Left and Right are both Wrong, and I am over it.

I am sick of hearing about the “Extreme Right” and the “Radical Left” every time I tune in to any form of news commentary.

I am frustrated that political leaders have bought into the rhetoric and that those on the supposed “other side” are vilified and dehumanised.

I am furious that Christian leaders have decided to pick political sides and now find themselves attempting to defend behaviour that no person with any shred of morality would consider ok.

We need to develop a more nuanced understanding of the forces that govern our political structures and realise that none of us lives in either a right wing or left wing world.

First off let’s actually define what left and right are supposed to mean in the world of politics.

In simple terms, the goal of the right wing, which is often called capitalism, can be summed up with one word: freedom. Author Lesslie Newbigin elaborates by saying that the vision of capitalism is:

“The freedom of the individual person to develop his own powers to achieve the greatest success he is capable of and to enjoy the fruit of his achievement.”

On the other hand, the goal of the left-wing, which is often called socialism can also be summed up with one word: equality. As Newbigin points out:

“At its best this has been a vision of brotherhood, of community, but in practise it has often been reduced to the vision of a mere equality of rights for each person seen as an autonomous individual.”

One way of overstating the difference is that The “right-wing” tend to pursue freedom at the cost of equality and the “left” wing” tend to pursue equality at the cost of freedom.

The thing is… they are both wrong, and we all know it.

For a start, history demonstrates that neither philosophy actually works. Newbigin points out that in terms of the right-wing:

“Since the rise of capitalism, no freely elected government has been able to stand aside and leave society to the working of the forces of the free market. The obscene cruelties of the early phases of the Industrial Revolution in Britain under the ideology of capitalism compelled governments at an early stage to intervene for the protection of the victims.
This is because no society can cohere and no government can continue to govern indefinitely when the exploitation of the weak by the strong passes a certain point and the political order has lost its moral credibility.”

And Newbigin points out in terms of the left wing that Socialism is:

“An ideal that has never been put into practise anywhere.”

Newbigin, writing in the 1980’s pointed out that:

“Neither system can survive except by modifying the rigor of its ideology. All Marxist governments have to give some place to free-market enterprise, and all capitalist governments have to use state power to limit the injustices that unrestrained free-market enterprise creates.”

This is my point.

If you are living in a moderately stable society it is because the dominant ideology is not capitalism or socialism but an amalgam of both.

Neither the right or the left is our problem. The problem is that our current system is based on a separation of the three elements of public life: political, economic and moral-cultural.

This is a comparatively new idea in human history, coming to the fore only a couple of hundred years ago, and while it unquestionably has produced better financial outcomes for everyone than anything that preceded it, it has also produced two major challenges: we are becoming more fragmented than ever and we don’t have any way to agree about what is good and what is bad.

The separation of morality from public life has also resulted in the decay of belief more generally. As Newbigin points out:

“Moral imperatives cannot operate merely as useful props for a profitable economic order. If they are not rooted in some belief about how the the universe is in fact ordered, they collapse; and if they are so rooted then the economic order cannot be isolated from their jurisdiction.”

You either believe something is right or you don’t and if you do it affects everything and if you don’t it affects nothing.

By trying to move morality to be a private and subjective matter, we have eaten away at one of the main pillars of our society and as a result, have a system of economics that is resisting any kind of accountability and a system of politics that has lost its purpose.

The assumptions behind our economic system are that: the free operation of rational self-interest will alone secure general well-being. Or as Gordon Gecko so memorably summed up in the movie Wall Street: “Greed is Good.”

What made capitalism work in the Western World was that there was a system of morality based on the Judeo-Christian belief system that held the worst excesses of capitalism in check. That was how it was meant to work… until we lost our belief.

As we separate the moral-cultural part of our lives from politics then it is no longer clear what our politicians “ought” to be doing. Instead of power being a means to an end, power becomes an end in its own right because not subject to any bigger moral framework.

Neither what we call “the Left” or “the Right” are actually truly capitalist or socialist, and even if they were. that would not be our main problem.

Our main problem is that the system that created capitalism and socialism also separated morality from politics and economics and now we increasingly realising we are in a mess.

We won’t get out of the mess we are in by arguing more strongly for the left or for the right. As Albert Einstein pointed out

“We can not solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.”

The fundamental problem our society faces is that we don’t have a collective “story” that binds us together as a story. We don’t have a collective morality that tells us what is right and what is wrong.

In this context, the Christian church can’t try to turn back the clock to some idealised age but instead needs to realise that it does have something to bring to the conversation.

The Christian church was always meant to be a counter-culture. We were meant to be yeast in the dough, or salt on the meat, that makes everything else better.

When Jesus said “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me,” he was declaring that there was an objective moral standard, and He was it.

In a world that has lost its moral bearings, we are meant to model, through the way we live our lives, what morality looks like.

Unfortunately, we have mixed up our role and have grabbed for the levers of power and the benefits of economics, forgetting what it means to be the counter-culture that both enhances and also challenges the culture in which we find ourselves.

I recommend any serious person take some time to read Lesslie Newbigin’s Foolishness to the Greeks. Although the book was published back in the late 80’s, very few religious or political commentators have made as much sense of the place we now find ourselves in.