Recently, a few people have called me conservative, which I find intriguing because I’m not sure whether it’s true. Actually, I have remarkably little idea these days what the words “liberal” and “conservative” mean. If Joseph Campbell is being called conservative for revering the past, despite his globalist perspective and emphasis on “following your bliss”, then... the categories of “liberal” and “conservative” have probably become meaningless to me.
However, there do seem to be real clusters in thingspace, real contrasts between my worldview and a lot of other people’s. For instance, I think I can say, fairly definitively, that I’m not progressive. I don’t think the world is getting steadily better; I don’t think technology is necessarily an improvement; I don’t think society is becoming more moral; etc.
So maybe the following distinction carves reality at the joints a little bit better than liberal vs. conservative does (at least as pertains to my worldview): forward-looking vs. backward-looking.
Forward-looking people:
are excited by new technologies
think the world is getting better and will keep improving as time goes on
think that society is becoming more moral
embrace or are excited by transhumanism
prefer science and rationality over tradition
etc.
Backward-looking people:
revere mythology, tradition, and other sources of knowledge from long ago
think that the world is getting worse, and long for an idyllic past
tend to be suspicious of new technologies
etc.
This isn’t a strict dichotomy, of course, and someone can obviously like mythology and tradition while also being excited by new technology.
(I noticed this distinction the other day, by the way, when I saw a phrase along the lines of “an idea that all forward-thinking people can agree with”. And I noticed that “forward-thinking” had no positive connotations in my mind; it wasn’t something I wanted to be. So I was thinking about the metaphor FORWARD IS GOOD in the George Lakoff sense.)
Another distinction that seems salient to me is nature-aesthetic vs. city-aesthetic. I feel like this distinction explains a lot of the divergence between my aesthetic and some other people’s. Also, I expect this distinction to correlate pretty strongly with the previous one.