2023-12-11 What's Right and Left Anyways?

Note: Originally published on November 14, 2023. Edited on December 10, 2023.

I find it interesting how people who used to be on the left take for granted the "criticisms" coming from the right. I see this rhetoric against identity politics and “wokeness” coming from people who you would expect to be on the left or center, or those who are supposedly against racism and homophobia and other forms of discrimination and stereotyping. They've taken for granted that these criticisms are truthful, and so haven't stopped to question the inherent racism in political groups co-opting and changing words like "woke" from their original meaning to something that they claim threatens society as a way of targetting a specific group of people for political gain. The reality is, these criticisms are often not truthful, they are actually strawman arguments that are made up altogether. The rise in Fundamentalism throughout much of society has prevented us from seeing through this.

This has happened all throughout history, but especially among those who criticize religion. Some people on the left have taken for granted the criticisms of religion by authoritarians and people on the right. An example is Edward Gibbon, who was part of the Whig Party, which merged into the "Liberal Party". Many from that party then moved to the "Liberal Unionist Party", which merged into, and this is interesting, the "Conservative Party".

We see this in the US as well. The Republican Party used to be the party of Abraham Lincoln, who led the Civil War and tried to abolish slavery. And now his party has become the party of racists and fascists that justify insurrectionists and try to protect Trump no matter the consequences to the US, like their willingness to abolish all forms of checks and ballances or to disregard people's votes. It seems what was once liberal becomes conservative in the future, although Gen Z and Millennials seem to be breaking this mold so far by continuing to engage in new ideas that progress society.

These things give us a very important lesson - politics is more complicated than right and left. Classical Liberalism is very different from Modern Liberalism. People on the far right and people on the far left can both be unethical. They can both justify genocide. They both can justify slavery and oppression. They both have justified homophobia and transphobia. They both can be caught up in taking strawman arguments for granted.

It was not long ago when rationality and science were used to justify slavery and racism. In fact, it was Scientific consensus that "survival of the fittest" and Darwinism be applied to social issues, including that of race, intelligence, and skills. Hitler used scientific and "leftist" ideas to promote hatred and to kill millions of people, but he is no "leftist" in the modern sense. He is in the center only insomuch that he uses whatever is convenient at the time to gain the most power and to strike fear in a group of people. The extreme left nowadays can want the liberation of Palestinians and still justify the terrorism of Hamas. The center and the right can justify the immoral actions of the State of Israel, failing to realize that prior to the creation of Israel, a lot of Jewish people who were already in or near the land were actually fine with living under these countries that weren’t persecuting them like Europe was at the time. The extreme left can turn criticisms against Israel into antisemitic tropes without realizing that tons of Jews are also against the immoral actions of Israel.

How you view Identity Politics certainly depends on how you define it. If you mean people have identities that we should respect, then I do not think that is a bad thing. Sometimes people adhere to this pseudo-Buddhist or pseudo-eastern-spirituality mindset that people don't have identities because they are primarily some spiritual being that's part of some whole, or some spiritual being that should focus on the dissolution of oneself. I disagree, people are real human beings with real physical bodies. The physical bodies are just as much a part of the person as the spiritual bodies. They have gender, likes and dislikes, skin colors, people they associate with, skills and lack of skills. If we want to define identity politics as people recognizing that identities exist, then that is not harmful or a problem in the least. It's reality, and people have the autonomy to decide what their identities are.

These people who use pseudo-Buddhist and psuedo-eastern-spirituality have missed the mark, because they only bothered to study a superficial part of the religions they have taken for themselves. This pseudo-Buddhism in the west has turned from an ethical system that was between extreme asceticism and extreme hedonism into a system that is barely ethical but extremely ascetic. This is certainly not what Buddha imagined or what the tradition is, and this form of pseudo-Buddhism is extremely destrimental. Buddhism becomes a political tool to fight back against the idea of identity rather than a way of bettering the world and yourself. Instead of focusing on your own spiritual journey, you start judging other people and focusing on what you think they should be doing. And further yet, pseudo-Buddhists have detached themselves from religion altogether, and view their form of Buddhism as intellectually superior. They focus more on feeling superior to others than on the ethical nature of Buddhism itself.

