Liberals and Conservatives, Humanists and Animalists

Are you a liberal or a conservative? Progressive or traditionalist? Leftist or right-winger? If you think that aligning with some of those categories is of ultimate political concern, you may have been taken in by the central pseudoproblem of Western politics.

The main deficiency of those categories lies not in their overuse, although the hackneyed formulations of much political punditry deadens our sensibilities, preventing us from understanding much of what’s been happening before our eyes. Neither is the underlying problem that our political discourse is fragmented and tribal, as we scramble to identify with a political party or with our favourite celebrity, news personality, or podcaster to feel like we belong to something that will outlast our meager self.

The chief embarrassment, rather, is that the categories in question obscure a deeper, unspeakable division, even while the conventional distinctions we draw in politics are acceptable because they’re irrelevant. Allow me, then, to outline the real division, to help you come to know where you really stand on the political front.

The Origin of Politics

A long time ago, humans separated from the other animals by acquiring what philosophers and psychologists call “personhood.” A person enjoys greater autonomy, intelligence, and creativity than the animals do, which is why our kind has dominated the planet in spite of the comparative weakness of our body type (although our mental talents in turn have given us physical prowess in the form of technological control). Animals are defined by their conformity to their biological life cycle, whereas we have more and more godlike freedom from our evolutionary role.

Rather than being angels or saints that have wholly transcended our animal nature, however, we often regress. After all, it’s hard to know what to do with godlike power, given life’s humble origin from water and dust. Thus, for a few million years in the Paleolithic Age, nomadic bands of wise apes wandered the plains as hunter-gatherers. Eventually they formed civilizations and learned the benefits and drawbacks of a sedentary way of life. There were artistic revolutions, culminating early on in the cave paintings, as well as spiritual and philosophical revolutions such as those of the Axial Age, from the eighth to the third centuries BCE.

These exciting advances in learning to cope with our personhood, with our existential divide from the rest of nature, on account of our unparalleled knowledge of our mortality and of the scope of the universe met with setbacks when we sometimes fell back into ignorance. After dark ages there were rebirths as we recaptured old insights and social frameworks. But even the social progress we take for granted, including advances in farming, medicine, and civil rights has no absolute legitimacy, because all such advances are experiments in personhood, in the creativity of clever mammals that have to look to themselves and to their cherished fictions to decide what to do with a superabundance of knowledge and freedom. What’s good for our species or for some generations, at least, may be disastrous for life in general; our progress may have tragic unintended consequences, because that progress is an accident on top of an accident, a social development resting on the natural selection of our species’ brain power.   

In any case, we can designate all novelties that flow from human creativity and from our separateness from the animals as “humanistic.” A humanist celebrates our revolt against natural limitations. If personhood is even more anomalous than the advent of life in the cosmos, the expression of our personal qualities—as opposed to our animal ones—must be virtually unnatural or miraculous. When we create artificial worlds (languages, cultures, cities, nations) to replace the wilderness, that promethean, antinatural enterprise is the divine handiwork that religious folks have been looking for. Attributing intelligent design and miraculous creativity to fictional gods is so much false modesty, because again, a wonder we can be sure of was the emergence of personhood from animal servitude, or to use the euphemism, from animal “behaviour.”

Humanists and Animalists

If we turn to politics, then, we find this same split between humanist creativity and regression to animal routines. Democracy and communism, for example, are humanist experiments because they’re unnatural, deriving as they do from philosophical convictions about human rights and liberties, and about reason’s power to manage the marketplace better than can competition between short-sighted buyers and sellers. Both democracy and communism are vulnerable to assaults from nature, as it were, since these social structures can collapse into a dominance hierarchy. In that default hierarchy, which is how groups of social species throughout the animal kingdom organize themselves, power and resources are concentrated by an elite minority that lords it over the group’s followers and marginalized members. Any political arrangement that echoes the dominance hierarchy, such as the monarchy, aristocracy, or plutocracy, is fairly called “animalistic,” in contrast to humanist explorations.

Here we have the true division between so-called liberals and conservatives. Liberals are humanists whereas conservatives are animalists, since the latter would have us return to animal norms. Their religious rhetoric and sanctimonious deference to “traditions” notwithstanding, the effect of so-called conservative policies is to reestablish or to exacerbate social inequalities that surrender our potential to transcend the default social hierarchy. That’s what conservative authoritarianism, theocracy, and free market economics are about. That’s why “conservative libertarians” say large governments should be drastically reduced in size to enable the market to work its magic—because without the welfare state, natural competition comes to the forefront. And that’s why in the United States, conservative judges lean towards granting the president maximum executive power and privilege, so that the president can stand out as the alpha male.

The social Darwinian idea—which is better thought of as an animal impulse—is to let losers die off and winners take it all, just as we assume happens in the wild. Without the government to protect those who fail in poorly regulated (effectively wild) competition for private profit, American have-nots are at the mercy of charities in a capitalistic culture that eschews empathy and egalitarian or socialist ideals as remnants of the evil, Soviet empire. (Mind you, those ideals could just as well be thought of as remnants of Christianity.) When the wealth of the middle class in one country is fattened and subsequently hollowed out by the parasitic upper class that pays itself exorbitant bonuses and keeps the majority’s real wages stagnant for half a century, those predatory elites go transnational. 

With that background in mind, the enlightening political question isn’t whether you’re a liberal or a conservative. Ask yourself, rather, whether you’re a humanist or an animalist. Do you hold as sacred personhood, that is, reason, freedom, creativity, and the tragedy of being like a god compared to sparrows, lizards, and hippos? Or do you condemn our godlike potential as so much sinful pride, preferring to retreat to animal norms and in particular to some political or economic form of the ubiquitous dominance hierarchy? Do you delight in personal, social, and technoscientific creativity or are you outraged by any social deviation from the oldest “tradition,” that being the mindless oppression established by the fitness of genes and of their living vessels in certain environments? Above all, do you want humans to be more or less like the other animal species?

It’s time we stop conceding to “conservatives” a phony moral high ground that’s based on fear disguised as prudence or on outdated religious stories, when the systematic effects of their “policies” are nakedly animalistic. We should also beware the deeper reason why the nationalist, authoritarian backlash against neoliberalism in Europe, America, and elsewhere brings liberals to tears: the spectacle of the masses acting like unknowing slaves to bestial compulsions by way of a mob mentality is even more appalling than the lack of guidance we have in our humanist quest for progress.