The Left and the Right: a brief summary of the differences

I reject the view that there is no difference between the political Left and the political Right or that the terms have no meaning.  In fact, they seem more important than ever.  It is true that in their application, the terms left-wing and right-wing have been evacuated of meaning to the point of practical uselessness, but it does not follow from this that the terms themselves are meaningless.  It is simply a matter of understanding.

We've all heard the common explanation that the left-wing and right-wing in politics originate from the French National Assembly during that country's revolutionary era, but as I hope the table below will illuminate, the meaning of these terms was presaged not in the mundane seating arrangements of a legislature, but in deeper values.  We could perhaps look at the war of ideas during that tumultuous time between the conservative Edmund Burke (Right) and the radical Thomas Paine (Left), but we could go further and say that the conflict between Left and Right is a manifestation of differences of primeval antecedence.

LEFT	RIGHT
Improvement of Man	Improvement of men
Rights	Liberties
Universalism	Particularism
Prometheanism	Organicism
Centralisation	Hierarchy
Multiplicity	Unity
Democracy	Aristocracy
Crowds	Mobs
Urban	Rural
Culture	Biology
Nurture	Nature
Ideology	Philosophy
Idealism	Romanticism
Materialism	Realism
Environmentalism	Ecologism
Post-Liberalism	Reactionary Liberalism
Technologism	Archaeo-futurism
Theism & Anti-theism	Paganism