Alt Binaries

Start with the thing everyone gets wrong, which is that they think left and right are positions on a number line. You hear it in the language. “Far left,” “centre-right,” “moving towards the middle,” as though there were a single road running east to west and every political creature on it could be located by a single coordinate, and the only question worth asking about anyone is how far along they’ve travelled. This is the dumbest map ever drawn and we keep using it because it lets a newspaper sort six hundred million people into a bar chart.

The number line dies the moment you try to load real history onto it. Was Stalin to the left of Bakunin? They’d have shot each other and did. Is a Catholic distributist who wants every family to own a goat to the right or left of a Silicon Valley libertarian who wants to abolish the family and upload everyone to a server farm? The line can’t hold them. It puts the monarchist and the free-marketeer on the same side, which is insane, they agree about nothing, the monarchist thinks the market is a solvent that dissolves everything sacred and he’s correct.

So throw the line away.

What I want is the deep story. The policy doesn’t interest me, because policy is downstream of coalition and coalition is downstream of accident. The stated reason interests me even less, because the stated reason is almost always self-interest in a clean shirt. I don’t care what a movement says it wants or even what it thinks it wants. I want the shape of the thing it cannot stop telling itself, the narrative so deep that the people inside it experience it not as a belief but as the texture of reality, the water the fish forgets it’s wet in.

Every leftist movement that has ever existed, from the Levellers to the Bolsheviks to the kid gluing himself to a motorway, tells one story. Every rightist movement, from Burke to the Falange to your uncle, tells another. The stories are older than the words “left” and “right,” which only date to where deputies happened to sit in 1789, an accident of French upholstery we’ve been forced to honour ever since.

Here is the left’s story. There is no circle. Or rather, there is only one circle, and it has no edge, because its edge is the species itself, or the set of all sentient things, or all that lives, the boundary keeps expanding and the expansion is the point. Every human being has the same claim on your moral attention as every other, and the accidents that seem to divide them, where they were born, what they pray to, the colour they came out, the wealth they inherited, are precisely that, accidents, scaffolding to be torn down so the universal human underneath can stand up clean.

The leftist looks at any line drawn between people and the first thing he feels, before thought, is that the line is an insult. The line is the enemy. The work of history is the dissolution of lines.

Here is the right’s story. There is a circle. You are inside it, or you are not. The people inside it are yours and you owe them everything; the people outside it are not yours and you owe them, at most, the courtesy you’d extend a stranger, which is real but bounded. The circle might be the family, the tribe, the nation, the faith, the civilisation, the race, the firm; it scales up and down depending on the threat, but it always has an edge, and the edge is not an embarrassment to be apologised for. The edge is the thing that makes the inside mean anything.

And the people who stand at the edge, who keep watch, who decide who comes in and who is turned away and who is met with violence, those people are not bigots or thugs. They are heroes. They are doing the most necessary work there is. The right looks at the boundary and feels, before thought, gratitude towards whoever is defending it.

That’s the whole quarrel. Everything else is weather.

Watch how it generates the surface positions you already know, automatically, with no further input. Immigration: the left sees a human being who wants a better life and a line on a map standing between them and it, and the line is the obscenity. The right sees the edge of the circle and a question about who gets to come in, which is the most serious question a circle can be asked, and they want it answered by someone who takes the circle seriously. Neither side is confused. They’re answering different questions because they’re inside different stories. The left thinks the right is cruel. The right thinks the left is suicidal. From inside each story the other is precisely that.

It runs deeper than immigration, which is just the cleanest case because the boundary is literal there, it’s a fence. Take welfare. The left wants it universal because the recipient is a human being and that’s the whole qualification, full stop, you don’t means-test the rain. The right wants it conditional and bounded because the resources come from inside the circle and flow to people who must, in some sense, be of the circle, must be contributing or have contributed or be plausibly about to, must be ours and not merely human. The universal benefit and the contributory one aren’t two policies. They’re two theologies wearing spreadsheets.

And this is why you cannot pin the stories to particular policies. The policies wander across the floor like drunks while the stories stay put.

Free trade was a radical left cause in the 1840s, the Anti-Corn-Law League against the landed aristocracy, bread for the workers against the rentier’s fence; now it’s the banner of the right and the left wants tariffs to protect the worker from the global market. Eugenics was a progressive enthusiasm, the Fabians and the forward-thinkers, science improving the species, until it became the signature horror of the right. The state church, the free market, the strong border, censorship, the draft, decentralisation, each of them has sat on the left in one century and the right in the next, and the people who switched did not feel themselves to be switching, because they hadn’t.

