Many people I encounter these days remark on the evacuation of the middle-ground in political views. Polarisation is the order of the day, and those who have seen themselves near the centre, whether leaning left or right, have found themselves wondering where everyone went, and why their own moderation is sometimes perceived as extremism from one side or the other. I explore this sense of disorientation in an autobiographical mode, to capture the sense of it ‘creeping up’ on us, while we weren’t looking. That leads me to some reflections on what we mean by such terms as left and right, radical and conservative, and liberal, which used to, or so it seemed, do an adequate job of locating us in the political landscape.
I grew up in the buckle of the bible belt in Texas. Actually, in a liberal chip in that buckle, a semi-bohemian enclave, Austin Texas. In that environment ‘conservative’ generally implied some combination of: Republican, Christian religious fundamentalism, creationism, segregationism, casual racism, support for the Vietnam War, hostility to ‘hippies’, business sector interests, anti-welfare policies, etc.. I grew up in a religious family (Episcopalian, my father taught early Christian theology at seminary, my mother became number two to the Head of the Episcopal Church Archives). But my parents were liberal Christians, ‘FDR’ Democrats, anti-war, and open to the ideas of the counter-culture, though not of that generation. In the 1970s I and my two older brothers had quite long hair. I listened to Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Randy Newman, Neil Young.
I was a somewhat withdrawn and socially uncomfortable child, who did not like public elementary school, and at the age of 10 my parents tried me on an experimental school outside of Austin in Bastrop County, called Greenbriar. It drew on radical educational theories about self-directed learning articulated by educationists such as A. S. Neill and John Holt. It was sort of a cross between a hippie commune and a school, but staffed by young teachers who for the most part were very dedicated to the ideas that inspired them, and very good with children. I thrived in that environment. I did self-paced, non-assessed study in reading, writing and literature, maths and geometry, natural science, archaeology and history, and music. There were gaps, but it was generally a rounded education, where I learned to take possession of my own learning. The school was in a rural location, 172 wooded acres bordered by a creek at one end and a railroad line at the other. I spent a lot of time on my own wandering in the woods at the school and neighbouring properties, down dirt roads, through fields, collecting arrowheads, and encountering snakes and box turtles. Because of its non-standard approach, Greenbriar was not accredited by the State Board of Schools, so I couldn’t graduate. After I had finished there, I got a General Equivalency Diploma in my late teens.
So I was steeped in the 1960s counter-culture while it evolved into the 1970s. As a young teenager a lot of people around me regularly smoked pot, but I didn’t, having a sort of gut resistance to mild social pressures to do so, and a psychological discomfort with the idea of ‘losing control’ of my own mind. After a few years, once I was widely accepted as someone who didn’t smoke, I got curious, and came to indulge off and on from my late teens into my early 30s. Us ‘hippies’ were aware that, while there was a vibrant counter-culture in Austin, driven partly by the presence of the University of Texas, we were the odd ones in that part of the world, and foreign and troubling to a lot of people in more mainstream society. When I was around 11 or 12 some of us joined a square dance club (The Cedar Park Stompers) run by people who were basically ‘rednecks’. The aim was to reach out across this divide, and show that we were just normal people. It basically worked, building a small bridge, although the kids doing it got older and drifted into other activities. But it stuck with me as a kind of ‘cross cultural’ experience, a meeting of different worlds.
After school I worked various jobs (house painter, line cook, landscaper/stonemason, warehouse stocker, electrician’s helper) but these were just ways to earn money while I pursued my main interest, music and songwriting, forming various bands, performing and recording, and working with a modern dance troupe. In my late teens, in the late 1970s, I worked with the Austin theatrical institution Esther’s Follies as pit musician, bit actor, and stage manager. At that time it was part of an effort to rejuvenate the run-down part of town on 6th Street, which is now a throbbing mecca of nightlife. Esther’s was a kind of experimental counter-cultural vaudeville musical theatre. A significant portion of the cast were gay, and I remember joining them and others at a demonstration near the old Municipal Auditorium, to protest an event featuring former pop singer Anita Bryant, who was then going around the Christian evangelical circuit condemning homosexuality as a sin. After Esther’s I became involved in a series of bands in the Austin punk/new wave/art rock scene, including Sharon Tate’s Baby, Delta, Vital Signs, playing clubs such as Rauls, The Continental Club, Duke’s Royal Coach, and Club Foot. It was a musical milieu which tended to push back against the hegemony of country, folk-rock, and blues in the Austin music scene. Sort of a counter-counter-culture.
