On Becoming Less Left-Wing (Part 3)
The reality of progress, the fragility of civilisation, the left’s role in making the world both better and worse, the case for capitalism, and how to think about “the West”
When I was in my early twenties, I had a very left-wing view of the world. In the first two parts of this series, I explained why I have gradually abandoned much of this worldview over the past decade or so.
In Part 1, I described how learning about evolution and economics has undermined the idealistic views I held about human nature and social cooperation. Reflecting on our Darwinian origins convinced me of a broadly “tragic” view of the human condition. Self-interest and status competition are deep-rooted, ineradicable features of our species, not products of bad institutions. Meanwhile, learning the much-maligned basics of “neoclassical economics”—Econ 101—convinced me of the benefits of free markets, the challenges of collective action, and the limits of good intentions and lofty rhetoric as a basis for good policy-making.
In Part 2, I described how learning about political epistemology and psychology transformed my understanding of politics itself. Thinking about how we form our political beliefs, and the challenges of accessing political “truths”, led me to abandon the Manichean view in which being left-wing means being a good person and being right-wing means being a bad or stupid one. I have come to see political ideologies as low-resolution, selective maps of unimaginably complex realities. Moreover, these maps are typically distorted in many ways by forces like self-interest, status-seeking, and tribalism, forces much easier to notice in the maps of other people than in our own.
As I’ve stressed in both pieces, becoming less left-wing hasn’t meant becoming more right-wing or becoming a “centrist” in a straightforward sense. I still think the left—even the far left—captures some important truths about humanity, history, and politics. But I now think that these truths are bundled with omissions, falsehoods, and simplistic narratives that illuminate certain parts of reality while occluding others.
In this third post in the series, I will describe how learning and thinking about history, including the complex topic of historical progress, has also shaped my political outlook. As with the previous essays, I don’t offer these reflections with the goal of persuading anyone of anything. I’m simply presenting my views and how they have evolved—and, hopefully, improved—in ways that might interest some readers.
The Starting Point
When I was younger, the idea that thinking seriously about history would be necessary to think seriously about politics didn’t really cross my mind. (The one exception was very recent history. Like many leftist millennials, I went through a phase of reading books about how something called “neoliberalism” was responsible for most of the world’s ills.)
My political worldview was almost single-mindedly focused on the present, which I understood as being in a state of extreme crisis and catastrophe. The world was defined by injustice, exploitation, and oppression, all upheld by extractive elites and oppressive systems at the expense of the vulnerable and marginalised.
Thoughts about historical progress didn’t feature in this worldview. In fact, in my early twenties, I would have thought that anyone harping on about historical progress was doing something suspicious and reactionary. How could anyone talk about the world getting better when the world is so awful?
To the extent I acknowledged progress at all, I would have viewed it through a simple lens. Just as the left is the political movement fighting for progress today, progress throughout history has been driven by left-wing political movements fighting for equality and emancipation against right-wing, reactionary forces. Progress was basically what happened when the left got its way—when it won this battle.
I also probably signed on to the popular left-wing view that any “material” progress in wealth and living standards arose either from socialist movements clawing back wealth from exploitative capitalists or through exploitation and theft on the global stage—for example, through slavery, colonialism, and “free trade” agreements that let Western countries become richer by extracting resources and labour from poor ones in the “Global South”.
I use the word “probably” because I’m engaging in reconstruction. It’s difficult to remember precisely what I believed a decade ago. I’d like to think I was a bit more sophisticated than this reconstruction suggests, but probably not much.
This is the general picture of the world one gets from the kind of writers and intellectuals I admired at the time. It will be familiar to anyone exposed to far-left politics. I encounter variations of it among many of the students I teach.
In any case, whatever precisely I believed a decade ago, I’ve come to think that this general way of understanding history, society, and politics constitutes a gross distortion. It’s not completely false—it contains some important grains of truth—but it is highly selective, and it contains many falsehoods, as well.
