The Trouble With Ideology
By: Philip Green
Tags: Ideology, Ethics, Totalitarianism, Facts

The Trouble With Ideology

A lot of what I’ve already written, and will be writing, depends on the relationship between some often opposed ways of thinking and behaving. So a discussion of those terms, that are sometimes thrown around too casually, is necessary. I’m going to relate “ideology” to “politics,” “ethics,” and “reason,” and hope to throw some light on our present condition.

I. Ideology

To begin with “Ideology” has many definitions. My own is that ideology in general is “the ensemble of beliefs and practices that support a (partially) fictitious sense of community among any organized human group.”

At first glance the definition seems too all-encompassing. What should be omitted? For one thing, I suggest that any organized activity based on the concept of “the team” necessarily incorporates a sub-ideological sense of community.

E.g., The great Yankee reliever Mariano Rivera organized and presided over a prayer meeting before every game. Some players joined in; most did not. Nobody cared either way. By my definition organized religion is almost always ideological, but these meetings neither constituted nor proscribed a separate sense of community; everyone already had that or they weren’t long for the team.

Ideology, then, exists in a meaningful sense only when the prospect of meaningful dissent is real: let us say, dissent at an existential level. That is not a sufficient condition, compared with the assumption of community; but it’s necessary.

Organized Religion, to take the most obvious case, is in general an absolutely ideological mode of thought. Most religions, though perhaps not all, are based on a “partially fictitious” sense of unity. Any woman living in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish or Islamic community could testify to that. In such communities there is no recognition of the “political” as a normal aspect of life, or the “ethical” as a series of binding constraints beyond personal or group desires; or “reason” as the support of beliefs that only contingently cohere with what one would like to believe. That’s the mode of thought we are confronting.

2. Politics

Again, there are many definitions of “politics” or “the political,” but they all amount to this: “Politics” is the realm of institutions that are designed in recognition that real conflicts of interest exist among the inhabitants of a bounded community, and that it is in the general interest to resolve these conflicts peaceably.

This is only true, though, in what I will summarize as non-autocratic states. We never speak of “the politics of Stalinism,” or Fascism; or “the politics of slavery.”Politics exists only in the absence of force. Thus those who sneer at “politics as usual” are missing the whole point. “The usual” may involve corruption, backroom deals, unconstructive intransigence, etc.; but it doesn’t involve decision-making by armed men in uniforms. That’s why democratic regimes are all based on the practice of politics as usual. It’s about power, of course, but it’s not about destroying an enemy.

3. Ethics

“The ethical”in contrast, is the realm of obligation; of what we rightfully owe to others, and they to us. As Hegel insisted, though, the law and obligations of contracts is not part of the ethical realm. The obligations of contracts exist because two or more persons or entities have made a deal; ethical obligations exist independent of our personal interests or any negotiated agreements.

It’s often said by critics of secularism that without religious conviction there’s no objective grounding for an ethical system. I think the opposite is closer to the truth. In the absence of a visible god speaking directly to persons (and so what if there is one? That didn’t help Joan in the end) religious injunctions are just commands from a higher authority. Nothing more. Hegel was quite right when he argued that only the State can issue objectively compelling demands–if you happen to be a legal positivist. And if you fail to notice that the statist interpretation of obligation has a pretty bad history.

Rather, as I see it, the grounds of obligation are multi-fold. They include the family: As in Antigone, people will die for that obligation. Also professions, such as medicine–the Hippocratic Oath. Also, institutions entered voluntarily, such as the Military–but not conscript armies.

At one point in her memoir, Tammy Duckworth lists fifteen rules that bind members of the military together. Most are from the Uniform Code of Military Justice, but one not in the Code is unquestionably paramount to her: “we will not leave one of our own behind.” (The voluntary and self-endangering actions of some men who were total strangers saved her life.) I heard the same thing from an ex-Marine who was a Professor of Public Law at Princeton, speaking of his service in the Korean War: “ the one thing I can say is that we never left one of our own behind.”

But we don’t need to invoke such glorified arenas. Many baseball players were shocked and enraged by the revelation that the Houston Astros had been stealing and communicating catchers’ signs by electronic means (rather than simple eyesight) during their run to the 20017 pennant. There are rules of engagement; the violation of them is unethical.

To be sure, ethical systems, and the way different human groups interpret them, vary widely. At one extreme they include the purely consequential–simple utilitarianism, justifying whatever makes the most people happy (though John Stuart Mill had to work very hard to make that kind of reasoning seem truly ethical.) At the other, there are the deontological, that is a set of rules to be followed regardless of consequences; or Kant’s version of deontology in the Golden Rule, the Categorical Imperative that whatever you do to others you must accept that they could rightfully do it to you.

These may all seem unmoored compared to religious authoritarianism. But they are not: you know what the rules are going in. John McCain is perhaps the most famous recent exponent of the deontological approach: torture is wrong, no invocation of impending consequences can ever make it right. And less stringently, there is the pragmatic, or results tested by experience. And the communal, as at a Friend’s Meeting. Even the purely personal, without the guidance of any system, as in Ernest Hemingway’s “What is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after,” can lie within the ethical realm: as long as it’s on the understanding that obligations to others over-ride your own self-interest.

