The Agents of History

Today's post is a bit of a ramble on a topic that I often think about yet have no firm opinion regarding. The issue is the tendency to treat leftists as in some sense more agential than right wingers. We see this in articles that frame behaviour from right wingers as an inevitable response to leftist excess. A particularly shocking example of this became somewhat infamous on Twitter:

But you can also sometimes see this in cases wherein more centrist pundits blast left wingers for making right wing victory more likely. It's at least a fairly common genre so I hope readers will be familiar from their own experience. It even crops up in how we talk, since "reactionary" as a term for extreme right wingers presents them as, well, reactive; and in more fancy academic socialist circles there will be debates about who the "historical subject" is or similar that more or less presuppose this group will be using their agency to advance progressive causes - at least when they get their act together, probably after reading the author's latest book etc. So... why is this?

It will help to clearly distinguish between moral responsibility and causal contribution. Ordinary language can generate ambiguities when we discuss making things happen - if I say "A happened because of B" this can be a purely descriptive judgement, where I am simply drawing attention to the fact that A played a notable causal role in bringing about B. But it can also be a moral evaluation, in which I am claiming that A bears responsibility for B's occurrence. 

Since the two are often related (foreseeable consequences of our actions are things we are often at least somewhat morally responsible for) this is often not a problem. But intuitively they can come apart - obvious examples come from cases where an action was a causal consequence but was in no wise foresseable. For instance suppose I remark "My, what a sunny day!" upon entering the office, and this reminds my colleague of having read L'Etranger as a youth and having wondered what it would feel like to kill a man, which in turn eventually leads to them forming an obsession with the idea and eventually doing the deed. It would be highly unusual to hold me morally responsible for the murder, even though we may suppose that it simply would not have occurred had I not made my remark. 

So we should be careful when discussing whether or not the left's actions lead to the right's actions. We must be clear about whether we mean the left are morally on the hook for the behaviour of the right, or if we mean there is a causal relationship between the two. And, in turn, we must ensure that our responses to claims made are those which our interlocutor actually put forward.

I think there's a couple of things that we can immediately make note of once this distinction is noted. First, at least with regard to the centrist pundits, some of their left-bashing tendencies are a matter of them simply not thinking right wingers are worth engaging with, or in any case that there is any chance they will engage with them. They have written off the right as either not morally or intellectually serious, not liable to engage in discussion with them, but think there is at least some segment of the left they can still convince or browbeat into better behaviour.  We can put this as - these pundits simply despair of getting right wingers to behave in a morally or intellectually responsible fashion, whereas they do hold out hope of (some) leftists doing so. This tendency is at least related to some of what I will say below, it is after all rather insulting and I find it curious that it is not reacted to in a more hostile fashion; but I basically don't have much to say about this beyond "perhaps rethink this tendency."

Second, there are plenty of crude attempts to dodge moral responsibility. The classic behaviour of the domestic abuser, unleashing violence while saying "see what you made me do" to the cowering victim, here scaled up to an entire political movement or ideology. This is an attempt to conflate moral and causal responsibility by presenting oneself as utterly without agency, helplessly made to do what would otherwise be obviously evil by the overwhelming causal power of those one harms. People who do this sort of thing may or may not be lying to themselves, but it is in any case bad faith and not worth taking too seriously. In these cases it is simply false that the causal or moral link exists and one can be firm on the point. There is nothing about the contemporary state of America, at all, that renders fascist dictatorship inevitable or justifiable. A lot of bad choices would have to be made between here and there. Kelly is endorsing the "eventually lead to" claim as a simple expression of his own desires.

I think these points are both fairly obvious. What I find more puzzling, and which prompted this post, is quite why you will also see this sort of "only the left truly cause stuff" perspective from people who I think should just find it insulting. Usually we take it to be desirable to have agency, we think of it as dehumanising and insulting to be objectified or treated as incapable of decision making or having our own values. It's reductive in some diminishing sense to have one's habits and hobby's and relationships and joy's reduced to mere causal mechanism, to ignore the role of your own locus of agency therein. This is why many find materialist determinism a depressing prospect in metaphysics. This is (one of the reasons) why feminists do not like it when a certain kinda man treats woman as, when properly functioning, machines where you put in nice guy behaviours and they output sex. This is the emotional foundation of Kantian ethics, or at least as far as I have ever been able to grasp it. We like thinking of ourselves as agents, as creatures capable of making at least some autonomous decisions based on and because of values we reflectively endorse.

So why is it that right wingers are not more routinely insulted by the insinuation that their political side is simply the dark shadow of the left? Maybe they are, but because of the circles I run in I just don't see this reaction? Or is there actually some sort of leftist bias in who values agency, and it correlates with political preference to not mind so much if one's agency is rhetorically diminished?

Ironically the best explanation I can think of for this is just another version of treating the left as agents of history! Namely, that because in so far as partisan politics crops up more of the entertainment industry is left wing than right, and likewise more of the intelligentsia, it's just more often that left wingers get to see developments and affirmations of a positive vision associated with their view. Right wingers are reactive because they literally just are more often having to react than developing their own position in a more positive way. 

But even that doesn't quite track to me. There are certainly churches and news media organisations that are large and influential organisations with right wing bases that could spend their time and resources developing a more positive vision. But for the most part they simply do not do this. (To be fair, the Catholic Church certainly does this, but then Catholic social philosophy doesn't neatly line up with the left or right in partisan political terms. Compare the Church's stance on refugees and the death penalty to its stance on abortion and trans healthcare. So it just generally doesn't quite fit in here.) And where they do they don't have anything like the readership, despite right wingers being a plurality or at least a sizeable chunk of most Western nations population. You could say this is just education polarisation, but I would again think this pushes the issue back.

So yes, there's my ramble. I do not understand why the tendency to treat right wingers as merely causally responding to left wingers is not seen as more insulting, in light of the way it apparently distinguishes moral agency. I hence likewise do not know why it is not more often challenged and resisted from the right. In principle one can keep moral and causal claims apart, and it would be good to do so. But in practice they often go together (and indeed are strategically conflated) so I don't think it's just philosophical rigour making everyone avoid the mistake. I honestly find it confusing, and I have not found any explanation fully satisfying.