/lit/ - Literature

>>4220188

For me it's difficult to say, but I don't characterise left and right using the big gov/small gov yardstick.

I've always found that attitude to equality a better indicator of how leftwing or rightwing a philosophy is, which is to say the leftwing tends to embrace equality, while the rightwing tends to embrace hierarchy.

If you're socially and culturally rightwing, you think some cultures are better than others and should be favored above others by the state, while if you're leftwing you think people and cultures should be viewed with equality and avoid elevating one above the other. Or if you're economically rightwing you're willing to allow the free market to take its course and see hierarchies of wealth and power develop from it, whereas if you're economically leftwing you want a more equal access to resources.

It helps explain why leftwingers react so instinctively against, say, IQ tests, since such tests lend themselves to hierarchy. Rightwingers perhaps prefer heterosexual marriage or think western culture is just better than other cultures and want it promoted, while leftwingers would be more wary and uncomfortable about saying something like that. It's all about attitude to equality/inequality in my opinion, moreso than attitude to big government/small government.

For anarchism, I'm not sure. I suppose you could say it conceives of everybody as equally free and nobody has a right to impose judgements of "better and worse" on each other, but on the other hand there's going to be a natural hierarchy arising in anarchist society. Anarchism is a difficult one to locate definitively as right or elft imo, but I think anarchist's attitudes to people being equally free would be stronger and more active than their acceptance of natural hierarchy developing out of people's free behaviour, which I guess is only accepted as a byproduct.

There are some difficulties though with using attitude to equality as an identifying marker. I mean the Stalinist regime had a lot of hierarchy going on, but its theoretical attitude was the promotion of equality. So you would end up categorizing it as leftwing even though in actual practice it had so much in common with authoritarian rightwing regimes. There are times were rightwing/leftwing is a useful tool of distinction, and times when it's better to admit right/left is a crude model that only imperfectly maps to the reality.