Re:The Truth Shall Make You Free: Catholicism and the CIA
by skissane on Wednesday November 17, 2021 @08:38AM
(#29252779)
I'm not inclined to agree. If you look at the policy positions the Catholic Church officially promotes, they tend to be a mishmash of "left-leaning" positions on some issues (labor rights, immigration reform, abolition of capital punishment), "right-leaning" positions on others (abortion, euthanasia, LGBT rights). Trying to paint Catholicism as being in some essential sense more "left-leaning" than "right-leaning" (or vice versa) seems to require either ignoring the details of the views the Catholic Church publicly favours, or else choosing to view some of those issues as more important than others. It is worth noting that (generally speaking) Catholics are not actually required to agree with the Catholic Church's official positions on public policy questions, they are (mostly) advisory recommendations, not binding doctrine; but that fact is a further blow to the idea that Catholicism is essentially "left-leaning" or "right-leaning".
Catholicism (and Christianity more broadly) is close to 2000 years old, whereas the concepts of "left" and "right" are less than 250 years old, originating in the French Revolution. Both terms represent alliances of political positions on rather disparate topics, and many of those linkages may be more due to accidents of history than any essential connection. The precise mix of positions that make up the "left" or the "right" varies from country to country, and changes over time. The terms are useful as a rough approximation in describing the politics of some countries in particular: I think the hard two party system of the US encourages "left-vs-right" thinking, although that still ignores the internal contradictions within both alliances. Many other countries, especially those with softer two party systems, multiparty systems, and/or greater cultural diversity, politics can be more multi-dimensional, and "left-vs-right" often appears less useful; and the difference between "left-wing" and "right-wing" authoritarian regimes appears to be more style than substance, rendering the distinction rather useless in large parts of the world. When you take this broader historical view of "left-vs-right", it seems unsurprising that the labels perform poorly when applied to a religious tradition which is approximately 8 times older than those labels themselves are.
Catholicism (and Christianity more broadly) is close to 2000 years old, whereas the concepts of "left" and "right" are less than 250 years old, originating in the French Revolution. Both terms represent alliances of political positions on rather disparate topics, and many of those linkages may be more due to accidents of history than any essential connection. The precise mix of positions that make up the "left" or the "right" varies from country to country, and changes over time. The terms are useful as a rough approximation in describing the politics of some countries in particular: I think the hard two party system of the US encourages "left-vs-right" thinking, although that still ignores the internal contradictions within both alliances. Many other countries, especially those with softer two party systems, multiparty systems, and/or greater cultural diversity, politics can be more multi-dimensional, and "left-vs-right" often appears less useful; and the difference between "left-wing" and "right-wing" authoritarian regimes appears to be more style than substance, rendering the distinction rather useless in large parts of the world. When you take this broader historical view of "left-vs-right", it seems unsurprising that the labels perform poorly when applied to a religious tradition which is approximately 8 times older than those labels themselves are.