Eventually I tired of the music business, and a feeling of a life going in circles in my hometown and not really progressing. In my mid-twenties I decided to do an undergraduate degree and move away from Austin, coming to study anthropology at Bard College in upstate New York, and then for a PhD at the City University of New York. The anthropology department at CUNY was one of the last departments in the US with a strong Marxian theoretical bent among many of its staff. It was very oriented toward placing the often rather rarified study of cultures as social isolates, little functional universes, into a wider historical and political economic context, in which various kinds of capitalist and colonial power were at play. This perspective, placing the particular within the world historical, suited me, and I felt intellectually at home.
This sketch of my life to that point conveys the broadly ‘left’ cultural milieu I grew up in, continued my education in, and felt at home in. And to this day I retain many of the values of that milieu: that extreme economic inequality is bad for society, that we should accept social differences as much as possible and keep conformism to a minimum, that people should be free to criticise and challenge wider social norms, that powerful states like the US are prone to abuse that power in the international arena, and need to be held in check by their citizens. Nonetheless, as I developed as an academic, I began to become aware of certain divergences in my thinking from many of those around me, particularly my more radical Marxian peers. I seemed to belong to an older and more liberal intellectual left. I was ultimately drawn to the work of Max Weber more than Karl Marx. While I was able to imagine a radically different society, much more equitable and less alienating, I could muster no faith in revolutionary prescriptions for how to get there. The disdain I sometimes encountered for ‘ideological epiphenomena’ such as constitutions, rights, citizenship, democracy, and so on, troubled me. I didn’t see a viable alternative. When I read a left-press booklet recounting a debate between Leon Trotsky and John Dewey, entitled Their Morals or Ours, in which Trotsky blithely argued that moral right is whatever the revolutionary party does, I knew I was no Trotskyist. And yet this did not trigger any counter reaction in me—no lurch to the right. I simply saw myself as part of a more centrist liberal left, and out of step with some of my more radical peers.
As an undergraduate at Bard, partly through taking courses with the philosopher A. J. Ayer, I encountered the work and ideas of David Hume, and was immediately drawn to him. His claim that moral assertions about what ‘ought to be’ cannot be logically derived from descriptive statements about ‘how the world is’, struck me with great force. It seemed to me that in this one thesis he had summed up the state of the modern world, where this bond between ought and is has been broken, and humanity exiled from a certain kind of holistic existence. More generally, over subsequent years of reading Hume more closely, I came to realise how much his sceptical approach to knowledge resonated with me. I share Hume’s distrust of ardent, enthusiastic belief, and his greater confidence in those beliefs that arise naturally and irresistibly through experience, especially beliefs in an objectively existing world governed by causation. In a world where people are often searching for things to believe in deeply, I am content to believe firmly in no more than I must to get along in the world. Many of my beliefs, while stable for me, are ultimately provisional.
I have a tendency to want to bring opposing views together in my intellectual experience. Reading a radical point of view makes me search for a conservative counterpoint. My PhD committee was a case in point. For the two internal examiners I chose Vincent Crapanzano, who had a joint appointment in Literature and was the closest thing the department had to a post-modernist (I’m not sure he would accept that label), and Gerald Sider, one of the most committed Marxists in the department, deeply interested in the ethnography and cultures of immiserated populations. My external reader was the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, an intriguing combination of quasi-marxian critique of modern capitalist society, and commitment to a kind of neo-Thomist medieval communitarianism. Some of my peers thought I was crazy. But it was a good committee, they pressed me, and they all got along fine.
