Looking Right to the Left
Part 4

3,314 words

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

Right or Left does not have a chapter on the eighteenth century. Rousseau is mentioned only three times, Diderot and Kant once each. The three references to Rousseau are all predictably negative, linking Rousseau to communist dictatorship and naivety about man in the raw state of nature. An opportunity is missed again, in this case the opportunity to review how right and left view the relation of human societies to biological reality and the natural world and what consequences their views might have in respect of a right or left world view. The adage “you can’t change human nature” is often rejected by the left on the grounds that “human nature” is a reactionary fiction; and that what is called “human nature” is in fact socially created nature, something which is molded according to specific economic and social circumstances. Weißmann does not consider this argument. He also ignores what many would see as an underlying contradiction on the left between hankering after “being natural” on the one hand, while favoring advances in modern medicine, modern gadgetry and artificial intelligence on the other.

This book does not systematically consider whether there are characteristically right or left positions on a wide range of subjects. There is nothing in Right or Left about an identifiably left or right “take” on science, space exploration, medical research, health, artificial intelligence, vivisection, conservation, education, discipline, aesthetics and much more.

Nevertheless, Weißmann does seem to side with the view, more characteristic of the right than the left, that protecting nature is “sentimental”:

It cannot be excluded that there are those on the right to whom the idyll ([Rousseau’s state of nature]) appeals. The protection of nature and associations for the appreciation and protection of nature have conservative roots and warnings about the consequences of the destruction of the countryside and the environment came from the conservative side. But that does not change the fact that on the whole neither sentimentality about nature nor a belief about its malleability were views ever shared on the right. The knowledge of the perils of nature are too profound, views formed by permanent struggles with nature, a nature which knows no rules of fairness such as those conceived by humans and humans alone.

There is a tacit acknowledgment here that the destruction of nature is indeed taking place and is regrettable. No other interpretation can be given to Weißmann’s approving note of the “conservative roots” of those who first “warned about the consequences.” But he also writes that “sentimentality” about nature was never shared on the right (suggesting such sentimentality is a left characteristic). What can Weißmann mean? If green fields and meadows are destroyed to make way for a highway, does Weißmann consider that opposition to such a project is necessarily “sentimental” and therefore typically “left”? If so, what is the reader to make of Weißmann’s approving comment that conservatives were the first to warn of the “destruction of the countryside”?

There is no mention of the religious dimension to an understanding of the natural world. Is Rousseau really only the forerunner of atheist communism or is there not in his views and those of many on the left a hankering after a lost Eden, a vision which is religious and traditional? What of the importance of lived experience and personal observation? Kant defined enlightenment as “using one’s understanding without relying on that of others.” Is the left or is the right more able to formulate beliefs based on experience rather than that which their respective loyalty informs them they should believe?

Weißmann notes that the nineteenth century has been called the age of liberalism. After the French Revolution, he writes that “liberal parties and movements set the tone”. He refers to the writings of Mill and Locke in preparing the way for a liberal world view and stresses their role as he sees it in replacing religious optimism with political and economic optimism, noting tartly:

[…]the redirection towards provable facts replacing Christian revelation. God did not vanish entirely, but he was demoted to being a more or less interested observer of his creation.

Surely a major question for anyone reviewing the meaning of left and right and in that connection the rise of liberalism, must be: which liberalism? The word liberalism is understood differently in different countries. “Liberal” in the United States usually refers to people who would be called leftists in Europe. In Britain, “liberal” usually refers to people who are morally non-censorious. In France, Spain, and Italy, “liberal” usually refers to economic liberals, free-marketers, the very people who tend to be regarded as the opposite of “liberal” in the United States.

Many people will think of liberalism as the utilitarian liberalism of a Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, for which the end of political endeavor is to create the greatest happiness for the greatest number? That view might loosely be called “left” , with a program of majority rights, equality of the sexes, of voting rights, equality of human races and the dismantling of privileges. But liberalism can mean something very different, even radically opposed, namely the political manifestation of an evolutionary doctrine which recognizes the domination of the strong over the weak as a force of nature and therefore “just” because “natural”. Such was the “progressive” doctrine of economic liberalism advocated by the social Darwinian Herbert Spencer, who coined the term “survival of the fittest” to apply to economics.

