sj_zero on Nostr: It's context specific, and realistically somewhat arbitrary because politics are ...
It's context specific, and realistically somewhat arbitrary because politics are fickle things.
One big example is that in Europe, right wing for the longest time related to maintaining the monarchy, and left wing referred to creating new power structures such as republics. In America, the monarchy has never been right wing because monarchy isn't part of the American tradition.
One of the most important groups of the left in the modern period was during the French Revolution starting around 1789, particularly the radical Jacobin faction. Many of the current left's ideas come directly from this region and this period of history. The first Republic experimented with many ideas such as income taxes, abolishing religion and replacing it with a "cult of reason", they changed marriage from a largely religious institution to a civil bureaucratic institution, and legalized divorce which was previously not allowed. The period was a period where radical feminists were emboldened to make demands in a society that was trying to totally rewire itself, though as the revolution became more radical women found themselves marginalized over time.
Later, in the 1830s, Karl Marx added economic frameworks to the left as well as tools such as class analysis. His works are a cornerstone of far left ideology that remains today.
The Russian Revolution started in the early 1910s, and after a civil war the Soviet Union was created. Over time, and in particular with the publishing of the works of Solzhenitsyn thoroughly debunked the moral superiority of Marxism as implemented in the Soviet Union while America was providing the working classes with the highest material quality of life on earth and throughout all of history, leading thinkers (who were previously enamored with Marxism) to find new ways of looking at Marxism to sort of "salvage" it, which led to neomarxist frameworks such as critical theory which looks at things through the lens of race, sex, and so on, or intersectionalism, which looks at something through multiple lenses at once to get to the most individualized view of a person's privilege and encumbrances.
By contrast, the right starts much earlier, and in Europe it would start with the greek philosophers, who would become the intellectual foundation upon which much of what would follow would be based. The Athenian civilization led to the Macedonian greek empire created by Alexander (Who I didn't know was a student of Aristotle until quite recently, which is amazing -- connecting the Macedonian empire to the socratic philosophers is really cool) which quickly fragmented and changed after his death, and soon Rome rose as the most prominent power in the region. It would end up being very important in forming the bureaucratic framework in the region, but eventually would become decadent and fall so would have less of a direct impact on conservatism than you might expect besides a few outliers such as Cicero and Marcus Aurelius. After the fall of the Roman empire, the core of European religion would become the royalty and nobility, and the core of roman religion and philosophy would be the church. Many notable philosophers of the period after the dust started to settle were Christians such as St. Augustine, a bishop from North Africa shortly before the fall of the Roman Empire, and immediately after Boethius created many works which bridged the gap between Christian scholasticism and ancient Aristotelian ideas. St. Gregory the Great led the church immediately after the fall, and guided the church to become something that would ultimately be one of the most powerful ideological forces on the continent.
By the 9th century, Islamic scholars were in the midst of a golden age of their own where they developed ideas, but quite importantly worked to maintain and extend works from the ancients for centuries. It would be these maintained works that ultimately would be recovered in the west, leading to the Renaissance, and ultimately to the enlightenment which would help create the modern age for good and for ill.
English right-wing ideas really seem to start with the Romans taking over England way back in 43BC and establishing the city of Londinium which today is the city of London, which introduced the English to greco-roman ideas from the continent which combined with the established rich cultures, as well as introducing Christianity to the island. By 410 the Roman empire was in decline, and suddenly the English were left to fend for themselves without the protection of the Empire, leaving them open to attacks from different Pagan groups such as the Angles and Saxons, which ultimately led to those groups settling on the island. This led to various groups inhabiting the island, such as the Celts who were already there, the angles, and the saxons. For several centuries after that there was a period of kingdoms building up, then political power started to coalesce. A series of wars and attacks from the danes and norwegians ultimately culminated in the normans taking control of the country, and implementing a nobility and many reforms that fundamentally changed England, putting it on the path to where it is today. The next 950 years or so had a huge history including the creation of the common law system, parliamentary democracy and a balance of power between the king, the courts, the house of lords, the house of commons, the church, the merchants, and so on, and this is the fertile soil from which the english right-wing came about. I don't want to go on much longer, but the struggles between all these different groups helped build a society that ultimately had an Empire upon which the sun ever set.