The policy is just a tool that lay on the ground, and one age picks it up to dissolve a boundary and the next age picks up the same tool to defend one, and what tells you which hand is holding it is never the tool. It’s the story the hand is telling about why.

Or take patriotism, which the right experiences as love and the left experiences as a category error. Of course the leftist can’t feel it, not really, not in the bone; to love your country more than another country is to draw exactly the line his story exists to erase. He can love humanity, he can love justice, he can love the international working class, all of which are circles with no edge.

What he cannot do is love the thing the right loves, because the thing the right loves is the edge itself, the particularity, the fact that this is mine and that is not, and his entire moral apparatus is built to dissolve that fact. When he tries to fake it he sounds like a man reciting vows in a language he doesn’t speak.

Now I have to ruin the symmetry, because there’s a thing the right understands that the left structurally cannot, and it’s the thing this whole essay is going to turn on, so pay attention.

The right knows that stronger is not the same as happy.

The left’s universalism is, at root, a welfare claim. It wants suffering reduced, dignity extended, the floor raised, the wound healed. Its telos is a kind of cosmic comfort, every sentient thing as content as it can be made. This is a beautiful aim and I want to be clear I am not mocking it. But it means the left, even at its most militant, is ultimately optimising for wellbeing, for the absence of pain, for the satisfaction of need. The good is the met need.

The right’s story has a different organising value underneath it, and it isn’t comfort, and the right often can’t articulate this because the articulation sounds monstrous in a culture that has decided comfort is the only legible good. The value underneath the circle is strength. Not the strength to be happy. Strength as such. The circle must be strong because a weak circle is breached and a breached circle is no circle, and the people inside a breached circle do not get to be comfortable, they get to be conquered. So the circle’s first duty was never to make its members happy. Its first duty is to make them, and itself, strong enough to persist. And these come apart. They come apart constantly.

The strong circle demands sacrifice, discipline, the young man sent to the wall, the hard winter endured, the comfort foregone now so the thing survives to next year. A father who optimised purely for his children’s present happiness would raise monsters and the right knows this in its spinal cord. Strength is bought with foregone happiness, always, and the right is the half of the human animal that has made its peace with that exchange.

This is why the two sides cannot even agree on what an argument is. The leftist, arguing, presents suffering: here is the immigrant child, here is the sick man bankrupted, here is the war’s collateral, and he believes, sincerely, that to display the suffering is to win, because in his story the reduction of suffering is the entire game. And the rightist looks at the displayed suffering and feels the tug of compassion, he’s not a stone, and then he files it under “costs of keeping the circle strong” and is unmoved at the level that matters, because in his story a circle that cannot tolerate any suffering in defence of itself is a circle that has already decided to die.

The left shows the wound and expects surrender. The right has a budget for wounds.

And the maddening part, the part that should keep you up, is that the right is correct about the trade-off and the left is correct about its horror. Strength does cost happiness. The cost is real. And the wounds the budget pays for are real wounds, real children, and the budget is, viewed from close up, an abomination. Both of these are true and the truth of one does not soften the truth of the other by a single degree.

I could keep going like this. I could spend another four thousand words running the two stories through abortion and crime and free speech and the family and the market and the climate and watch them generate, every time, the positions you could have predicted, the left dissolving every boundary it finds and the right defending every boundary it’s given, and it would be satisfying in the way a machine that stamps out identical parts is satisfying, and I’d have proven my little thesis and you could go home.

But I’ve started to notice something about the circle while I’ve been describing it, and it’s pulling me somewhere I didn’t mean to go.

It’s this. I keep saying the circle has an edge, and the left wants to erase the edge, and I’ve been treating “no edge” as a coherent thing the left believes. But there’s no such object. A circle with no edge is not a large circle. There is no such figure at all. The word for a region with no boundary is not “the universal circle.” There is no word, because there is no thing. To have an inside is to have an outside; the two are made in the same stroke, you cannot draw one without drawing the other, the line that includes is the same line that excludes and it is one line.

Which means the left’s deepest story, the no-edge circle, the universal embrace with no outside, describes no political position that merely happens to be hard to achieve. It describes something that cannot be a shape. The leftist asks for no bigger circle than the rightist wants. He is asking for the one figure that geometry forbids.

And he knows this, somewhere, which is why the edge keeps having to move outward forever and can never simply arrive, because the moment it stopped moving it would be an edge, it would have an outside, and the outside would be the new obscenity, and the whole engine would have to start again. The universal is no destination. It is a direction you are condemned to travel because arriving would betray you.

