Some Reflections on the Meaning of Right and Left

Most people I encounter nowadays lean towards the left in some way, if not from the political or economic standpoint then almost certainly from the cultural one. It's the conventional view in our post-spiritual world and to express ideas at variance with it is regarded with increasing suspicion. The traditional understanding of life seems to have been swept away over the past few decades, and often not just swept away but turned on its head as well. I would never advocate a full return to the past since you don't go forward by going back to where you started. Besides, the past was full of ignorance in many respects. But sometimes when you have taken a wrong turning you do have to retrace your steps or, at least, you have to cut across country to get to where the old path would have led if it carried on going in a proper direction.

Right and left would seem to echo deeper realities than purely political ones, and that makes sense when you appreciate that this is a world built on the interaction between complementary opposites. I think that if you strip them back to basics, to what might be their initiating distinguishing impulse, you could say that the right is based on quality and the left on quantity. Alternatively put, it might be said that the right is based on the vertical aspect of life (hence the focus on hierarchy) while the left follows the horizontal (hence equality). And from this you see that both have a certain validity and also that there is room for both. You can also see why the right (the true right) is religious and the left is materialistic.

But, though there is room for both and though both are, in their different ways, necessary, one does have precedence over the other just as the vertical axis has precedence over the horizontal. Quality must come before quantity just as, on a loom, the warp is woven before the weft is added.

Life is made of spirit and matter working together but it should be obvious that the spiritual comes before the material in this pairing. The latter is actually an expression of the former. Now, it might seem odd to compare the right to the spiritual but I submit that this is precisely what it is ultimately grounded in when it is true to its calling because of its awareness of the primacy of God. Just because many people on the right today have no spiritual leaning does not invalidate this. It simply means that their attitude has been corrupted by the materialistic beliefs of the left. They have lost their true centre and abandoned religion but this means they are right only superficially and their 'rightness' is heavily coloured by leftist assumptions.

That the left relates to the material should not be hard to see. Since its beginning, it has made no bones about its focus on this world and righting the wrongs, as it sees them, of this world, and it does so from a materialistic point of view. When it adopts a spiritual attitude, you will find that its spirituality is cast in a human-centric form, and always social matters come before spiritual ones, the latter being seen in the light of the former.

It is my contention that increasingly over the last 50 years the left has been used by the demonic powers to undermine human civilisation. That is why the focus of the left has gone from alleviating poverty to a near obsession with inverting the natural order of being. Naturally, this demonic campaign has been dressed up in attractive clothing and most of those fighting it believe themselves to be at the vanguard of progress. In some respects they might be since the dark powers are far from stupid and know how to sugar the pill just enough to make it go down. Also, old ways of thinking did need to change to keep up with the general evolution of human consciousness which is why it is not good enough simply to retreat to religious traditionalism. But generally, I'm afraid to say, most of those on the left today are like Lenin's useful idiots, and it has to be pointed out that they are only able to be used in this way because of character defects they might have that can be taken advantage of, envy and resentment being the among the obvious ones but there is also spiritual naivety and, most importantly, lack of imagination. True imagination, that is. As we know, many contemporary artists are on the left but you will find that their imagination is usually grounded and lacks vision. Strong on the horizontal axis but weak on the vertical.

I am not saying that those on the right are paragons of virtue. We are all sinners from the spiritual perspective. That is the legacy of the Fall, that almost archetypal time when we lost connection to the divine. But if such people acknowledge the reality of God, as they should do if they truly are on the right in a more than outer sense, then they are at least facing the proper direction. Moreover, they have this advantage over those on the left. They are generally concerned with real things and with people rather than abstract concepts. They care about those they actually know and who actually exist rather than an amorphous and non-existent 'humanity'. They are realists not ideologues who see everything and everybody through the distorting lens of ideology. They are interested in real individuals not theories about abstractions.

Nothing is completely clear cut and simple. At least nothing is in this world and at this time. In fact and in truth everything is clear cut and simple but here in this world we all have good and evil within us, or the tendencies to such. A person on the right is not better than one on the left. Human beings are a complicated mix of all sorts of things, of mixed motivations, aspirations and ideas of what is good and what is not. But, in general terms, if one is pulled towards acknowledging the reality of God one becomes more aware of the truths of tradition and less drawn towards the idea of remaking human beings in a false, materialistic image which is what the left is hell-bent on doing now. 

