Lincoln Allison's "Definition" Is Pretty Close To Reality

Although his use of adjectives, IMHO, appears to favor the left which is fine because both sides, if there really is this division, will attempt to put the best face on. I will admit to lean to the right and subscribe to the "I'm All Right Jack!" position and feel that things like giving "rights" to groups that have not earned them; ie: prisoners, children, minorities, etc. accomplishs nothing but the growth of mediocrity and a growing dependance on others for their survival. A case can be built for right being right most of the time while the left will always be left....left behind.

Sunday, 10 December 2006
Lincoln Allison on Human Nature

In political philosophy, but also in daily political debate, much appears to rest on the relationship between love and hate, order and violence, community and egoism. What is immutable and what contingent? Much of what deeply divides ‘left’ from ‘right’ in the modern world seems located in this area. It is recognisably ‘right-wing’ to regard lust, acquisitiveness, ambition, jealousy, malice, mistrust and violence as typically and immutably human. Thus order can only be achieved through coercive law, systems of status, hierarchies of office and regulated markets in goods and services. In this aspect conservatism is typified, to use Anthony Quinton’s phrase, as The Politics of Imperfection. Conversely, it is typically ‘left-wing’ to explain known and existing imperfections in terms of contingent sociology. At the broad level, idealists must believe in the possibility of the state ‘withering away’ as Marx expects, or being abolished, as many anarchists recommend. But the differences of vision can be revealed in the particular discussion of a single riot. It can be understood in terms of poor policing, an inadequate system of punishment, the decline of religion or a failure of parental discipline. These would be typically ‘right-wing’ emphases. To emphasise social injustice, class tension or the failures of the economic system would be equally recognisable as a ‘left-wing’ view.

(Lincoln Allison, Right Principles: A Conservative Philosophy of Politics [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984], 30)