When the colonies that would become the United States began, ultimately they borrowed a lot of ideas from Rome, including the idea of the Republic. Many of their other ideas came wholesale from the English (being English colonies), such as snagging a lot of English common law. At the moment the nation was created, it's safe to say that fundamentally the country could be considered a left wing creation, in the same vein as the nearly contemporaneous French Revolution, but the difference ideological background led the revolution down a much different path. The French Revolution was focused on rebuilding society from the ground up in reaction to the bureaucracy and nobility in France, whereas the American revolution in my view was focused on a revolution that brought about a largely evolutionary step from the English parliamentary democracy it came from. England at that time was one of the freest societies on earth, and so the new nation America was deeply rooted in liberty, and even today this idea is a core part of the American right wing, though tempered with the other core part which is religion -- prior to the 14th amendment being ratified in the mid to late 1860s, the states were not held to the bill of rights, so many states had official religions for example. America was a colony from an island nation with a strong merchant class, so it was focused strongly on capitalism and trade, so those things ended up a big part of the country's underlying framework as well. All this combined to make a right wing in America focused on liberty, piety, capitalism, and often some of the values that individual diaspora brought to the melting pot as well.
In some ways, I'm sort of cutting the descriptions of both the left and right short, because both interacted with the modern age and particularly the industrial age, in different ways. Both the left and the right ended up finding different forms of nationalism compelling, where the left's focus on social justice and economic ends appeared to be more relevant in the industrial age and the combination of industrialism and the left wing resulted in the ideologies of socialism and communism. The right, on the other hand, ended up really affected by the martial philosophy of industrialized total war which changed how it would look, especially during the cold war period.
I think both ideologies are struggling somewhat in the postmodern period because both contemporary right wing and left wing ideas are contingent on the idea of perpetual progress. For the right, the idea of progress comes from Christianity where we're trying to find the utopian heaven on earth. For the left, the idea of progress comes from Marxism where we're trying to find the utopian real communism. Both could appear to be driving continuous progress as economic, scientific, and engineering improvements continued to be exponential, but the reality of the moment is that just like most easy oil has been extracted and most easy minerals have been mined, most easy economic, scientific, engineering, and technological progress has been achieved, and it's becoming more difficult to keep seeing progress, which I think will mean both the left and the right need to rethink exactly what progress looks like without the past 300 years exponential growth. I think with the looming threat of population collapse and civilizational collapse, we'll have to work to stop trying to find our answers in the lab and start finding answers in our souls.
To show things in a different light though, in China, to be conservative might be trying to be more like the Zhou dynasty of 500 BC, which obviously has nothing to do with anything I've said, which really helps show how you have to be careful and understand the context of where and when you are to define left or right wing.
One big example is that in Europe, right wing for the longest time related to maintaining the monarchy, and left wing referred to creating new power structures such as republics. In America, the monarchy has never been right wing because monarchy isn't part of the American tradition.
One of the most important groups of the left in the modern period was during the French Revolution starting around 1789, particularly the radical Jacobin faction. Many of the current left's ideas come directly from this region and this period of history. The first Republic experimented with many ideas such as income taxes, abolishing religion and replacing it with a "cult of reason", they changed marriage from a largely religious institution to a civil bureaucratic institution, and legalized divorce which was previously not allowed. The period was a period where radical feminists were emboldened to make demands in a society that was trying to totally rewire itself, though as the revolution became more radical women found themselves marginalized over time.
Later, in the 1830s, Karl Marx added economic frameworks to the left as well as tools such as class analysis. His works are a cornerstone of far left ideology that remains today.
The Russian Revolution started in the early 1910s, and after a civil war the Soviet Union was created. Over time, and in particular with the publishing of the works of Solzhenitsyn thoroughly debunked the moral superiority of Marxism as implemented in the Soviet Union while America was providing the working classes with the highest material quality of life on earth and throughout all of history, leading thinkers (who were previously enamored with Marxism) to find new ways of looking at Marxism to sort of "salvage" it, which led to neomarxist frameworks such as critical theory which looks at things through the lens of race, sex, and so on, or intersectionalism, which looks at something through multiple lenses at once to get to the most individualized view of a person's privilege and encumbrances.
By contrast, the right starts much earlier, and in Europe it would start with the greek philosophers, who would become the intellectual foundation upon which much of what would follow would be based. The Athenian civilization led to the Macedonian greek empire created by Alexander (Who I didn't know was a student of Aristotle until quite recently, which is amazing -- connecting the Macedonian empire to the socratic philosophers is really cool) which quickly fragmented and changed after his death, and soon Rome rose as the most prominent power in the region. It would end up being very important in forming the bureaucratic framework in the region, but eventually would become decadent and fall so would have less of a direct impact on conservatism than you might expect besides a few outliers such as Cicero and Marcus Aurelius. After the fall of the Roman empire, the core of European religion would become the royalty and nobility, and the core of roman religion and philosophy would be the church. Many notable philosophers of the period after the dust started to settle were Christians such as St. Augustine, a bishop from North Africa shortly before the fall of the Roman Empire, and immediately after Boethius created many works which bridged the gap between Christian scholasticism and ancient Aristotelian ideas. St. Gregory the Great led the church immediately after the fall, and guided the church to become something that would ultimately be one of the most powerful ideological forces on the continent.