As a graduate student in anthropology, I remember having a moment when it suddenly struck me that the common argument made by anthropologists—that western, rational-scientific policies around land use and resource management often run afoul of the embedded traditional wisdom of local cultural groups, causing unanticipated damage to ecological environments and practices—was fundamentally conservative in its perspective. It is an argument in the same vein as Edmund Burke’s defence of the value of established traditions and institutions, arising out of long experience, and providing social goods in ways not fully understood by those who benefit. For a while, as a graduate student, I had a subscription to the longstanding left magazine The Nation. But I eventually let I lapse, aware that despite having agreement with many of the policy views expressed in those pages, there was something about the somewhat smug and self-assured moral tone of it that put me off. I didn’t need or want to be reassured that I was among ‘the good.’
These various intellectual moments might have been taken as signs that I was a conservative thinker, but it never really struck me that way. I identified more as stubborn and independent. Through much of my employed career as an academic (I ended up in sociology) at the University of Edinburgh this sense of slightly atypical leftness stayed with me, and my ongoing interest in conservative thought did not trouble me, or cause any cognitive dissonance. For instance, working in Scotland encouraged me to go deeper into the world of Scottish Enlightenment thought. To an interest in Hume I added Adam Smith, who I had mostly encountered through the vituperations of Marx and various Marxists, which made me curious to understand Smith’s thought first hand. What I found was a proto-sociologist with penetrating insights into human beings and our social nature, the dynamics and tensions between sympathy and self-love, and the conflicting interest of socioeconomic classes. An advocate of the growing division of labour and markets, yes, but a cheerleading architect of current capitalism—no.
As someone who studied nationalism and national identity in Scotland, and more generally, I came to the view that while specific nationalisms can have both positive and negative consequences, the modern national ordering of the world was simply a present given condition, and it made no sense to try to evaluate nationalism either negatively or positively as a whole. I was aware that some on the left have a wholly negative view of nationalism, but many, like me, do not. For instance, much of nationalism in Scotland is generally left leaning. As someone who has also studied theories and concepts of power in the social sciences, I came to the view that power, in the basic sense of the capacity to achieve intended results in the world, also, is neither good nor bad. Nor is it necessarily bad for some to have some power over others (most obviously, doctors and patients, parents and children, teachers and students). But a lot of left-leaning discourse on power evinces a deep suspicion towards all power, as though it must take the form of unwanted and often unrecognised domination and exploitation. The left struggles to articulate a positive notion of power (except as resistance to oppression) whereas the right has stronger traditions of conceptualising power, authority and influence in positive terms. In both these areas of inquiry, nationalism and power, I have sensed myself being off-centre of dominant academic discourses, but I have never construed myself as taking a rightward position. And while many colleagues would recognise my penchant for liberalism, which is sometimes viewed negatively on the left, I never had the sense that colleagues suspected me of being ‘conservative’ or ‘on the right’.
That is, until recently. As we all know, over the last decade, and especially since around 2020, the world of belief has gotten stranger, and distinctions between left and right have gone a bit haywire. When, under the pressure of a small student petition, my university choose to ‘de-name’ its David Hume Tower because of a racist footnote in one of his essays, I let it be known that I was sceptical about this move, and that we needed to balance Hume’s intellectual contributions against his failings. For many I was on ‘the wrong side’ on this occasion, insensitive to the ‘hurt’ Hume’s footnote caused. When a report commissioned by the City of Edinburgh into the role of slavery and colonialism in the city’s history was published, I criticised what I saw as a superficial approach to the issue that failed to engage the public on the deeper questions of the heritability of moral responsibility. I did this in the pages of the Spectator. Again, some saw me as on the wrong side, and were scandalised that I would publish in a right-wing venue such as the Spectator. From my point of view, the magazine asked me to write something, and I was glad to add my left-of-centre views on this issue to that magazine. In that article I mentioned in passing that a recent re-wording of the plaque that sits at the bottom of the Melville Monument (Lord Henry Dundas) in Edinburgh was now seriously historically inaccurate in pursuit of political correctness. (Dundas did not cause a quarter of a million Africans to go into slavery who otherwise wouldn’t have.) This raised the hackles of the key figure behind that rewording, who spent several weeks excoriating me on Twitter, even questioning my right to teach. I think at least some around me would have sided with him. More recently, I was one of the founding members of the Edinburgh branch of Academics for Academic Freedom, the immediate purpose of which was to sponsor public events presenting the ‘gender critical’ point of view, because attempts to do so up to that point had encountered obstruction within the university. This group garnered further attention because of its repeated attempts to support the screening of the film Adult Human Female, being successful on its third attempt due to a considerable investment of university security and local police. After this episode I discussed with some colleagues the idea of EdAFAF co-sponsoring a seminar discussion and debate on the idea of ‘decolonising the curriculum’ and was met with the response that EdAFAF was ‘divisive’ and not a group with which they would want to do business. I could fill in this account with further events and details, but this suffices to give a sense of the atmosphere since about 2020.
