What’s right doesn’t make it left or right
Humanity is facing existential threats, all of them based on choices we have made, others we are about to make. Some are clear and present dangers, others less so. What is common to all is that they are shared by people of all political, cultural and religious persuasions.
Yet we manage to politicise, marginalise, ostracise, criticise, misinform and disinform in order to ensure we shape the high moral ground on which to hoist our banners.
Nowhere is this more accentuated than in democratic elections, where winning hearts and minds in advocacy of ideas has been superseded by slander, partisan media and premeditated divisiveness. Better still if we can demonise people and threats from beyond our borders with some good old fashioned fear-mongering of people and cultures different from our own.
The recent result in the Australian election demonstrated that the population has tired of divisive rhetoric and alienation of the sort that dominated the Trump presidency and drove the vote for Brexit. Always a moderately conservative constituency, Australians herded to the centre, wrapping neckties of independents and progressive Greens around the inner suburbs of Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.
Australians consolidated around the issues of climate change and environmental degradation, political and institutional integrity and a more equal economic and social dividend for all from one of the world’s wealthiest nations.
That an incumbent government would lose an election on these fundamental no-brainers beggars belief. As it railed against the governance of nations in the ‘arc of autocracy’ it was judged to have failed to have protected its own citizens from crises driven by climate, to have delivered truth and integrity in governance and stretched the gap economic and social gap between cohorts of citizens, especially women.
But here’s the thing. None of these issues is morally, legally or culturally the unique concern or province of the left or right of politics. They are universal aspirations for all fair-minded people, whether they live in democracies, autocracies or something in between.
In a globally connected and accessible world, the existential worries of human kind are common to all. The risk of escalation of the Russian invasion of Ukraine into a nuclear cataclysm, climate-driven food and water shortages causing the homelessness and dislocation of millions, the loss of biodiversity maintaining the fine balance in our ecosystems that has prevented the devastating spread of exotic diseases for millenia, the on-going global exploitation of the poor to sustain the lifestyles and consumerism of the rich.
Neither the right nor the left have unique insights or intellectual capacity to resolve these universal challenges which, by definition, render immaterial any measure or belief about what is right or left philosophy or politics.
As I noted in a previous post, progressives are conservatives and vice versa. There is, or should be, little distinction as we deal with the big issues of our time. If we fail to recognise this, it may be politics itself that is truly our most existential threat.
Photo by micheile dot com on Unsplash