I'm with Shuggy (I think...?)

I'd been looking at Phil Edwards' excellent post on identifying the political spectrum over the weekend; mulling it over, taking it in, thinking through what I thought.

I was just about to go back to post a draft post on it I'd done when I started off on one of my blog trawls and visited Shuggy. Who writes it so succinctly - and in many respects is close to my own answers and stance - that I almost felt this post redundant.

Sigh.

Still, for those interested I think I am: a Pelagian Digger Hippie Whig ...

... but where I feel myself coming undone is on the issue of how change relates to the present. The choices offered are:

A Right-Hegelian believes that, to the extent that it makes sense to talk of a good society, the good society is an extension of trends which have a visible and increasingly dominant influence on society as it is now

A Left-Hegelian believes that it emphatically does make sense to talk of a good society, and that such a society will in important senses require the reversal or overthrow of society as it is now

Now I want to believe that we have made progress and change and that there are some strands of that in modern society. But there are a lot of things are horribly problematic in the world today and I'm not sure that the trends that are increasingly dominant are the ones I would wish to see extended (I'm particularly thinking here of fundamentalism of all kinds, but especially religion). So this places me closer to thinking about dramatic change of society as it now is. Except that I fear what such a change would look like and whether we would lose too many of the good things that have come about e.g. improved access to education, rights for women....

Anyway, this means that if I place myself as a Right-Hegelian Whig, I'm a Reformer, and if I place myself as a Left-Hegelian Whig, I'm a Revolutionary.

Since I am torn between these two that probably just means I'm F.

For Fence-sitter.

Splinters up my political arse as usual then.