The problem, and it goes to the basis of Western thought, is that we try forcing the inherent tension and balance of a dichotomous reality through the lens of a monist idealism.

For instance, the relationship between liberal and conservative is between desire and judgement. Between the heart and the head.

Society is that dichotomy of organic energies pushing up, versus civil and cultural forms coalescing in.

We are driven by our desires, but they need steering. To chose which are more suitable for the health of the larger community, which are neutral and which are negative.

Yet that judgement can’t become all-encompassing, or it slides into tyranny, just as unconstrained desires slide into anarchy.

We have this role model of an all-seeing deity, but a spiritual absolute would be that essence of sentience, from which life rises, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which it fell. More the consciousness seeking knowledge, than any form or brand of it. The light shining through the film, than the images on it. The mind referees the desires, it doesn’t create them and it is those desires, the appetite, that give the banquet of life meaning.

Conflating the absolute with the ideal shouldn’t have survived 2000 years of philosophy, but it does underpin much of the Western model, possibly because it does insist everyone read from the same page, or else.

Though we are reaching the edge of the global petri dish, with our linear, go forth and multiply, bottom line paradigm, so it might be worth considering a more cyclical understand of the dynamic. Then those on either side won’t insist they are on the road to nirvana and those going the other way are misbegotten fools.

As Robert Frost put it; “If you are not liberal when you are young, you have no heart. If you are not conservative when you are old, you have no head.”