Extreme liberalism or anarchism can be extremely right-wing in cases where it advocates the “survival of the fittest” as the guiding principle of social order. Rudolph Carlyle Evans proposed his idea of an ideal non-technical social system in his book The Resurrection of Aristocracy, which depicts a right-wing anarchist Utopia in which science plays a minimal role and natural strength determines what and who is morally right and wrong. Weißmann is aware of a liberal -right-wing link, because he writes of Ludwig von Rochau, a man who added a ruthless evolutionary component to liberal theory. Von Rochau believed that the “right of the strong to rule in the state is comparable to the law of gravity in the physical world.”

What of right-wing progressivism, in which instead of communism, capitalism is regarded as the final and ideal society? The Dictatorship of Capital replaces the Dictatorship of the Proletariat as the peak of evolution, ushering in the End of History, Ayn Rand’s novels and essays argue the case for such progressivism of the right, the rule of the gifted in a society dedicated to rewarding personal ability and permitting untrammelled technical progress whilst “leeches” and “bums” fall by the wayside as part of a remorseless evolutionary process. Belief in liberal evolutionary progress can also be extreme left, not only in its Marxist form but also where it is simply understood to mean that history inevitably progresses towards more enlightenment and increasing power in the hands of majorities accompanied by an inevitable decline in tradition and privilege and a democratic prioritizing of the needs of the common denominator.

The reader is not offered more than a glimpse of the relation between liberalism, anarchism and right or left theories before being hurried along in Weißmann’s guided tour of the history of ideas.

The two major chapters of Right or Left continue as they begin with anecdote and narrative, and cursory commentary on political ideologies. The anecdotes are certainly entertaining and probably every reader will find something new. To illustrate the extreme and grotesque idealization by the left in the past of the “Homeland of Socialism” and probably to stress what he sees as a left replacement of Christian piety, Weißmann relates this amusing anecdote:

The attraction [of the Soviet Union] for the political left in the 1920’s and 1930’s can hardly be overstated. Here was the homeland of choice..of the progressive part of humanity…Moscow a red Jerusalem to where one went on pilgrimage to receive a blessing. The German communist Clara Zetkin demanded that those traveling with her to Russia remove their shoes on arrival in Russia because they were now treading on holy ground.

By now it should be clear to the reader that Right or Left does not try to discuss the meaning of right or left at all. It is instead an entertaining and informative history lesson, the history being centered on the history of ideas, mainly in Germany and France, but not entirely neglecting Britain and Italy. For readers who wish to be briefly told about what Max Weber, Thomas Carlyle, Edmund Burke, the Marquis de Condorcet and many others said and wrote, this chapter will not disappoint, but it does not contribute to an assessment of how the terms left and right might fulfill or not fulfill “the need for political differentiation.”

In his chapter on the twentieth century Weißmann considers totalitarianism and provides sub-chapters titled “Left totalitarianism”, “Right totalitarianism”, “Totalitarianism neither left nor right”. Totalitarianism is the doctrine of the total power of the state to decide the fate of its citizens with no tolerance of conflicting narratives or ambitions. A right-wing and left-wing totalitarianism or a totalitarian regime with no definitive right or left traits are all possible. Most people will agree that the Soviet Union under Stalin was a totalitarian communist state. Weißmann rightly underlines the connection, overlooked by many people, between the totalitarian impulse of the French Revolution and the fulfillment of Jacobin totalitarian promise under the Soviet dictatorship and the close link between them. He writes:

The similarity with the the Jacobin project is no coincidence: Rosa Luxemburg characterized the Bolsheviks as “the inheritors of the Jacobins” and Lenin had monuments to Danton and Robespierre erected in the center of Moscow; monuments in honor of Marat and Babuef were also planned. Trotsky affectionately referred to Babeuf as Maximilian.

