May 22, 2012
Changing Shape of Ideologies
by Steve Fuller@www.nst.com.my
NEW POLICY-MAKING: Precautionary versus 'proactionary' attitudes: THE new French presidential election seemed to indicate which a old left-right groups have been as potent as they have ever been as well as positively in their birthplace. But have been they?
The modern domestic spectrum is an artifact of a seating arrangements during a French National Assembly after a series of 1789. To a right of a Assembly's boss sat a supporters of king as well as church, whilst to a left sat their opponents, whose usually point of agreement was a need for institutional reform. The eminence capitalised upon long-standing informative associations of right- as well as left-handedness with, respectively, certitude as well as suspicion in this case, of a status quo.
In retrospect, it is remarkable which this eminence managed to define partisan domestic allegiances for some-more than 200 years, absorbing both a good conservative as well as radical movements of a 19th as well as 20th centuries.
But a decline in voter turnout in many of today's democracies suggests which this way of conceptualising ideological differences may have turn obsolete. Some have even argued which ideologies as well as parties have been not pertinent in an increasingly fragmented domestic landscape.
But a single division which looms upon a horizon could reinvent a right-left eminence for a 21st century: precautionary versus "proactionary" atti! tudes to ward risk as beliefs of policymaking.
In social psychological terms, precautionary policymakers set their regulatory focus upon a impediment of misfortune outcomes, since proactionary policymakers seek a graduation of a many appropriate available opportunities.
The precautionary element is a improved well known of a two, as well as increasingly total in environmental as well as illness legislation. It is routinely accepted as a Hippocratic Oath practical to a tellurian ecology: upon top of all, do no harm. By contrast, a proactionary element is associated with self-styled futurists, for whom being "human" is defined by a capacity to keep ahead of a game when taking calculated risks, whether by benefiting from success or learning from failure.
The disproportion in between a dual beliefs is many clearly strong in their implications for a relationship in between scholarship as well as technology. Precautionary policymakers plead scientific uncertainty to quell technological innovation, since their proactionary counterparts inspire creation as an prolongation of scientific supposition testing.
They also differ subtly over their conception of humans. Precautionary types aspire to a "sustainable" humanity, which invariably means bringing fewer of us in to existence, with each of us making reduction of an impact upon a planet. Those with a proactionary focussed have been happy to increase a planet's human population indefinitely as nothing some-more or reduction than a series of experiments in living, regardless of outcomes.
Not surprisingly, required domestic as well as commercial operation leaders have been not wholly gentle with possibly group.
After all, precautionary policymakers would have commercial operation value charge over growth, whilst a proactionary camp would have a state inspire people to comparison stream norms rather than belong to them. A precautionary organisation would look like a miniature version of today's regulatory state, since a proactio! nary sta te would work like a venture capitalist writ large.
But maybe many conspicuously absent from both precautionary as well as proactionary meditative is a old welfare-state ideal which we competence procreate during will in a world where a brood have been assured a secure existence.
For all of their substantial disagreements, both sides dismiss this prospect as a 20th-century anticipation which was usually at a moment realised in Northern Europe for a few decades after World War 2.
Lurking behind this dismissal is a clarity which amiability itself is undergoing a massive mutation in a self-understanding. However, which mutation is moving during once in dual diametrically opposed directions, which we have called "Humanity 2.0.
Precautionary types would reacquaint us with a common animal origins, from which we have strayed for much as well long, since exponents of a proactionary element would assist a depart from a evolutionary past.
At a very least, they would re-engineer a biology, if not replace it altogether with a little intellectually superior as well as some-more permanent substratum.
To be sure, a precautionary as well as proactionary beliefs remain comparatively marginal to mainstream domestic discourse. But they have a potential to shift a ideological axis by 90 degrees.
The right is currently widely separated in to traditionalists as well as libertarians; a left in to communitarians as well as technocrats.
In a future, we suggest, a traditionalists as well as a communitarians will form a precautionary stick of a domestic spectrum, whilst a libertarians as well as technocrats will form a proactionary pole.
These will be a new right as well as left or, rather, down as well as up. One organisation will be grounded in a earth, whilst a alternative looks toward a heavens. Project Syndicate
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