Don’t We Need a Third Axis?
Oct 21st, 2007 by Micah Tillman | 3 Comments |
I promised to say something about why I thought the political identity test was flawed.
To begin, I think the test is actually pretty good.
It’s better than the idea that everybody’s either Liberal or Conservative. I’m not sure how they decided where on the graph to draw the lines, but they seem to fall in reasonable places. (Which, randomly, reminds me of this verse).
And it helps explain the existence of Libertarians at both “ends” of the “spectrum,” if it does nothing else.
But I think there needs to be a third axis. The “space” of political identity is a volume, not a plane or a spectrum.
The third axis would locate your view of truth. What is truth and how is truth achieved?
Different views of truth will lead to different interactions with other people on every issue. How much diversity and contradiction do you require in the advice your advisers give you before you think you understand a situation? Do you think there are any absolutely true propositions, no matter what anyone else thinks?
Not taking your view of truth into account can lead to false positives (like saying that I’m a “social liberal.” I don’t think I am, though I could be wrong. I just have a view of truth that commands me to seek comprehensiveness and clarity in my views. And that means believing that even views I think are wrong might reveal an aspect of the world I hadn’t taken into account before.)
(My articles that deal with truth, published on other sites, are here, here, and here.)
Unfortunately, I have no idea how the various views of truth could be arranged on a line. What would the unifying theme be? In the graphs used by the test, the axises indicated “increasing/decreasing permissiveness.”
Is it possible to add a “truth axis,” or am I missing something?
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I don’t know, I think there are internal contradictions to the liberal and conservative axis that can’t be resolved by an “alternative” or “third” axis. For one thing, the question of tolerance would seem to play out: liberals are tolerant, while conservatives are intolerant. Some very interesting political theory going on for the last 15 years (names I’ll refrain from saying for now, to avoid a name-dropping posture) calls this directly into question, especially when it is pointed out that so-called tolerant, multi-culturalist reason exists by concealing its own intolerant foundation. That’s just one example though. In an extended sense, this is a question already brought up in third wave feminist critiques of second-wave feminism’s short-comings.
What I think the lesson to be learned is not that we need a new political axis to sharpen our political identity, but a release from this injunction to always locate ourselves in the constellation of contemporary ideological coordinates.
I’m learning new things all the time! Feel free to name-drop. I’d love to look some of this stuff up.
[...] my interactions with the idea of political identity, and pdxstudent’s informed responses (here, here, and here) that there’s something artificially limiting about labeling yourself through [...]