Does the left or the right in the West generally have a higher and deeper sense of “spiritual maturity”?

…as answered on Quora….

One of the hallmarks of spirituality in nearly all traditions is to embrace or somehow unify a basic metaphysical duality. At first blush, one would expect neither “the left” nor “the right” — each by emphasizing one tendency in political thought and practice — to sport a deep spirituality. Both are doomed to shallow gambits and contradictions scuttling unity of wisdom and meaning.

The problem is, what do “the left” and “the right” represent?

For decades I was on the wrong track on this. I have always deeply distrusted both leftists and rightists, but, to make sense of their characteristic follies and perversities, I kept looking to their policies and their basic orientations as defining. Not a wrong-headed approach. But the world seemed too complex to reduce to a one-dimensional spectrum. I was troubled by the prevalence of the same kind of policies on the left and the right. A certain arbitrariness seemed most evident. The idea that left-right served as little more than a chaotic delusion or distraction kept on coming back to me.

In the last few years, though, I applied it to my most basic interest in social theory: in-group/out-group alignments and dynamics. And I listened to the latest metamorphosis of leftist obsession, with the focus on “inclusion.” And it struck me: leftist thought isn’t about oppression (per Arnold Kling) or egalitarianism (per Michael Malice), it is about appealing to the cause of outsiders or an outsider group as a rationale to attack and either reform or destroy (or just take over) the in-group hierarchy. Rightist thought is all about something more basic: defense of the in-group and its hierarchy from outside threats, or merely leftist ones.

Protecting self from other (self-defense) and one’s own in-group (in traditional societies this often amounts to “kin group”) is a basic, natural, and necessary tendency. A basic interest. We would not be here as a species had not our ancestors successfully accomplished this. But protecting the outsider from abuse by the in-group and its defenders is absolutely vital to the growth of civilization. Also a basic interest. For the rightist vice is overkill, treating every perception of human difference as evidence of an enemy. It needs to be counterbalanced with a willingness to defend the underdog, the loner, the misfit, or merely a wanderer or trader from another tribe, to allow civilization to grow.

So “the right” is traditional order; “the left” reaches beyond the programmed-into-us defensive instinct to protect and nurture the other. This “orientation” is at least as old as the Amenist/Atenist (right/left as in setting sun in the West versus rising sun in the East) split in Egypt, and comes to us from both our Helenistic and Hebraistic traditions. It is not an accident that “right” is both a direction and a key term in moral philosophy. It is funny to have seen leftists so despise tradition that they now see “right” as utterly evil. Ah, the comedy of partisanship.

Rightists assume that they are always in the right — denying that they can be oppressors to outsiders, denying the possibility of “right vice.” Leftists assume the opposite. But obviously there is right-virtue and right-vice just as there is left-virtue and left-vice.

The rightist vice is oppression of outsiders and other groups; slaughter; exploitation, etc. The leftist vice is treason, taking in outsiders to destroy other insiders.

Justice is when both sides’ virtues are in play, and both sides’ vices are repudiated.

Nowadays that does not seem possible, since both sides see only vice in the other. There is no possibility of achieving spirituality in such out-of-balance nature.

Instead of spirituality, there is only ideological mania.

The principles that would determine what virtue is in defense of self and kin from invasive, threatening others (and of course any group can seek destruction or exploitation of another), and virtue also in defense of others from the “no kill like overkill” extremism of the rightists, while being able to discern where both insider and outsider defenses go beyond the fit and proper — that is justice.

Spirituality would be the “feel” for that just balance, the sheer perspectival ability to create the balance and cultivated instinct to dispose the imbalancing passions.

Hint: that spirituality does not arise in politics, normally, since politics in a democracy (as well as other governmental mechanisms) is all compromise based on expedience and what-you-can-get-away-with, not principle: politics forms shotgun compromises. A spiritual, justice-oriented middle-ground balance would achieve ideal compromises, where the middle ground is virtuous.

I am pretty certain that our form of modern governance engenders and promotes left-vice and right-vice, which in turn reinforces our mixed system, and if we want peace and a vital spirituality, we are going to have to rethink our fundamentals.

I know: not likely.

twv