I can only talk about other’s unhappiness with positions I have taken, and perceptions of me as becoming a right-wing conservative, in the vaguest terms, because of course, no one who disagrees with me will talk about these things publicly or to my face. I hear gossip from both staff and students, get odd looks, and regularly hear colleagues voice positions that are clearly strongly opposed to the positions I have taken, as described above. But these are not matters that can be engaged openly and productively. My suggestions to those more senior in the administration, that airing these differences in a public and civil manner is precisely what is needed to improve the culture of the university, and that this needs to be sponsored from the top, falls on deaf ears. Or at least ears that are not prepared to countenance that strategy.
None of this happened because I had undergone any fundamental change of view. Rather, the world around me seemed to be becoming absurdly extreme, and I felt I was trying to steady the ship. The bedding in of the hegemony of leftward views in the academy that I have witnessed across my career, especially in the humanities and social sciences, seems to have jumped to a new level. For many, which ‘side’ you belong to is now more salient than what views you hold and why. I admit that while I recognised this trend as unbalancing the academy, precisely because I situate myself on the centre-left, I was not as attuned to it as I would have been had I identified on the right. In my view, none of these positions I have taken contradict my leftward convictions.
So how do I locate myself in this strange ideological terrain? And how are others doing so? Three frames seem relevant: the dichotomies of ‘left versus right’, and of ‘conservative versus radical’, and the idea of ‘liberalism’.
The distinction between ‘left’ and ‘right’ is often seen as representing a deep and stable philosophical opposition, usually between values of equality and those of hierarchy. I have my doubts. The fact that the actual content of policies has reversed in many instances suggests that these are rather unstable categories regarding their substantive claims. When I was younger, national economic protectionism in the interest of workers, and freedom of speech, would have been seen as unambiguously preferences of the left. But now they are championed on the right, and looked upon with suspicion by much of the left. In Britain the left used to be primarily anti-Europe (the EC) seeing it as a capitalist project, but now the left is strongly pro-Europe (the EU) seeing it as something that transcends the nation state. For my part, I have always tended to view the powers of both the state and major actors in the capitalist marketplace with wariness, believing these need to be balanced off against one another, to help hold each one in check. I think it makes sense to use the democratic power of the state to actively and strategically compensate for the failures of the marketplace, and to ‘level the playing field’ as much as is reasonably possible. I think there is value in strong trade unions focused on employee rights, and in basic (though not necessarily exclusive) public provision through taxes of collective goods such as education, healthcare, and public utilities. I accept that with such public provision there are risks of bureaucratic capture by interest groups, but abandoning all such provision to the market and those who dominate it strikes me as unwise. The best check on these tendencies is active democratic vigilance. This suggests a kind of pragmatic social democratic leftism to me. I seem to be on the centre-left.
