As frequent visitors Pascal and Mike both note in comments on my "Theocracy Slur" item, it is clear that the old terms Left and Right do not apply in the post-Cold War world but that there are nonetheless still two very different mindsets operating in the West.

One could see these two minds as representing ends of a continuum, with most people somewhere near the middle of one side or the other (sort of a dual bell curve, with one bell on each side of the neutral or zero mark), but clearly there is a great difference between the mentality that embraces abortion and the one that abhors it; the one that presses for schemes of world government and the one that supports national sovereignty and individual and community autonomy; the one that believes national citizenship should ideally be granted to anyone who wants it and the one that believes in working for national cultural unity; the one that stresses government income redistribution by force and the one that regards private property as sacrosanct, and so on.

In fact, statism and (classical liberalism) can easily be seen as the outcomes of these two mentalities, not the fundamental source of the major conflicts within the West over the past few decades.

It is tempting to think that one side tends to think in terms of what is best for society and the other what is best for the individual. That is the way most people characterized the two sides during the century past: individualism and collectivism.

This goes back to the Enlightenment-era differences between the British/Scottish/American concern for individual rights and the Continental belief in the primacy of the General Will.

But this distinction doesn’t wash today, nor did it do so during the past century. The same mind that favors economic redistribution, an obviously collectivist orientation, also favors the freeing of mentally unstable persons, a definitely individualist approach. And the same mind that presses for free markets often approves of community authority over how much public indecency to allow.

It it still not quite clear, then, exactly what constitutes the two separate minds.

Or is it?

Perhaps the difference between the two ends of the continuum is perfectly evident, but neither side wishes to admit it.

As I wrote in my article for the Fall 2006 issue of Orbis magazine, there appear to have been two main streams of thought throughout the history of Western civilization.

One stream comes from Greece and Rome, and the other from Calvary. The Western world, sometimes known as Christendom, has always vacillated between the two, with one stream sometimes sweeping history in its direction, and sometimes the other being predominant. Western history is in fact the record of the intellectual turbulence created and sustained by these two currents. To understand where we are today, we have to understand the nature of these two streams and where each would lead us.

I believe that we are at another point in history in which we may well be in transition between dominance by one of the two streams, as during the Renaissance and Enlightenment eras. Such periods are times of great intellectual and cultural tumult, and we are certainly experiencing a highl level of such turbulence these days. Hence, a further investigation of the nature of these two streams and their current manifestations is in order, and I shall provide it in coming installments on this site.