Years ago I read Banker to the poor: microcredit and the fight against global poverty by Muhammad Yunus. In the book, Yunus describes the origins and purpose of Grameen Bank. This bank specializes in providing small loans to people experiencing poverty to help them begin to achieve self-sufficiency. It’s not a charity – it’s a for-profit bank, and Yunus points out in the book that the need to be profitable is part of what makes Grameen effective in achieving its goal of lifting people out of poverty and free them from a cycle. of dependence. Interestingly, he found that his very success in reducing poverty was condemned by leftists. The complaint was not that Grameen was ineffective in achieving these goals – they were upset precisely because Grameen was highly successful in improving the lives of the poor and deprived. Yunus remembers that leftists seriously complained that by improving people’s lives and helping them become self-sufficient, Grameen was “robbing the poor of their despair and rage.” This is certainly a strange objection, in my opinion. I tend to view rage and despair as bad things to be freed from, not good things to prevent from being stolen.
Yet there was something about Yunus’s political analysis that always bothered me. When questioning whether Grameen Bank should be considered a left-wing or right-wing company, Yunus draws an apples-to-oranges comparison. He says Grameen can be considered right-wing because of its belief that “government, as we know it today, should withdraw from most areas except law enforcement.” law, judicial system, national defense and foreign policy”, while leaving the country. “its other functions” to the “private sector”. He summarizes by saying that “Grameen supports less government – even advocating as little government as possible – is committed to the free market and promotes entrepreneurial institutions. »
Yet, says Yunus, there are also elements that make Grameen a left-wing organization. These include how Grameen is “committed to social goals – eliminating poverty, providing education, healthcare and employment opportunities to the poor; achieving gender equality through women’s empowerment; ensure the well-being of older people. Grameen dreams of a world without poverty and social assistance. » And, according to Yunus, “all these characteristics place Grameen on the political left”.
Do you see why it’s apples and oranges?
When assessing what makes a person (or organization) right-wing, Yunus describes things in terms of meanswhereas in describing what makes a person (or organization) left-wing, he describes things in terms of ends. While I’m generally willing to accept the definitions people stipulate when evaluating their arguments, this kind of apples-to-oranges difference is a serious flaw. If you want to define what separates the political left from the political right, you have to define both sides in terms of means or ends. Defining one by means and the other by ends is just bad lexicography.
I prefer to think of the left versus the right in terms of the difference in the means that are appropriate to employ, and not (necessarily) in terms of the difference in the ends sought. Dan Moller argues the same thing in his book advocating libertarian political philosophy: Governing the Least: A New England Libertarianism. Moller writes:
The disagreement between libertarians and their antagonists is not over the importance of values such as liberty or equality, but over whether it is permissible for the state to use force promote these values in different ways. To see this, note that libertarians and their opponents can actually agree that equality or fraternity is of great importance; they could join forces and work tirelessly in the name of such value, provided those contributions were voluntary. As long as anti-libertarians focus simply on their concern for equality, on the horror of poverty, or on their vision of a better world, they have made no progress in identifying a point of disagreement… to decide whether happy “community” values should triumph over the base “atomism” of libertarians. The question is not whether we should regard ourselves as isolated islands or kind communities, but whether the state should create the corresponding community by compulsory means; we can all agree that marriage is a blessed state while still insisting that it emerges voluntarily. In other words, we would avoid a world of confusion if only those who advocate the state’s promotion of a certain value would add the word “…and I support the use of threats and violence to promote that value if necessary. »
Agreement on the means does not require agreement on the ends. Two people may favor identical means of policy and institutions, while anticipating or even hoping for different results. And two people may seek to achieve identical outcomes, but disagree on which policies or institutions will most effectively achieve those goals. In my opinion, it makes more sense that this last difference is what marks the difference between the political left and right. In other words, it makes sense to talk about left or right politics, but much less sense to talk about results between left and right.
But there are worse offenders than Yunus. The socialist writer Nathaniel Robinson, for example, seems to define politics through an amalgam of means. And ends, so socialism is a system that uses a particular set of means, but at the same time it only counts as socialism if it also achieves the ends desired by socialists. So, Robinson frames things in a way where Venezuela’s descent into madness gives him no pause or reason to re-evaluate the policies he advocates – because of Venezuela, he said that “if there is no equality, there is no socialism” and therefore “since my politics demand equality, you cannot accuse my politics by pointing the finger at a highly unequal society “. But “politics” is not a result – it’s a process. Politics is not an end, it is a means by which objectives are achieved. Robinson’s conflation of the two amounts to saying “you can’t blame the processes I advocate for by pointing to outcomes that don’t reflect my desires.”
Many critics of socialism argued that the processes inherent in socialist policies inevitably result in an authoritarian and highly unequal society. Milton Friedman summed up the idea when he said, “A society that places equality before freedom will achieve neither.” A society that places liberty before equality will achieve a high degree of both. » More importantly, critics of socialism have specific arguments in favor of Why socialist policies, once implemented, end up producing results like Venezuela. To simply address this concern definition socialism, so that it only counts as socialism if the results are what socialists want, is the intellectual equivalent of covering one’s ears and shouting “THAT, I CAN’T HEAR YOU, I DON’T HEAR YOU!!!”
That of David Schmidtz Live together expresses one more reason why I prefer to view political divisions as a difference of means rather than ends. Schmidtz writes:
Political ideals are not points of convergence. The liberal political ideal is not that we embrace the same religion, but that we don’t have to. The ideal is that everyone chooses for themselves… Our current historical experience is that true escalation is not so much about being on the same wavelength as about no need to be on the same page – learning to be at peace with the humiliating fact that we live among people who have their own destinations.
That is, political ideals are not about the destinations we are trying to reach – they are about the framework of rules and institutions that allow us all to get along with each other and seek our own destinations, even in the lack of agreement on what we seek to achieve. the ends must be achieved.
