Analysis: Left, right, up, down… sea-change is on the way in political norms

THE just-concluded French presidential election seemed to suggest that the old left-right divisions are as potent as they have ever been – and certainly in their birthplace. But are they?

The modern political spectrum is an artefact of the seating arrangements at the French National Assembly after the revolution of 1789. To the right of the Assembly’s president sat the supporters of King and Church, while to the left sat their opponents, whose only point of agreement was the need for institutional reform.

In retrospect, it is remarkable that this distinction managed to define partisan political allegiances for more than 200 years. But the decline in voter turnout in most of today’s democracies suggests that this way of conceptualising ideological differences may have become obsolete.

One division that looms on the horizon could reinvent the right-left distinction for the 21st-century: “precautionary” versus “proactionary”. The precautionary principle is roughly defined as the Hippocratic Oath applied to the global ecology: above all, do no harm. By contrast, the proactionary principle is associated with self-styled futurists, for whom being “human” is defined by our capacity to keep ahead of the game when taking calculated risks.

The difference between the two principles is most clearly apparent in their implications for the relationship between science and technology. Precautionary policymakers invoke scientific uncertainty to curb technological innovation, whereas their proactionary counterparts encourage innovation as an extension of scientific hypothesis testing.

Unsurprisingly, conventional political and business leaders are not entirely comfortable with either group. After all, precautionary policymakers would have business value conservation over growth, while the proactionary camp would have the state encourage people to transcend current norms rather than adhere to them. A precautionary firm would look like a miniature version of today’s regulatory state; a proactionary state would operate like a venture capitalist writ large.

But the thing perhaps most conspicuously absent from both precautionary and proactionary thinking is the old welfare state ideal: that our offspring are assured a secure existence. Both sides dismiss this as a 21st-century fantasy only temporarily realised in Northern Europe after the Second World War.

Lurking behind this dismissal is a sense that humanity itself is undergoing a massive transformation in its self-understanding. However, that transformation is moving at once in two diametrically opposed directions.

Precautionary types would reacquaint us with our humble animal origins, whereas exponents of the proactionary principle would expedite our departure from our evolutionary past, re-engineering our biology.

The right is currently divided into traditionalists and libertarians; the left into communitarians and technocrats. In the future, I suggest, the traditionalists and the communitarians will form the precautionary pole of the political spectrum, while the libertarians and technocrats will form the proactionary pole.

These will be the new right and left – or, rather, down and up. One group will be grounded in the earth, while the other looks toward the heavens.

l Steve Fuller is professor of social epistemology at the University of Warwick.