Beyond Left And Right - guest editor Jay Kinney - Editorial

Whole Earth,  Summer, 2000  by Jay Kinney

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Whole Earth has a long tradition of guest editors. Jay Kinney is our first since our revival in 1997. He was editor of the CoEvolution Quarterly (1983-85), and spent many years as publisher of Gnosis, the best magazine tracking little-known or much-repugned Western spiritual traditions. I come to Jay for the lovely revelation of edges, both new and old, chipped and razor-sharp. He has reported on many cultural cutting edges--like punk and New Wave music, as well as anarchists, libertarians, and left/right politics. He made me laugh with satiric edges in his cartoons (he was editorial cartoonist for In These Times and founder of Anarchy Comics), and brought me to very thoughtful edges (too "dangerous" for most others to touch) as editor of the "Politics & Religion" and Islam issues of CQ and Whole Earth Review.

Eminently fair, revealing the validity of whoever is speaking, poking holes in stock categories, moving from the short-term opinion and current sound bite to a more timeless sense of human endeavor, Jay seemed just what Whole Earth needed in an election year. I mean, politics is not the mainstay of Whole Earth, but asking "What are your real allegiances?" and "What's required in these politically demeaning times to re-energize a sense of the heartful citizen?" is crucial in all times. In his exploration of both inner meanings (see the review of Hidden Wisdom) and their outward expression, Jay's the fine, open-minded tracker who can lace any journey with mind-bogglers and winking asides.

--PW

I'll admit right off the bat that pulling together this special section for Whole Earth has been a bit of a gamble. I'm not much of a gambling man, actually--in fact my Scottish blood dictates that on those rare occasions when I find myself in a casino, the extent of my gambling is to splurge on two rolls of nickels for the five-cent slots.

Nevertheless, when it comes to editing I like to take bigger chances, and the forty-eight pages that follow are the editorial equivalent of a bracing game of strip poker. My wager is that you'll find the material by turns touching, intriguing, infuriating, and, hopefully, inspiring. If you don't, then the joke's on me.

A few words of explanation are probably in order. Like many Whole Earth readers whose worldviews first tool: shape in the '60s and '70s, my broad sympathies lay with the left for many years. I evolved from antiwar liberal to socialist to anarchist, until some time in the '80s when I got fed up with the whole radical-left milieu, which seemed doomed to spin its wheels endlessly.

However, I remained interested in politics--especially the energies unleashed by glasnost and perestroika, which ultimately led to the breakup of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. All bets were off, it seemed, and I increased my investigation of outlooks that ran counter to left orthodoxy: libertarianism, neo-conservatism, paleo-conservatism, the radical right, you name it.

My modus operandi was fairly simple: I'd explore one group's convictions, granting them the benefit of the doubt, and see how it felt to see the world through their eyes. In due course, I'd do the same with the next, and the next. The result of this exercise--apart from a resistance to being pinned down to one solid viewpoint during political arguments (utterly maddening to the people I talked with)--was a kind of self-deprogramming, wherein terms like "left" or "right" simply lost their negative or positive charge. Granted, some perspectives felt better than others and some felt decidedly worse. But I reached a point where I saw that one's assumptions largely shape the conclusions that one draws, and that reality is so richly complex that it can simultaneously sustain and reinforce all manner of contradictory, viewpoints.

Whether this was a kind of political epiphany or merely a crystallization of my inherent ambivalence is not for me to say, but the next logical step was an interest in perspectives that transcended left and right altogether. There had been elements of this tendency in both anarchism and libertarianism, but both positions' followers seemed overly certain that they had found the one-and-only Truth. What interested me was not finding the perfect ideology to believe in, but rather discovering ways in which people could sidestep ideologies altogether while still making sense of their lives politically and socially.

If this were only my own eccentric pursuit, I doubt that I would have found much out there that dovetailed with this goal. However, there does seem to be something in the air (besides particulate pollution, that is), and relevant material kept arising as this issue came together. The rest of this short essay is my effort to summarize my findings.

TWO SIDES TO EVERY STORY

"Left and Right," like "Night and Day," are such familiar and oft-used concepts that they offer the illusion of having always been with us. Yet their use as political markers only dates back to 1789 and the French Revolution. At that time, as Roger Eatwell has described it, "a seating pattern emerged in the new National Assembly in which most of the nobility and clergy could be seen to take up positions on the right, whereas the Third Estate, which demanded a constitution and limitation of the King's power, occupied the left."