Weißmann also makes the shrewd point that opposition to the state in Soviet Russia was made more difficult owing to the abolition of private property and the imposition of a “command economy.”

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As there are few political actors who will openly advocate the creation of a totalitarian state as their ideal, the left, insofar as it acknowledges the totalitarian nature of the Soviet state, tends to play down or even deny that the Soviet state was “really socialist” at all. Many on the right are wont to play down or deny “right-wing” characteristics of national socialism often claiming instead that the national socialist regime was “fundamentally left.” Weißmann will have none of this. He distinguishes between Italian fascism and German national socialism, not, as is customary, by arguing that the former was only authoritarian and the latter fully totalitarian, but in making the case for a much sharper differentiation between fascism and national socialism.

For Weißmann, fascism was neither left nor right, but if anything more left inclined than right, and definitely had totalitarian traits: “In reality the Italian system, which the Fascists themselves called stato totalitario was more a left than a right totalitarianism.”

The author nevertheless argues that Mussolini was too pragmatic to be committed to either a left or right world view:

Marx only interested him to the extent that Marxist doctrine offered a way of preventing socialism from becoming middle class and instead keeping the revolutionary fire burning. He stood closer to thinkers like Machiavelli, Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, the most important representative of the philosophy of life (Lebensphilosophie), or Sorel, who awarded pre-eminence to the will, the will to power instead of to material conditions.

In contrast to fascism, national socialism was very definitely, in Weißmann’s view, a right-wing totalitarian phenomenon, necessarily so for Weißmann, because he closely identifies right-wing thought with belief in the overriding importance to society of exclusion, ranking and hierarchy. He quite rightly underscores the importance to national socialism of the evolutionary principle of struggle for survival. He might also have mentioned how characteristically right it is and not left to talk about what is “natural” and condemn what is “unnatural”. Biological inequality is natural, social inequality is not.

This linking of equality and hierarchy, the opportunity to advance on the basis of ability regardless of class origins is an inherently modern trait, like Hitler’s emphatic advocacy of progress. It greatly increased the attraction of national socialism. It was at the core of his constructive program whilst the destructive element-the preparation for war and eradications -was kept intentionally concealed. None of this detracts from the fact that the starting point was the Darwinian understanding of reality aimed ultimately at the creation of a “new man” who, like Nietzsche’s blond beast, will be better equipped for the struggle for survival than man in his current condition, because history can never change. Hitler stated that the world was like a challenge cup, its conquest awarded to the strongest.

This raises yet another question: to what extent are left and right-wing leaders truly idealists and to what extent do they adopt beliefs as a means to achieve power? Perhaps the two elements can exist together? Believing fanatically in something, I may be enthused with the will to carry it through.

In Weißmann’s final chapter called Eine Bilanz (A Summing up) he quotes a well known saying by Émile Chartier (pen name “Alain”) that “anyone who doubts the importance of a distinction between left and right will certainly not be on the left.”

Alain’s remark strikes this reviewer as substantially true. More people generally regarded as left will self-identify as left than those generally regarded as right will self-identify as right. This has partly to do with a greater general prejudice in many countries against the right, but is not a complete explanation. Why is it so? Weißmann quotes Alain approvingly yet offers no explanation whatsoever for a fact which, if true, indicates something important about being right or left.

Weißmann pursues another point following on from the Alain quotation however, namely that there is what he calls a “yawning gap” between the way people see themselves on a right-left scale and what their opinion of the validity of the right-left scale itself. Apparently in a survey conducted in France, 75% of those questioned stated that left-right designations were “useless”, yet 76% of those questioned nevertheless had no trouble placing themselves somewhere on a right to left scale.

“Such a paradox”, writes Weißmann, “can only really be explained by accepting that placing oneself on the political map has less to do with a concrete ideology than with a particular way of thinking which directs perception and provides it with the appropriate mental and objective processing of what is experienced.”

