

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