By the 9th century, Islamic scholars were in the midst of a golden age of their own where they developed ideas, but quite importantly worked to maintain and extend works from the ancients for centuries. It would be these maintained works that ultimately would be recovered in the west, leading to the Renaissance, and ultimately to the enlightenment which would help create the modern age for good and for ill.
English right-wing ideas really seem to start with the Romans taking over England way back in 43BC and establishing the city of Londinium which today is the city of London, which introduced the English to greco-roman ideas from the continent which combined with the established rich cultures, as well as introducing Christianity to the island. By 410 the Roman empire was in decline, and suddenly the English were left to fend for themselves without the protection of the Empire, leaving them open to attacks from different Pagan groups such as the Angles and Saxons, which ultimately led to those groups settling on the island. This led to various groups inhabiting the island, such as the Celts who were already there, the angles, and the saxons. For several centuries after that there was a period of kingdoms building up, then political power started to coalesce. A series of wars and attacks from the danes and norwegians ultimately culminated in the normans taking control of the country, and implementing a nobility and many reforms that fundamentally changed England, putting it on the path to where it is today. The next 950 years or so had a huge history including the creation of the common law system, parliamentary democracy and a balance of power between the king, the courts, the house of lords, the house of commons, the church, the merchants, and so on, and this is the fertile soil from which the english right-wing came about. I don't want to go on much longer, but the struggles between all these different groups helped build a society that ultimately had an Empire upon which the sun ever set.
When the colonies that would become the United States began, ultimately they borrowed a lot of ideas from Rome, including the idea of the Republic. Many of their other ideas came wholesale from the English (being English colonies), such as snagging a lot of English common law. At the moment the nation was created, it's safe to say that fundamentally the country could be considered a left wing creation, in the same vein as the nearly contemporaneous French Revolution, but the difference ideological background led the revolution down a much different path. The French Revolution was focused on rebuilding society from the ground up in reaction to the bureaucracy and nobility in France, whereas the American revolution in my view was focused on a revolution that brought about a largely evolutionary step from the English parliamentary democracy it came from. England at that time was one of the freest societies on earth, and so the new nation America was deeply rooted in liberty, and even today this idea is a core part of the American right wing, though tempered with the other core part which is religion -- prior to the 14th amendment being ratified in the mid to late 1860s, the states were not held to the bill of rights, so many states had official religions for example. America was a colony from an island nation with a strong merchant class, so it was focused strongly on capitalism and trade, so those things ended up a big part of the country's underlying framework as well. All this combined to make a right wing in America focused on liberty, piety, capitalism, and often some of the values that individual diaspora brought to the melting pot as well.
In some ways, I'm sort of cutting the descriptions of both the left and right short, because both interacted with the modern age and particularly the industrial age, in different ways. Both the left and the right ended up finding different forms of nationalism compelling, where the left's focus on social justice and economic ends appeared to be more relevant in the industrial age and the combination of industrialism and the left wing resulted in the ideologies of socialism and communism. The right, on the other hand, ended up really affected by the martial philosophy of industrialized total war which changed how it would look, especially during the cold war period.
I think both ideologies are struggling somewhat in the postmodern period because both contemporary right wing and left wing ideas are contingent on the idea of perpetual progress. For the right, the idea of progress comes from Christianity where we're trying to find the utopian heaven on earth. For the left, the idea of progress comes from Marxism where we're trying to find the utopian real communism. Both could appear to be driving continuous progress as economic, scientific, and engineering improvements continued to be exponential, but the reality of the moment is that just like most easy oil has been extracted and most easy minerals have been mined, most easy economic, scientific, engineering, and technological progress has been achieved, and it's becoming more difficult to keep seeing progress, which I think will mean both the left and the right need to rethink exactly what progress looks like without the past 300 years exponential growth. I think with the looming threat of population collapse and civilizational collapse, we'll have to work to stop trying to find our answers in the lab and start finding answers in our souls.
To show things in a different light though, in China, to be conservative might be trying to be more like the Zhou dynasty of 500 BC, which obviously has nothing to do with anything I've said, which really helps show how you have to be careful and understand the context of where and when you are to define left or right wing.