[Buddha-l] Political views of Buddhists

[Richard Hayes]

Dear comrades, er um, denizems:

Benito has made the interesting claim that most Westerners are Marxists. (I 
guess that would explain why Germany, France, the UK, Australia, Canada, 
Israel and the USA all have elected right-wing governments.) Dennis Lingwood, 
founder of the Western Buddhist Order and a social and political 
conservative, has observed with some alarm  that the majority of Western 
Buddhists are political leftists. James Coleman has surveyed Buddhist 
converts (not asian Buddhist immigrants) in the USA and found that 96% 
identify themselves as politically left of center.

For years and years I have found the terms "left" and "right" and "liberal" 
and "conservative" unhelpful and almost meaningless. None of those terms 
unambiguously capture how I would identify myself or most people whose 
political and social views I know about.

Some political scientists in the UK have devised a new way of discussing 
political orientation. It places people on a graph with two axes. The x-axis 
plots where a person stands on economic issues; left of 0.0 indicates 
favoring government control of corporations, as well as favoring 
tax-supported healthcare, education and social programs, while right of 0,0 
indicates favoring free trade and minimal governmental regulation and low 
taxation. The y-axis indicates where one stands on governmental social 
regulation; above 0,0 indicates a tendency toward authoritarian policy, while 
below 0,0 indicates libertarian policy.

If you visualize a standard two-axis graph and imagine four quadrants, here is 
where some well-known figures would fall according to these political 
scientists:

NW (authoritarian communist): Pope Benedict, Stalin, Kim Jongil, Fidel Castro, 
Pol Pot, Robert Mugabe and Hugo Chavez.

NE (authoritarian free-market liberals): Hitler, Olmert, Bush, Chirac, Blair, 
Thatcher, Howard, Harper and Merkel.

SW (libertarian communist): Nelson Mandela, Gandhi, Dalai Lama XIV. 

SE (libertarian free-market liberal): Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, Thomas 
Freedman.

Denizens of buddha-l, your assignment if you should choose to accept it, is to 
take the short political quiz at http://www.politicalcompass.org/ and to 
report your score back to the rest of us. (This will help Benito do his 
research into the political orientation of Western Buddhists.)

My score: -8.63, -7.13 (This means I'm about 87% communist and 71% libertarian 
and therefor in the same sector as Gandhi, HHDL and Mandela, although 
consideraby more to the left than any of them. This would put me pretty 
solidly in the sector of folks that Benito sees as Buddhists in dire need of 
reform and cure, perhaps even of inquisition. My company in this sector, in 
addition o HHDL, would probably be Thich Nhat Hanh and Bhikkhu Buddhadasa. My 
high communist score would explain why I tend to get along pretty well with 
Unitarians, Quakers and anabaptists, and the high libertarian score would 
explain why I am so allergic to lamas, swamis, gurus, roshis, priests, 
rabbis, imams, deans and departmental chairs.

I'm eager as hell to hear reports of where my beloved fellow denizens reside 
on the Political Compass graph. So drop what you're doing and take the test!

http://www.politicalcompass.org/questionnaire

-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico
http://www.unm.edu/~rhayes