(I posted some related thoughts in "The Pournelle axes and the modern political climate" about three years ago.)
I've lately been noticing a few references to something called the Political Compass, which purports to categorize political philosophies better than the conventional left-right spectrum. Most of us have heard some people say, or have said ourselves, something like "I'm a social liberal, but an economic conservative." The creators of the Political Compass try to quantify this notion with a two-dimensional taxonomy. On one axis, which they label "Left-Right," they measure something like one's attitude to free-enterprise capitalism. On one end you'd demand totally equal distribution of wealth, on the other you'd support a Darwinian laissez-faire economy. On the other axis they measure attitude toward government authority, from libertarian anarchy to Orwell's 1984-type fascism.
Serious thinkers have known forever that you can't get a useful political taxonomy by measuring only one of anything. Mathematically speaking, a political philosophy is a vector, not a scalar. The Political Compass makes it a two-dimensional vector, which is better than a scalar but still misses some useful distinctions. Better yet would be at least three dimensions, and a complete taxonomy would likely require several more than that. But there is no free lunch, and the cost of increasing precision is difficulty of comprehension. Thinking in two dimensions is hard, in three it's very challenging, and in four or more practically impossible. If we're to understand human nature, though, we have to try. And there is no peaceful way out of the mess we're in without some understanding of human nature. Keeping it simple is usually a good idea, but if we try it now, there will be war.
According to its website, the Political Compass "has been on the internet since 2001." I have a vague memory of its advent. Some libertarians were promoting a test they called the "world's smallest political quiz," which if you took it would place you on a grid based on the Nolan Chart, which was another early (1970) attempt to create a two-dimensional political taxonomy. The Political Compass turns out to be barely distinguishable, so far as I can tell, from the Nolan Chart, aside from the set of questions used to determine the test-taker's score on each axis. Both of them seem to have more detractors than advocates.
Their lack of acceptance should be no surprise. As I suggested a moment ago, nobody wants to hear "It ain't that simple." Another problem is the inadequacy of only two dimensions. Two is better than one, but still not good enough. And, it won't be much better, maybe no better, if the test questions are biased so as to produce outcomes favorable to the philosophy of whoever created the test. When I took the world's smallest political quiz almost 20 years ago, my score said I was a libertarian, which I'm not. But guess what? David Nolan was a founder of America's Libertarian Party.
What aggravates everything is our resurgent tribalism. Now, everybody knows we have a problem with tribalism. It's more often called polarization, but it's the same thing. But whatever we call it, what everybody knows is that it's a problem for Those Other People. They, not we, are being tribalistic. We're just defending our principles. That is not tribalism, that is virtue.
There are principles worth defending—even with deadly force, if it comes to that, and it will come to that every now and then. But we don't make them worth defending at all costs just by saying "These are our principles." Some principles are more fundamental than others, and the most fundamental is a commitment to the Enlightenment values of reason, science, and humanism.
This is no longer a popular notion, and it seems to be getting less popular every day. But a few thinkers are still promoting it, and many are associated with a group that has come to be called the Intellectual Dark Web. It was from a few of them that I heard about the Political Compass, and their remarks prompted this essay.
The IDW has been attacked by thugs on both the left and the right—which is good evidence that they're saying something that needs to be said. No matter where the political compass says you are, they have some good ideas about which way we all need to be moving. As long as we're moving in any other direction, it's for sure we won't like the place where we end up.
Next: It's never right to be wrong
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(This page last updated on June 18, 2020.)