Chemists call molecules chiral
when the molecules come in mirror-image pairs. The term is applied to molecules that share a
common chemical formula and are built from the same numbers of the same kinds
of atoms. They differ in the geometrical arrangement of the atoms. That’s
all. Same content, just rearranged to create mirror-image reflections. The
right- and left-handedness of chiral chemistry provides a handy metaphor for the
politics of Left and Right: mirror images built from a common substance and a
common formula.
For reasons probably unimaginable, chemistry came to mind
when I found the movie Return Engagement on the Internet Archive (it follows the Bob Costas interview). The
movie documents a series of debates between notorious pitchman for the colorful
‘60s psychedelic counterculture, Timothy Leary, and G. Gordon Liddy, notorious
henchman for the disgraced U.S. president Richard M. Nixon. This odd couple toured
the U.S. in the 1980s, staging debates that pitted Leary’s libertine individualism
against Gordo’s conservative authoritarianism.
In debate Leary preaches a gospel of self-discovery and invites individuals to liberate themselves from the suffocating conventions
of polite society, to spread their wings and fly free from the strictures of
the hive. Liddy counters by accusing Leary of reckless self-centeredness and
hedonism. He argues for the duty of individuals to subordinate their desires to
the needs of social orderliness. Gordo preaches a communitarian, collectivist
ethos.
WAIT A MINUTE.
Liberal? Conservative? Is anybody paying attention?
Tune into partisan polemic today and you get a mirror image
of the Leary-Liddy debates. The Left is all about community, and if you hear invocations
of freedom and liberty, it’s more likely coming from the Right. Listen to
right-wing talk now and you’d think community was synonymous with gulag. So, between 1984, a fitting year to make such a movie, and
today, what happened to political Left and Right?
They became what they beheld.
The Right adopted the “Do your own thing”
ethos and adapted it to the cult of the business entrepreneur. The Left internalized
a tut-tutting stance, condemning the “greed” of the self-centered striver,
while striving itself to be “socially responsible.”
How long before the mirrors switch again and Lefties snap,
“Don’t tell me what to do” with Righties castigating them for shirking their
responsibilities? Stay tuned.