It is often the case that outsiders redefine a term into the complete opposite of what the insiders defined the term to be originally. This happens extremely often in politics and with those who talk about just politics without having any knowledge outside of politics itself. When you become so wrapped up in the political world that you don’t study or hear anything outside of politics, then of course you don’t know what the terms really mean by the people who created the term in the first place, and you don’t know the significant harm that this causes. The left has done it with religious terms, the right and center has done it with “woke”, and the right has done it with “identity politics” and “liberalism” and "democracy". It is usually either an extremely disingenuous attempt to criticize and create false accusations against a group of people, or the result of being so wrapped up in politics that you never once considered studying cultures, religions, or groups outside of the political sphere. People are good at twisting and lying about what others really believe, and if one never heard from the beliefs of specific groups, then you are left with Orientalism, viewing certain societies as exotic, a sense of superiority among your group and a willingness to view others as less human or less intelligent, not recognizing other civilizations, and even misunderstanding the practices of the early Christians as the Romans did, calling them "incestuous" or other outrageous claims, and the list goes on.

Identity Politics has been misunderstood because it has been taken up aggressively by certain small groups that have their voices amplified on Social Media, the media, and other platforms. Reality is more than Social Media and the media, however. “Identity Politics”, in its original conception prior to being labeled with this name, and its continuation, has always been about marginalized groups coming together to fight for diversity and the rights of everyone, including people of all skin colors, LGBTQ+, women, children, and anyone else that has been wrongly marginalized. Attempts to twist this into a “manichaean conflict” are misinformed and are the result of fear-mongering terminology being used by these critics that lack a nuanced knowledge of both Identity Politics and Manichaeism. They only surface the most superficial of any political opinions and ignore any criticisms they receive which challenge their naive and cherry-picked views.

Manichaeism was influenced by Gnosticism, but before making a judgement on this, we should know what Gnosticism really was and not the mischaracterized form that self-important redditors on the r/Gnosticism have claimed it was. It is dualistic in that it views a fight between good and evil. However, people have become so misinformed about Manichaeism that they have reduced the term down to just dualism itself. Manichaeism, like Gnosticism prior to it, views the material world as evil and the spiritual world as good. Does this sound familiar? It is not completely unlike those who advocate for the dissolution of all physical or material identity or those who advance a position that all humans are part of the same spiritual being without their own identities. Physical identities and physical embodiment like sexuality and skin color are the antithesis to Manichaeism and Gnosticism, which views the material world as evil and which were highly ascetic to the point that they were against all sexuality and reproduction in the first place. That is the lack of nuance that has gone missing from contemporary political fear-mongers who use a term just to scare and persuade rather than to inform and educate, and people willingly accept these fear-mongering terms without any care to studying what Manichaeism and Gnosticism really were.

Gnosticism comes from the word Gnosis, meaning "knowledge." If you think this is a good thing, it's not, because they have bastardized knowledge into something extremely exclusive rather than universal, and something that only the superior know about. Does this sound like anything else to you? Intellectual superiority within an exclusive group has been a component of many cults of knowledge and cults of personality, and that's because it plays on people's desire to know more, desire to be right, or even their desire to be better than others. If someone has this mindset, they are more likely to undervalue others and to overemphasize their intelligence. Some even use flowery "philosophical" language to try to sound smart, but you can always tell when they splatter a bunch of philosophy-sounding words into a string of mostly-nonsensical or ambiguous sentences. These are the people who are more likely to tell others how they should think of themselves, because they don't like the idea of self-autonomy and self-identification because it implies that people know more about themselves than others know about them.

The critics fundamentally misunderstand where modern Liberalism is coming from because they fail to see the negatives of the Enlightenment. It is no coincidence that most of the critics of “Identity Politics” frequently regard it as opposed to liberalism’s Enlightenment values, the same Enlightenment values that regarded Black people as lesser humans than White people, and the same Enlightenment values that allowed some of the biggest wars and genocides in modern times to go unchecked for so long. Enlightenment is not our salvation. It is not perfect. It has very large downsides that have been criticized by the liberal religious and the right. All logic and no empathy or ethics leads to a dangerous path, one that can easily justify murdurs and genocides. Modern Liberalism is an attempt to combine the emphasis on the freedom of classical liberalism with an emphasis on morality. One might call this religious or “Manichaean”, but this assumes religion and morality are inherently evil and that reality is relative. There is a right and wrong, and modern liberalism is an attempt to fix what is wrong. Seeing anything related to religious ideas as “evil” is more “Manichaean” than Identity Politics ever was.

It seems that everyone thinks everyone else has an ideology except themselves. This is because ideology has been reframed as a negative instead of what it actually is, which is a philosophical system. The idea that identities exist and that your physical body and preferences affects your spiritual self is a philosophical idea, not an ideology. The idea that people have the autonomy to discover or choose their identities is a philosophical idea, not an ideology. The concept that the realm of ideas is part of reality, or perhaps is all that reality is, is a philosophical idea - in fact it's inspired by Plato, although others later have expanded on it to form what is often called Idealism (arguing that reality is ideas).