4. Reason

This is simple. Facts are facts, Truth is truth, errors are errors, myths are myths, and lies are lies: that’s the sum of empirical reason. Without reason, there’s no thought that can legitimately command consent; rather, just expressions of self-interest or assertions of power.

If you tell me that you’re afraid of vaccination, that’s a statement of fact: you really are. If however you tell me that it’s your business and none of mine, you’re either ignorant or lying: it’s the business of everyone who might run into you. I’m not going to go any further into this clarification because no one who’s still reading this blog can possibly have disagreements with it. Even more than with politics or ethics, ideology in this realm can add up to the complete abdication of genuine thought. That’s the worst of what’s happening today.

5. Ideology as a Way of Life

Here we come to the nub of the matter. It isn’t as though only bad guys have ideology, and good guys have serious non-ideological thoughts. (The ironic title of an article I wrote years ago was “I have a Philosophy, You Have an Ideology.”)

After all, the dominant way of life — so-called democratic capitalism — that most of us willy-nilly take for granted even if angrily criticizing it, is based on an authorized self-image that is virtually nothing but ideological.

John Maynard Keynes, no dogmatic capitalist, once remarked that the good thing about the free market was that buyers and sellers didn’t have to like each other in order to strike a deal that was good for both. That was a rare moment of ideology speaking through him, as though we all lived in a state of simple commodity production or barter: as when I spend three hours building you a dining chair and your return the favor with three hours of putting up my wallpaper. Capitalism in real action is about as truly communal as a WWE match. Nothing its spokespersons and practitioners tell us about human relations under capitalism is bears even a passing resemblance to the truth.

However, at the same time, anyone of capitalism’s critics who thinks about “what is to be done”politically is almost certainly in some degree ideological.

AOC and myself (!) for example, are both democratic socialists, which entails among other things that we place putative long-term results above what are to many people more obvious immediate benefits. In so doing we’re relying on a notion of community that is, in my words, “partially fictitious.” Ideological.

The same is true of, say, the implications of climate change; or the Helsinki Accords on Human Rights, to which I also gladly sign on. The partially fictitious community in both these cases here is that of all “humanity” (except perhaps for the dominant economic classes). But practically speaking there is no such thing. Political and material interests always intrude in some way or other on the ethical and the reasonable. Most of all, as I said above, millions or billions of people place what they see as their short-run interests against the long run–in which as Keynes also said, we are all dead. Again, the choice is, consciously or not, ideological.

For me, even the nation-state can be the subject of such an identification. As I put it once in a Nation article, “Two Cheers for Patriotism.” That doesn’t mean glorifying wars, all of which I I’ve opposed since the Korean; but it means something.

In my case it has mostly involved athletes in the Olympiad: Brandi Chastain ripping off her shirt; Al Michaels shouting “Do you believe in miracles?,” as the seconds ticked away in the Men’s ice hockey final against the Soviet team; Joan Benoit Samuelson, on her way to becoming the winner of the first Olympic Female Marathon ever, emerging from the tunnel into the Stadium to a standing O from a rapturously cheering home crowd.; Kerri Stug landing her final vault on a badly sprained ankle–and sticking it; Simone Biles defying the supposed irresistible law of gravity…

But also defining moments of loss: the death of FDR; the assassination of JFK; the unbearably sad image of doctors and nurses who’d rushed from all over the Metropolitan area to stand on the steps of St. Vincent’s, hopelessly waiting for survivors of the Twin Towers who would never arrive. Again, all these moments add up to a sentimental identification that can only be called ideological.

6. What then are the discontents of ideology?

What is unique, and as we’ve seen over the past Century uniquely destructive, is an ideology that goes well beyond the role ideologies play in accustoming people to their social condition. This is the nub of my discontent: something entirely different is happening when ideological thinking not only undergirds political or ethical or empirical thinking but actually replaces them: by asserting (through its avatars) that their unity, their demands, supercede all values, all facts.

As we saw on January 6th, as we read on the pro-slavery, pro-Nazi banners, that is now the threatening condition, which is in danger of becoming our reality. Echoing the Neo-Nazis with their chants of “Jews will not replace us,” Tucker Carlson speaks for the millions when he proclaims, almost literally, “Blacks will not replace us.” That is the essence of the Cultural War: the ideology of white privilege and supremacy that cedes no ground to any other way of thinking.

The sentimental ideology I’ve described above may be naive, but it is not destructive. Even the falsehoods of capitalism leave room for opposition and occasionally successful challenge or meaningful reform. Conversely, when the conflict of interests that creates political action is turned into a conflict of absolute ends by one party, we have left the realm of politics for the realm of war.