The ancients knew this and didn’t pretend otherwise. The Greeks had two words and we have collapsed them into one and lost everything in the collapse. There was the philos, the loved one, the friend, the kin, the member of the household, and the agapē that the early Christians seized and weaponised, the love that was supposed to fall on the just and the unjust like rain, the love with no edge.

And the staggering thing, the thing nobody tells you, is that the Greeks who had philia did not think agapē was a higher form of love. They would have thought it was not love at all. To love everyone equally is, in the older grammar, to love no one, because love in that grammar was precisely the act of preferring, the choosing of this one out of all the others, and a preference that prefers everyone has performed no act.

When Christ said love your enemy he was not extending an old idea to its limit. He was saying something that, to the ear it landed on, was very close to gibberish, a square circle, a dry sea, and the two thousand years since have been one long argument about whether the gibberish was actually the highest wisdom or whether it broke something in us that we have never managed to fix.

Because here is what the universal circle actually requires, once you stop and feel its weight instead of cheering for it. It requires you to look at your own child and a stranger’s child and feel, if you are honest, if you have really taken the story into your blood, exactly the same thing. The same pull. The same readiness to bleed. And no one has ever done this. No one.

Not the saints, who loved God and loved the poor as an offering to God but did not, when the building burned, run past their own mother to save a stranger of equal moral weight, and if one ever did we would not call him a saint, we would call him something with no name in any language because the thing he did has no name, it is outside the grammar of what a creature with a mother can do.

The universal love the left’s story requires names no love human beings have failed to achieve through weakness. It names a love that, achieved, would no longer be recognisable as the thing we were trying to feel. It would have burned off everything that made it warm.

You cannot love everyone, because to love is to turn toward, and you have only one face, and it can only turn one way at a time, and the turning toward this is the turning away from that, and there is no posture of the soul that faces in all directions, that is not a soul, that is a lighthouse, and a lighthouse loves nothing, it only shines.

And the circle, the right’s circle, the hard bounded thing with the heroes at the wall, I have been calling it the small story, the tribal story, the one the universalist is trying to outgrow. But look at what it actually is. It is the shape love makes when it is real. It is the only shape love can make.

The edge that the leftist experiences as an insult is the edge of a heart, which has walls because a thing without walls cannot hold anything, cannot keep a single drop of what is poured into it, and the man at the wall, the one I said the right calls a hero, he is not guarding a nation. He is the membrane of the one cell.

He is the skin, which the body cannot live without, which is the difference between an organism and a puddle, and the leftist who wants to dissolve every membrane in the name of one great communion is not describing heaven. He is describing the sea the cell crawled out of, the warm undifferentiated broth where nothing has an inside because nothing is alive, where there is no suffering because there is no one to suffer and no boundary for the suffering to press against, and we came out of that, we crawled out of it three billion years ago by the grace of a membrane that decided some of the ocean was going to be us and the rest of it was not.

So which is the death-drive? I started this thinking the right’s story was the old fearful animal one and the left’s was the dangerous beautiful new one, the reach that exceeds the grasp, and I am ending it unable to tell which of them is reaching toward life and which toward the warm water where the reaching stops.

The leftist wants to go home, and home is the ocean, and the ocean is before the wound and before the self and before the line, and it is also death, the same death, the dissolution of the one into the all that every mystic has called both salvation and annihilation in the same breath because they could not tell, at the top of the climb, which one they had reached. The Buddhist who blows out the candle. The Christian who dies into God. The communist whose state withers away. They are all walking toward the same edgeless place and calling it by the most hopeful word they have.

And the rightist, the hard man at the wall, keeping his small circle small and strong and bounded and alive, refusing the great communion, refusing to dissolve, is doing the thing every living cell has done since the beginning, which is say no to the ocean, hold the membrane, keep the inside in and the outside out for one more day, not because he is afraid of the great love but because he has understood, in the part of him older than argument, that the great love and the great death wear the same face, and that to be a living thing at all is to have chosen, once, irrevocably, the small warm bounded mortal self over the cold infinite peace, and to keep choosing it, every day, against the pull, until the membrane finally fails and you go back into the water that was always patient, that never wanted anything, that was only ever waiting for the line to give way.

I don’t know which of them is right. I think that’s the only honest place this ends. I came to sort two political tribes and I have ended up looking at the oldest thing there is, which is a small living warmth holding its shape for a little while against an enormous gentle dark that means it no harm and will take it anyway.

The line is the insult. The line is the love. It was always the same line.