Left & Right: Old Heritage, Modern Curse

The divide between Liberal and Conservative politics is prehistoric

A painting depicting French citizens in Paris, on their way to be executed by guillotine. They had been found by radical Revolutionary leaders of not being radical enough. During the Revolution, over 17,000 people in Paris were publicly executed for being not sufficiently revolutionary.

It’s nothing new!

The political terms “left” and “right” in our common usage derive from the seating arrangement of the First National Assembly in Revolutionary France in 1789. Delegates who favored stability and order were seated to the right of the Speaker and those who clamored for wiping the slate clean and starting all over gathered on the left.

Artist’s conception of the First National Assembly in Paris, during the French Revolution in 1789. It was held in riding academy and the floor still stank of horse manure. Chaos ruled.

That pattern quickly became fixed in languages around the world to mean more or less “liberal” (revolutionary) and “conservative.” (reactionary).

The left quickly got the upper hand in France because everywhere they looked the zealots observed inequality. To them, there was no equality anywhere and only an all-powerful government, led by them, could fix that problem. They would bring everybody down to the same level by force and if you weren’t on their side you were a candidate to have your head cut off.

The public execution of French King Louis XVI, January 21, 1793. His savage death by a revolutionary rabble created a new and more bloody phase of the Revolution known as “The Terror”. It ended with Napoleon’s empire and a new age in European history.

But it didn’t start in France …

There is a pre-political, almost genetic divide separating people into the opposite camps and it’s one that goes back far before the dawn of history … a pre-civilization bias which has its origins in the small bands of our hunter-gatherer ancestors and it has never stopped affecting our relations with each other, regardless of where we live on the planet.

It’s the never-ending contest between freedom versus bondage, independence versus conformity and self-determination versus submission. The French Revolution gave us the political designates, “left” and “right” but distinctions between the two stretch far back into the fog of prehistoric time and have their origins in the deeply emotional and destructive concept of “fairness”.

These are members of the Yanomami tribe who live near the headwaters of the Amazon River in southern Venezuela. They have acquired a few of the trappings of modern culture but individuality isn’t one of them. To live here you better not be seen as a free thinking individual.

In a tribe, there are no individuals. Everything is shared equally and everybody not only sees everybody else all the time but also sees what everybody else has. Anybody who aspires to get more than the others or dares to be “different” is shunned, ex-communicated or even killed. And if you do wind up with more or you are seen as being smarter than your neighbor you either deny it, hide it or share it.

Sharing it is the easiest way to survive. It is customary in some tribes to simply give away* something of yours to a neighbor which that neighbor admires. We call this tribal behavior communism and, although primitive, it still shapes our “civilized” behavior today.

(* The fascinating book, Seven Arrows, by Hyemeyohsts Storm, provides a long look into the concept of the “Give Away” by the plains Indians of North America.)

Tribal Justice: This woman was sentenced by an Iranian court to death by stoning. Victims are traditionally buried up to their shoulders and then killed by onlookers who hurl rocks at the exposed remainder. Note the civilized dress of the “audience”. This tribal practice predates any Biblical references.

Humans were inescapably locked in tribes, not just for a few thousand years but for thousands of generations. Over such an unimaginably enormous span of time, the constant pressure to avoid natural unfairness became an ingrained part of our human politics, so much so that we have yet to evolve out of it, despite at least 5,000 years of advancing civilization and modernization.

The tribal mind, whether primitive or modern, sees inequality and “difference” everywhere and longs to get rid of it “by any means necessary”. To the Jacobin radicals in revolutionary France it meant the genocide of the middle and upper clsasses. To the Stalinists in the 1930’s it meant the genocide of farmers in Ukraine who refused to give their land to the state. To tribalist totalitarians anywhere at any time, it means forced obedience to the collective and if that means genocide, well, so be it.

“In a tribe there are no individuals…” Germany was a tribal nation in the 1930’s and 40’s and was deliberatly made so by the Nazi Party.