Ideology in the 21st Century: "Politically Correct" vs. "You're Not the Boss of Me"
In the 20th century, back when I grew up, the ideological spectrum that conceptualized social, economic, and political divisions was based on the old Left/Right, Liberal/Conservative, Progressive/Reactionary divide. The philosophical underpinnings went back two (or three, depending on who was reckoning it and what they included) centuries to the early Enlightenment ideas of Western Europe, refined in the American and French Revolutions, and pushed further in the crucible of capitalism in the Industrial Revolution.
The questions were profound and complex, the dialog and dialectics full of clamorous assumptions and disagreements. The experiment was long and bloody.
But on some level, it generally stayed focused on the notion of "How do we make it possible for an expanding human population to successfully organize itself, govern, divvy up resources, engage with one another, establish a set of shared understandings about interaction... even in the face of profound disagreements and competing interests?" It was never tidy, rarely consistent, and the further along the spectrum (to either end) a leader was, generally the more fervent and less flexible they were (there were always exceptions) but the more powerful and compelling their rhetorical appeal was, to followers.
It was group-based, movement-oriented. It was tribalism in the "us" versus "them" mode, written into the town squares, streets, border clashes, and jungle villages with bloody fury. The ripples pushed their way out to less literal, less wholesale slaughter in the forms of proxy wars, Cold Wars, and hardening internal partisan conflicts.
In the twenty-first century, as with everything else, the ideological spectrum has become "meme-ified," reduced to the crudely simplistic essence of tribalist appeal. It has become an intensely personal form of ideological identification, in which the individual, rather than searching for a group whose ideology provokes adherence and belief, merely searches for like-minded fellow-travelers whose beliefs reinforce their confirmation bias.
At one end, we have those who believe that the survival of the human race itself demands a set of more or less prescriptive rules that will apply to everyone, dictating how we treat one another in all kinds of public and private transactions, how economic activity may be undertaken with the least harm to the planet and the most broadly-shared benefits, how the individual may contribute to, and share in, the common good through compliance with the rules and investment in collective well-being.
At the other end, we have those who believe that individual creativity, endeavor, and economic interest are the only potent engines of human survival and evolution, and that any attempts to control them for the chimera of 'the commons' are a threat to that survival and evolution, enabling irrational, inferior, unfit individuals to use the leverage of collective power to overwhelm the steady march of superior moral and creative individual endeavor, to the detriment of all concerned.
At the Politically Correct end of the spectrum, we suspect that the You're Not the Boss of Me ideologues are less interested in the steady march of human endeavor than they are in their own unhindered ability to get their own way and/or exploit the weak, or at least be able to indulge whatever personal pleasures they choose without social or economic consequences.
At the You're Not the Boss of Me end of the spectrum, they're pretty sure that our Politically Correct rhetoric is merely a high-sounding cloak for our authoritarian absolutist dreams, subjecting all individual freedoms and creativity to the soul-destroying conformity of faceless and totalitarian state control intruding in every aspect of personal life and personal choices.
And the level of discourse continues to degenerate...
wearily,
Bright
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