Check out The World’s Shortest Political Quiz. This was made by a guy who believes (correctly) that the left-right political spectrum is too limiting. Instead he’s made a 2-D political map, with 10 questions to show where you fit on it. The left side is still traditional left-liberal, and the right side is traditional right-conservative. After the quiz, each of the five political positions is summarized, and it’s that summary which has had me thinking about the current left-right divide and what might be going on behind it.

Here’s what the quiz has to say about left-liberals and right-conservatives:

Left-Liberals generally embrace freedom of choice in personal matters, but support central decision-making in economics. They want the government to help the disadvantaged in the name of fairness. Liberals tend to tolerate social diversity, but work for what they might describe as "economic equality."

Right-conservatives favor freedom of choice on economic issues, but want official standards in personal matters. They tend to support the free market, but frequently want the government to defend the community from what they see as threats to morality or to the traditional family structure.

I thought that was amazingly on target for how few words it used. I’ve been thinking about it ever since, wondering about the reason behind the divide, and I have an idea.

Liberals and conservatives both want the same thing, but disagree on cause and effect. Each of them sees one thing they do understand and one thing they don’t, and they try to control the unknown with the known.

Conservatives see the economy as the mysterious unknown. Attempts to meddle are expensive disasters, they feel. But as long as people behave correctly in their private lives, they believe, the economy will magically sort itself out correctly. In the more extreme conservatives, they believe that God uses the economy to punish or reward personal moral behavior. Thus, if the country behaves immorally, economic disaster will strike; if it behaves morally, prosperity for all. Although they might not express it this way, they see attempts to influence the economy directly as futile—trying to alter the wrong side of the equation.

Liberals, on the other hand, believe that immoral behavior is caused by unmet needs. To them, human behavior is the mysterious unknown, but the economy, at least, can be understood. Economic inequality, to a liberal, causes people to make evil choices, which explains why they are so desperate to correct the economy. The mirror image of the conservatives, they see attempts to force people to behave morally as basically futile, so long as economic inequality continues.

I think it’s obvious to most people—or should be—that a little of both is true, in different cases. As the liberals expect, widespread economic depression will induce desperate people to lie and steal. As the conservatives expect, eroding moral standards (especially honesty) can damage an economy.

There are “borderline” cases. Given, for example, the AIDS crisis in Africa, liberals and conservatives can both make fairly convincing arguments for the application of their principle. What’s amazing to me, though, is that you don’t have to look far to find people who are willing to believe in the liberal or conservative principle in any case, beyond all reason.

I remember talking some years ago with a group of people about the Dunblane kindergarten massacre. I could not believe it when one guy said, in all earnestness, “It’s because of unemployment. People don’t have anything to do, no purpose, so this is what happens.” It’s an extreme position in this case, and an indefensible one, but there he was, believing it. And this was a rational, educated person.

There are plenty of examples of the extreme conservative position, too. It’s not hard to find people who believe, for example, that legalizing gay marriage will lead to economic disaster, and/or weaken the country’s defense against terrorism.

As the quiz points out, these aren’t the only two ways of looking at the world. Unfortunately, it seems like these two agendas dominate the political discourse today.