If we are to talk about modern philosophy, there is generally this fight between two systems: Analytic Philosophy, and Hegelian Philosophy. People adhere to one but exclude the benefits or ideas of the other. People from one side call the other side ideological. The fight misses the entire point, however, which is that both philosophical systems have value and they both offer useful and good ideas.

I'm from a Christian background, went to a Catholic University, got a Theology degree, and started learning more about Judaism and visiting the Synagogue. All of these things affect who I am, my identity. Who I am is based on who I interact with, my community, and how I interact with others. Who I am is also based on my interests. I respect people's autonomy to recognize their identities because I respect the fundamental parts of Judaism and Christianity, that is, all humans are in the image of God, all humans have free will, and all humans are worthy of love.

So, when we brush things over with broad strokes like the left's "obsession over gender pronouns", we must set the record straight and correctly. Why do gender pronouns exist? Where did this movement come from? Is this movement responding to anything? Is it advocating for a group of people who have been harmed throughout history? The reality is identity, gender, sexuality, and skin color all live outside of politics. They are not political ideas to be weaponized for or against, they are real human attributes that exist in multidimensional humans and have all been described for thousands of years. It is insulting to think that certain politicians can claim any one of these are "recent" political ideas of the "radical left." The truth is they are not and they never have been.

I remember not long ago when people were still experimenting with various different pronouns. They hadn't settled on one, so there were various different ones out there. That's part of the process of finding the right choice; it's how language in society develops. They ended up settling on one pronoun "they" for gender-neutral, particularly because it's a pronoun that already exists, and a similar pattern of using third person plural gender-neutral for singular as well can be found in other languages.

As for the idea that people should use the correct pronoun for the correct person, that's called respecting people. I know nowadays people on both the left and the right no longer think respect is good; they call it "political correctness". But because of the way I grew up, I think respect and politeness are good things. It is a sad state when people start arguing against respect and politeness, as far as I'm concerned. Part of this fight has always been there. You think Jesus wasn't telling people to respect others? He was. Or the prophets? Or any other main religious figure? "Language-policing" has always been there because people harm with language. The harms of language is a reality, which is why we should be mindful of this. Some people have reframed this as "language policing" because they don't want to recognize the reality that language can harm, or they don't want to take on the responsibility of choosing their words wisely.

I have a very big problem when we start rewriting history to exclude people of other genders and the existence of other pronouns or words for these genders. The ancient Jews had multiple genders. The Greeks had the Androgynos. There's 2 Spirit and the 3rd gender is other indigenous civilizations. Identities, gender, and respectful language are not new ideas, and they are not inherently bad. What matters is how they are all used - to uplift and respect people, or to harm people?

Certainly, part of the outrage on parts of the center and the right is how they view what men and women are. They have taken a Fundamentalist approach to Science, because they only know the way of Fundamentalism in their religion. They have completely ignored the social aspects of gender and started associating it with Chromosomes, as if Chromosomes hadn't just been found in the 19th Century. And yet not all of them agree, as some associate gender with your sexual organs. They are so absorbed in thinking they are right that they have missed the fact that they all disagree on the specifics of what makes someone a man or a woman - chromosomes vs. sexual organs. And perhaps some of them think that chromosomes always match your sexual organs, even! How careless and self-assured they are to not want to actually study human anatomy or the diversity of social views on gender, but certainly part of the problem is Health classes not covering these topics. So now more people are not going to be taught these topics properly because older people think they are correct about everything they were and weren't taught that they can't comprehend having been taught the wrong thing (like much of their understanding of History, but that's a different topic altogether). Our understanding of Science, Philosophy, Sociology, Psychology, Theology, and History changes with time. If you are not keeping up with these changes, then you truly do not know these fields except in a partial and outdated way. That's just the truth of the matter. They are not static and concrete like the Funamentalists want you to believe.

To conclude, I think it's very easy for me, being a white American myself, to say that oppression doesn't exist, so I could only imagine how easy it is for other people. Of course, I'm also gay, and my rights are constantly under attack right now in the US. I would have expected other people to be able to at least try to have sympathy, but maybe they're just unable to because they have never experienced what this is like. Britain and America both have a tendency of whitewashing and also a lack of responsibility to the things they've caused and harmed in history. Pointing this out and wanting people to recognize and change this is about as ideological as wanting people to understand you and not spread lies about you, that is, not at all. It's called respect. Popularity is never the goal. You do not stop advocating for justice and morality just because people do not like it.