I said earlier that there is a sense in which we need both left and right, and I think that is true. One, if not balanced by the other, will tend to manifest the defects of its qualities. So if I say that right is right that does not mean that right alone is right. It's like the two commandments. Love God is the primary commandment, the one on the right. But love your neighbour as yourself is also necessary and this is the commandment that a true left would have as its motto. But you cannot do the second properly unless you do the first to begin with. The second must come from the first. It must arise out of the first. If it tries to come from itself, it is false which is why so many on the left, for all their fine words, are usually to be seen as fakes, uttering words which do not come from the heart and are ideas about goodness not goodness itself. Goodness is only in God and if he is denied there can be no true goodness.

For the right, God comes before Man but for the left the relationship is reversed. Doesn't that make it clear that ultimately the left is just another attempt at disturbing the natural order of being? It takes an aspect of truth, which does have it place in the whole, but removes that from its natural place in the scheme of things to try to make it foundational. It is a disruption of hierarchy, and one more bite of the apple that is supposed to make men gods without reference to their Creator.  I suppose you could say that the first leftist hasn't changed his tactics. These have just become more sophisticated.

You might have followed me up until this point but I am now going to say something that may seem controversial. I have said that we need both right and left as each can balance and complement the other and prevent things going to extremes. But I have also said that the right should be the leading force of the two, the one that sets the tone, with the left acting as a remedial influence, a counteracting pull to proper harmony as well as contributing its own positive qualities. But it should not take precedence. There is a clear parallel here with male and female, and it seems reasonable to draw the conclusion that the right is largely masculine and the left feminine. And once you grasp this the state of the world today becomes easier to understand. As cultures tend to do in the days of their decline, our world has become feminised and this is one of the reasons it has lost its way. For when the feminine seeks to usurp the leadership position, when it rejects love in its desire for power, the natural order of being is disrupted. The search for truth is made secondary and the priority becomes human feelings. I should add that the feminine forces are aided in this by secondary masculine ones who have felt left behind and undervalued by the previous established hierarchy. Here again envy and resentment come into play and work to undermine legitimate authority.

Of course, many people will regard this analysis as absurd and see it as coming from prejudice or fear rather than basic human intuition which is what I would maintain. That is because they are not acknowledging what lies beneath the surface of reality. When you look into the inner state of the world and of human beings then you can see the machinations that have brought about our current spiritual malaise. Ignore that and you cannot really understand what is going on. How can you when you lack the proper facts?

This post is really just an amplification of the meaning of the archetypal realities of Adam and Eve, disrupted by the Fall and then put right and carried forward by the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus. In one sense, we are currently repeating the Fall. The only way to put that right is through acknowledging the reality of Christ and living that both inwardly and outwardly. 

What does this mean? First of all, it means rejecting the world, the flesh and the devil. However to do that you have to know what these are and they come in many guises not just the obvious ones. Be wise to them all. Then it means taking Christ as the pattern of your soul and conforming yourself to his reality. This has both an inner and an outer dimension and both must be taken fully into account. This is easy if you have seen properly and without distorting your vision by any one of the three impediments to truth just mentioned. That is to say, it's easy to understand but it is arduous to put into practice because you are taking a recalcitrant material, your soul, and trying to knock it into shape. It is very resistant but persistence and faith will bring results.

The inner dimension is the fact of Christ in you, the Christ light within your very being. But this light can only be kindled through the outer dimension which is the reality of Christ as himself. You cannot truly awaken Christ within if you do not submit yourself to the living God. By the same token, it is not enough to acknowledge God above if you don't seek him within as well.

To conclude, politics must end in spirituality. If it doesn't, and is seen only in its own light, it is redundant and, more than that, harmful. Right and left have no proper meaning in themselves but insofar as the former acknowledges that which is beyond itself while the latter does not, seeing life as political rather than spiritual, it is undoubtedly the truer option.