War, as von Clausewitz euphemistically put it, “is the continuation of politics by other means.” The “other means” are the use of extra-legal, organized and destructive physical force against persons who could otherwise lay claim to some kind of comity, as interest groups or parties that occasionally come together to meet a common need or threat; or as nation-states that have a formal treaty relationship (which circumstance is precisely what he had in mind.)

So here we are. Worse yet, what is true of politics is also true of ethics and practical reason. They are being subverted by the political movement making a bid for power that may yet come to pass. As for the former, think back to the treatment of Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch and Major Alexander Vindaman, compared with the celebration of war criminals and other killers including police officers, as well as the contempt for and smearing of the one who did his duty on January 6th. Together with the pseudo-martyrdom of Ashleigh Babbitt, all these make the principle clear: there is no commitment that must be honored.

As for practical reason and empirical facts, nothing need be added to the words of the Bush Administration official who told Ron Suskind, “we make our own facts.” Or as Kellyanne Conway so nicely amended it, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer was giving “alternative facts.”

Summing all this up is the sign we saw in the window of a restaurant in New York City, within which the unmasked clientele were happily dining: “No rules, just rights.” Or, the underlying message to all the disregarded: “I have no obligation to take care on your behalf.” To quote the talk radio host in Norman Mailers’ novel Why Are We in Vietnam, as he reads a cigarette ad while incarnating Rush Limbaugh long before the fact, “The tests are inconclusive, and anyway, Fuck You.”

In that simple slogan, the ideology of individual rights verges on the totalitarian. As the exiled psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, echoing Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, put it in his classic analysis of Naziism, Escape From Freedom, the embrace of total “freedom” led its supposed beneficiaries to fling themselves into the hands of an authoritarian leader who then ruled them in their own name.

This Rule of One entails that the Rule of Law and the notion of equality before the law (the first among equals of all those “rules”) are repudiated. Hatred of non-conforming difference, of all Otherness that calls that total “freedom” into question, takes over. The conception of us all as bearers of dignity and deserving of respect is dismissed. In sum, as to ethics and facts, the Good and the True go down the drain.

7. Conclusion: with a few recent examples of the Ideology of Replacement:

“The influential young white supremacist Nick Fuentes — an ally of the Arizona Republican congressman Paul Gosar and the anti-immigrant pundit Michelle Malkin — wrote on the encrypted app Telegram: “The Taliban is a conservative, religious force, the U.S. is godless and liberal. The defeat of the U.S. government in Afghanistan is unequivocally a positive development.”

“Dr. Stock joined physicians including Dr. Joseph Mercola and a group that calls itself America’s Frontline Doctors in generating huge audiences for their bogus claims. The statements by them and others have contributed to vaccine hesitancy and a resistance to masks that have exacerbated the pandemic in the United States, public health officials say.”

“A recent poll found that 15 percent of Americans believe there is a cabal of liberal elites who worship Satan and traffic children for sex and blood. This is QAnon’s core tenet, but the movement contains multitudes. Adherents believe Donald J. Trump is battling the cabal, which, depending on whom you ask, may or may not comprise members of a reptilian alien race disguised as humans. Many followers also embrace conspiracy theories about Covid-19, Black Lives Matter, vaccines and the death of John F. Kennedy Jr. Skepticism and bigotry unite these disparate theories; authority, expertise and otherness are always suspect.”

Govenor Abbott has stood firm against calls to reimpose safety precautions, insisting that “we must rely on personal responsibility, not government mandates,” a spokeswoman for the governor said in a recent statement. “Every Texan has a right to choose for themselves and their children whether they will wear masks, open their businesses, or get vaccinated.”

“South Dakota governor calls the Sturgis rally with hundreds of thousands of attendees ‘a fantastic event’ as COVID-19 cases spike…”

Demand for Deworming Drug to Treat Covid, but No Evidence It Works.

Thank you, Tucker Carlson

“47 percent of Republicans say time will come ‘to take the law into their own

hands’: poll.”

“Trump Encourages GOP Crowd to Boo U.S. Women’s Soccer Team.”

“Aside from everything that’s repulsive about the man, more and more we see the totalitarian impulse in him. Like Stalin on art and music, Trump is on sports: nothing too irrelevant to escape his notice. The hatred for Megan Rapinoe: what sickness lurks in the hearts of men. Only The Shadow knows.”

(I don’t know who’s responsible for that quote–it might be myself.)

And then:

“Simone Biles is a ‘National Embarrassment’ Texas AG Tweets,

DeSantis Remains Defiant as Corona virus Cases Surge in Florida.

(“I have been half in love with easeful Death,..” John Keats)

“Texas, of course, is one of the states badly hit by the ongoing climate disasters, which all Texas Republicans deny are…what? Occurring? Of concern? Must be addressed by government policy? No, none of the above. No, merely require calling up FEMA, or the White House, or some other branch of the detestable Democratic federal Government, and begging for millions of dollars in disaster relief.“ Paul Krugman

Shakespeare put it best, in Macbeth–Act III, Scene 3:

BANQUO: It will be rain tonight.

FIRST MURDERER: Let it come down!

MURDERERS: Stab Banquo to death.