Imported right-left labels mislead when applied to non-Western politics

Evidence

The seating arrangements of the first French National Assembly after the Revolution do not express a law of nature, and the practice of classifying political ideas, interests and groups as right or left obscures more than it illuminates even in the Western world where it originated. As applied to other societies, shaped by different experiences, guided by different traditions, moved by different as­ pirations, such imported labels can only disguise and mislead. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1415

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A genuinely dense, generalizable point: the entire left/right axis is a contingent artifact of one post-Revolution seating arrangement, retained as a habit of thought that actively distorts analysis of societies with different historical inputs.
• XREF: Connects to the recurring writerly-theme that categories inherited from one context distort another — parallels the work on how colonial-era knowledge systems were imported wholesale.