Many people want to discard the left-right distinction as a way to understand politics. Most of them are ignorant of what it means and that ignorance usually explains them. Discarding the prevailing schema sounds sophisticated, making the speaker sound wiser than ideologues caught up in tribalism. But all the "That's just like your opinion man" rhetoric actually does is dismiss clear thinking in favor of being shallow and uninformed by history. Clear thinking requires categories and definitions: ideally Aristotelian definitions.

Aristotle's definition of definition prescribes that an adequate definition will have two things: genus and species. While these are where the modern taxonomical terms come from, what Aristotle meant by them does not align with their usage in modern taxonomy, just as an "atom" cannot be split by definition, so that the act of splitting a so-called "atom" proves that it was never an "atom" to begin with because it can be split. It would be within reason to argue that any physicists claiming they have "split the atom" are just stupid and wrong no matter their practical results because "splitting the atom" is a contradiction in terms since any child can understand that an atom is defined as that which cannot be split.

What happened was that we got used to calling non-atoms by the name "atom" and didn't want to change their name even after we discovered, by splitting them, that we had always been wrong to have ever thought that they were ever true "atoms." A similar thing happened with "genus" and "species". They became part of a much larger taxonomical system which no longer resembles their original usage so that their original meaning faded away over time. I intend to revive their original ancient meaning here.

For Aristotle, the "genus" part of a definition must answer the question, "What kind of thing is it?" and the "species" part of a definition must answer the question, "What makes it different from other similar things?" It takes both to have a clear definition, which is one of the checks for whether you're thinking clearly about any given thing. Being unable to give an Aristotelian definition is a strong indicator that your thinking about a thing is unclear.

Unlike with the terms of atoms, genus or species, the definitions of the political left and right have actually stayed very, very consistent across time since their 18th century origins, despite extreme changes in governmental structure and geopolitical environment. They are clear, centuries-old tried, tested and battle hardened categories which very few, if any, policy frameworks ever manage to escape.

The terms “left” and “right” in politics originated with the French National Assembly during the French Revolution in 1789. The two opposing viewpoints physically sat together on opposite sides of the room and this physical seating arrangement is what gave rise to the political categorization used globally ever since. Thus, “left” and “right” were never a metaphor: the origin of these terms were instead completely literal and physical. The competing rumor that the terms originate from the apostles James and John sitting at Jesus’s left and right hands in the gospel according to Matthew is simply untrue. These are very modern, very political categories, not ancient religious ones.

The original right wing were the supporters of the French monarchy and the original left wing were the supporters of the French revolution. Since we don’t see our current political options as having an all-powerful king versus indiscriminately chopping people’s heads off, one might suppose that the left wing and right wing categories would no longer be relevant. But that would be a ridiculously shallow reading of the competing philosophies involved in that political moment.

What descends to us from 1789 is the idea that those on the Right side of the political spectrum are traditionalists who think of the past as good and of the tendency of the present to be negative, while those on the Left side of the political spectrum are progressives who think of the past as bad and of the tendency of the present to be positive. Thus, right wing and left wing do not connote any specific policies. They are instead descriptors of how the ideology or framework views itself in relation to political history.

So Left and Right have a shared genus: they each refer to meta-narratives concerning large scale political history. At the same time, they are separate species: where the Right specifically thinks of the past as good while the Left specifically thinks of the past as bad.

Some confusion often arises in international contexts because Left and Right are regionally and historically relative -- especially the Right. The ideas of the conservative movement or right wing of any particular country are always grounded in the specific local history of that country and do not reflect on right wing movements anywhere else in the world because every country is different. So if, for instance, an American right wing conservative condemns the right wing conservative movement within a Muslim country, that's not a contradiction because those two movements have absolutely nothing whatsoever in common except in the abstract and indirect way that they're both grounded in the local history of their respective country. Calling them both "conservative" in order to suggest that they are somehow linked to one another goes beyond the usefulness of the framework. They are each “right wing” or “conservative” only by being linked with the specific history of their particular region, not by being linked with each other.

In contrast, there is often some degree of connection between left wing movements globally. In the 20th century, this was largely through the International Communist Party, (although there were plenty of Leftists unwilling to admit any Communist ties in the latter half of the 20th century) but after the fall of the Soviet Union, this connection has either ceased or become much less formal.

The historical relativism of left vs right is also significant. Ideas which were left wing when they were new, if they succeed, always inevitably become right wing ideas later on when they become old.

Critically, the strength of the Left vs Right schema is that it does not prejudice the discourse or insult either side. It allows for acknowledging shared facts across the ideological lines without controversial evaluations. This, in turn, provides a shared set of common premises upon which political arguments can be based. Those demanding to discard the schema generally do not provide any new alternate schema to replace it, so that what they are really against isn’t “outdated” political categories from 1789 but is instead usually a rejection of clear thinking itself.

However, a major exception would be proposals for alternate or complementary schema which retain the benefits of the Left vs Right schema of being clear, non-insulting and constructive while allowing for more precision and nuance. We shouldn’t be forever chained to 1789 as the sole criteria for political thought for no reason, but we should be constrained by the principle of Chesterton’s Fence: “Do not remove a fence until you know why it was put up in the first place.” This conservative principle is so inherently reasonable that even the most progressive thinker who wants to tear down every fence in existence should still be able to accept it.

Also, now that we know why we have this schema from the above explanation, it should be obvious why we need a schema like this. No matter their flaws, Left and Right will and should persist in our language and our thinking until a superior schema is available to replace them.

Note: I have not read H.J. Eysenck's The Psychology of Politics (1963) and Samuel Brittan's Left or Right: The Bogus Dilemma (1968) which the Googling I have done to write this essay indicates that I should be reading if I want to eventually turn it into a better researched, more polished paper. I see this post as soliciting feedback on an early draft.