As he approaches the end of his book, Weißmann makes his own position regarding right and left clearer, if not exactly very clear, and an unmistakable note of emotion appears in his writing for the first time. He notes that writers like Guénon and Evola conceived humanity as being in irreversible decline. Everything that is born is fated to perish. Life is an incurable disease. Spengler and Cioran (the latter is not mentioned once in Weißmann’s book) come to mind. Weißmann believes that there is an inherently pessimistic streak in the right-wing world view and an inherently optimistic streak in the left wing one. The cultural pessimism characteristic of much of the right, the belief in the natural decay of civilizations, is certainly in stark opposition to a vision of constant progress to an ever juster global society.

It is not difficult to align this belief {that the works of man are unique but subject to to natural laws of growth and decay] with the theoretical considerations of an Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee, Rolf Dieter Sieferle or David Engels. They were all skeptics when it came to the conviction that “everything will turn out well in the end”, for the state of emergency is the cas réel , is the real state of affairs and that is reality. For them it was characteristic of a right thinking style to be very sensitive concerning the more problematic aspects of human existence, concerning that insidious kind of decadence which appears in the guise of progress but which is nothing other than degeneration by way of domestication. It is a process of creeping decay which Gustave Thibon wrote of: ‘The stigma of humanitarian degeneration is benevolence or cultism towards everything which denigrates and spoils mankind, such as sloth, easy and contrived living, egotistical violation of the original laws of nature…as though the honeyed irresistible song of the sirens does not contain more irresistible notes than the threat of the furies.’

Weißmann then unexpectedly brings up the suggestion that people may be living in a “fake reality”:

The rejection with which such an analysis [Thibon’s] is confronted today is largely because it does not correspond to the understanding of reality held by the majority. In the Western world the conception of reality is dominated by the notion that reality is a construct, even an invention, in any case nothing that can exist outside human conception. This view of things has achieved success[…]parallel to the rise of the left, partly of Marxism or other milder forms of materialism, partly of relativism, which at first glance seems to hold out the promise of general tolerance.

Weißmann seems to be hinting here at Derrida’s deconstructionism, which taught that reality is nothing but text and limitless interpretations of text. The following does not read like cultural pessimism, still less analysis. It echoes rather the resentment of anyone whose own views are not those of the hegemony:

The stress on openness and otherness cannot disguise the fact that the controllers of public discourse do not see their own position in any way as relative. They see it as absolute, on the grounds that they are in a position to see through all other opinions.

The concluding paragraph of the main body of Weißmann’s work (there are three appendices) is a droll affirmation of his own belief and a return to the early statements about right and left being a necessary polarity:

Heimito von Doderer spoke of what he called ‘the rejection of apperception’ and that rejection is always an option, which suggests that the left will always be with us, it also underlines the necessity of a counter force, one which maintains a political dialectic in which each side cannot be without the other but which insists on its precedence because the truth is always right.

So far as understanding whether left and right are constants in human social orders and judgments is concerned, Weißmann leaves his readers largely to their own devices; but there is an underlying suggestion which he implies in his final lines, namely a constant polarity of optimism and pessimism.

If it be a generalization to say that the right-winger is a pessimist and the left-winger an optimist or that the right-winger is a realist and the left-winger an idealist, there is considerable evidence for it. Arguably the decisive and permanent difference between right and left is between an acceptance of life and nature as they are preordained by God or Nature on the one side, and the relentless ambition to improve them on the other. The case can be made that pessimism, acceptance of inequality, hierarchy, discipline and discrimination derives from the right’s deference to a natural order. Similarly the case can be made that the drive towards more equality, justice, mandatory improvement, and greater control derives from the left’s urge to amend that order.

Is there a better “bottom line” to define an enduring difference between right and left than this: the right wants society to defer to nature and the left wants society to amend it?

Right or Left does not consider these matters in any depth, but it draws attention to many points of departure for a book that would do so. Right or Left whets the reader’s appetite for such a book.