However, the terms ‘conservative’ and ‘radical’ should not be equated with those of ‘right’ and ‘left’. I see these terms as primarily defining attitudes towards social change on the one hand, and towards the nature of human knowledge on the other. Conservatives prefer the status quo, and sometimes the status quo ante, and radicals aspire to profound structural change and overhaul of society. Corresponding to this are conservative scepticism about placing too much certainty in abstract knowledge, and a preference for the pragmatic, the ‘tried and tested’, versus radical confidence in the ability to imagine and bring into being profoundly different social orders, through revolution if necessary. Regarding social change, I am a middle-of-the-road-reformist, believing that society will inevitably evolve. I think that within a functioning liberal democracy, things can be steadily and incrementally improved, and should be, but that radical revolutionary change is frequently lost control of, leading to unintended and unanticipated consequences, including forms of despotism. Like many philosophical conservatives, I worry about radicals seriously overestimating their capacities to seize control of society and events, and getting swept up in waves of intolerant ideological enthusiasm. But this is complicated, because at times what we normally call ‘the right’ can show these same tendencies toward over-driven radicalism—just think of Donald Trump and his following. Left and right, and radical and conservative, do not easily map onto one another. But to the degree that conservatism is associated with scepticism about radical enthusiasm, and with a belief in preserving what one thinks is worth preserving, then I have conservative tendencies.
The idea of liberalism raises a further complication. Having lived on both sides ‘of the pond’ I am very aware of the different usage of this term on either side. In the US it is associated by the right with the left and connected to terms such as ‘socialism’ and communism’, and the ‘big state’. In the UK the meaning is more ambiguous and centrist. Because of British political history, there is a close connection between liberalism and support for free trade and scope for markets, and these are more a part of the conventional meaning. Moreover, in the language of the left-leaning academy on either side of the pond, this second sense, often associated with the term neoliberalism, has increasingly made ‘liberalism’ a ‘boo word’, despite its stronger left association in public discourse in the US. To many progressives it suggests insufficient radicalism and a capitulation to capitalism.
I don’t think of liberalism this way. Whatever the deeper philosophical arguments in its favour, for me it is a pragmatic approach to the real world. For me liberalism is about realising, within practical limits, the greatest dispersal of power, while nonetheless maintaining sufficient centralisation of power to support necessary collective action. This dispersal is the reason for supporting a governmental structure of checks and balances, for counterbalancing the power of the state with that of a robust and diverse civil society, for allowing scope for the autonomy of market actors, for strong guarantees of individual rights, for competitive party systems with democratic elections, for having strong principles of freedom of speech in the media and universities, for high degrees of ideological tolerance, and for having military power firmly under the control of a democratic state. Liberalism is not a laundry list of tastes and values on the left, or to be confused with libertinism. It is a modus operandi, a way of managing inevitable social conflict and competing interests, with an eye on the durability of the long game, rather than immediate victories.
So what am I? A left-of-centre-conservative-liberal? What is that? As I’ve just presented it, I don’t think it is incoherent. There may be some concessions to be made to the brute practicalities of getting along in a world that is more complex and unpredictable than we can imagine. But thinking that we must attend to a general social sense of fairness, that social change is something we have to negotiate whether we like it or not, that we need to exercise a bit of modesty and circumspection in our claims to knowledge, and that people are at their best when power is widely distributed and they have to find ways of cooperating, hardly strikes me as right-wing extremism.
I know lots of people are in the same boat as me, occupying an abandoned middle ground with their moderate views, and wondering where everyone went. The leftward ideological skew of the modern university, and its regimes of silence, compounds this sensation, providing a distorted view of the landscape from that perspective. But part of the problem seems to arise from using terms such as left and right, conservative and radical (or progressive), as sorting bins, taxonomic categories into which individuals must fall. When in fact they are more like reference points. The fact that it is possible to be neither ‘north’ nor ‘south’ at the equator doesn’t make those terms meaningless or useless. Moreover, the term ‘liberal’ as I’ve defined it here has an implicit opposing term: authoritarianism, in which the goal is to maximise the centralisation rather than dispersal of power. In these terms the true opposite of authoritarianism would be ‘anarchy’ in which there is no stable ordering of power. Liberalism as I conceive it, is another strategy of the middle ground.
I wrote this autobiographical essay to convey what I think is a common experience these days, of ideological disorientation, and because I increasingly hear people giving up on notions of left and right, and I sympathise. These terms do not have stable meanings. But I suggest that attitudes towards social change, as encoded in ‘conservative’ and ‘radical’ are more firmly anchored in persistent possibilities, and that ‘liberal’ should be understood not as another name for the left, but as a strategy for maintaining a flexible but relatively stable political centre. Left and right I can do without, but liberalism is something worth conserving.
Uneasy Essays 