Ideology and Philosophy

 

    I have always thought that philosophy – and every form of serious thinking – is limited by what can make sense. What can make sense, in turn, is conditioned by the concrete lives we live, which is conditioned but not determined by “the world” in which we live: by technology, by dominant media, by history, by economic and social relations – “the base” as Marx termed it. Then there is the equally broad term “culture” or in Marxist terms “the superstructure,” which is always in some complicated relation to the base. This consists of all the ideas, explanations, and interpretations that constitute an individual's understanding of self, others, nature, transcendence, and the world as a whole. Ideology is part of this. So ideology is something that can condition one's thinking without one being fully aware of it. 

     I don’t want to get into Marx-interpretation here, but these seem two aspects of one whole to me. In any case, what I resist is the treatment of philosophy as a journey of ideas, some having an impact on culture and thus the base; but a journey of ideas intelligible apart from all the other things happening in the world. So, for example, the idea you hear from Thomists that Nominalism destroyed the Medieval Thomist synthesis, opening the door for modern philosophy (Descartes and those who followed him), which opened the door for the regime of science-capitalism-technology to become dominant. As though the modern world was a consequence of philosophy alone. I don't believe our ideas are nothing but the distorted reflection of economic and technological power, which itself can be understood with the precision of natural science, as Marx believed. But neither are they completely independent. Sense is conditioned by form of life (Wittgenstein).

    Whenever power elites with a vested interest in maintaining or expanding their power, wealth, and privilege – and at least since the early stone ages that describes every social matrix or ‘form of life’ as Wittgenstein termed it – there will be ideologies: political and social interpretations that justify a particular regime – meant in a neutral sense as the system as a way of organizing a system of power. Ideology (as Marx understood it) is no longer well understood, partly for ideological reasons. What a rationalization is in private life, ideology is in public life: it justifies and blocks the kinds of criticism that would call into question the self in the case of rationalization, the powers-that-be in the case of ideology. Rationalizations and ideologies are meant to make an interpretation that is potentially problematic, morally or politically, something we take for granted, something that is beyond criticism, something you’d be unhinged to call into question, something that belongs to the “social consensus.” Ideologies are public rationalizations we uncritically take over to spare ourselves the pain of truth. Just as we don’t judge an individual by what he thinks of himself, so we don’t judge a regime by its own self-interpretations. We all want our self interpretations to be self-authenticating. That's why we try to ban thoughts of rationalization and ideology. 

     Ideologies are also a kind of epistemological bubble that actually lies under the surface of official political programs. Pre-Trump Republicans – crudely put – had a belief system based on “what’s good for big business is good for the country,” whereas Democrats believed that the state had to alleviate the worst injustices of capitalism to secure its benefits.

And as in private life one differentiates between what a man thinks and says of himself and what he really is and does, so in historical struggles one must distinguish still more the phrases and fancies of parties from their real organism and real interests. (Marx, The 18^th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte)

The ideology is “capitalism is good for the country” and “socialism is bad for the country” (again crudely put). “There is no fundamental conflict between workers and the owners of capital.” “Workers freely enter into labor contracts with the owners of capital,” and so on. Or I wrote earlier on how Thomism became an ideology that rationalized the power of the feudal landowners and the Church. The beliefs that informed conflict in the Middle Ages never called the underlying economic power structure into question.

    Ideologies can be thought of as an “official currency” of consciousness, to which all other ways of thinking and speaking tend to conform in one way or another: “public modes of consciousness.” It is not possible to draw a clear line between a political program and ideology. As a Whig in 1840’s, I can see how a man like Abraham Lincoln could see free enterprise as a progressive force. By the time of Ronald Reagan, I can only see the modern variants of that belief system as a form of false consciousness – ideology; as masking the power moves on behalf of particular capitalist interests. You have to look and see how it is used. [I think it probable that the elites and also people disadvantaged by the regime overreacted to Bernie Sanders’ “democratic socialism” and the attempts of the Left to change aspects of social consciousness (“Wokeness”), seeing in it a breakdown of the American ideology and releasing the political toxin that we know as MAGA. Here we see that ideology can also have a positive role of maintaining some social cohesion and preventing the rise of fanaticism.]      

   There are typical ways ideologies deceive us. Empty generalities mask reality. We in liberal countries praise freedom, equality, and rights, masking the real world reality of how these ideas play out for working people and the poor as opposed to the economic elites. Such generalities permit discourse to be “torn away from the facts,” as Marx put it. Or ideas that perhaps reflected some reality in the past are used to distort a very different present. Lockean liberal ideas corresponded to some extent with the experience of small shop owners and free farmers in the America of 1800; today the same ideas are used to cover up just how radically different corporate America is from that time. Or ideologies use idealized or slanted language to distort social reality. Kings had their power by divine sanction in the Middle Ages. We live in capitalism because of a freely entered social contract. The uninhibited exploitation of man and nature by 19th-century capitalism was hailed as progress and civilization. The controllers of capital are called “work-givers” in German (Arbeitgeber) whereas those of the dispossessed who have nothing to sell but their labor are “work-takers” (Arbeitnehmer). Etc.

     When we think, when we think philosophically, we must always be aware of ideology. A good test is to draw out the social and political implications of your belief system. My critique of “autonomy” as a moral idea is embedded in the form of life I inhabit, and I am well aware that it implies a political belief critical of capitalism, and thus critical of liberalism. That doesn’t mean I am going out of the streets demanding the end of capitalism. At this time, political action has to deal with the threat of populist fascism – which would do away with valuable aspects of liberalism (e.g. somewhat free thought at universities) as well as any chance to humanize capitalism or, better, transform it into something more compatible with justice, human dignity and decency. I am also well aware that my criticism of “autonomy” as used in the ideology of the regime I live under only makes sense in that world. I think Aristotle would not have understood it because he would have found the ideology and indeed the regime I am criticizing unintelligible. In other words, my philosophical critique is a kind of ideology critique.

   My own thought is “safe” in that it imagines an alternative world that does not exist, or has only existed in attenuated forms. I’m a bit like Plato criticizing our shadowy ideas of the world from an imagined position outside the Cave – imagined only from a position within the Cave. That is a problem for philosophy. That is why I feel a person must not reduce their politics to their philosophy or vice-versa. Dialog between the two is important though.

  I don’t think Marx believed he was thinking philosophically. He didn’t think of himself as a philosopher. He didn’t believe he was primarily interpreting reality using the tools of reason and conceptual thought (the tools of making sense). “The philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways,” he famously said. “The point, however, is to change it.” But Marx was also interpreting the world. That quote is an interpretation. And if you want to change the world, you need some beliefs to guide you. I believe Marx thought of himself as a Darwin of the historical world. That makes no sense to me. The desire to put one's interpretations beyond interpretation by (illicitly) conceiving them as "scientific" is ironically itself a profoundly ideological distortion, typical for the regime of science-capitalism-technology. 

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 I am not against private business as such. What I mean by "capitalism" is the radical simplification of practical reason to profit-calculation and thus (usually) efficiency-calculation without concern for the effect of decisions on community life or the nature of the place (or your relationship to God if you are religious). There is nothing wrong with a marketplace as long as the marketplace doesn't take over the whole city. Not everything can become a commodity without demeaning and damaging it. There are a few limits on capitalist rationality - not allowed to murder you competitor; there are laws against fraud to protect the system as a whole. But aside from that the power of capitalism is that the controllers of capital don't have to worry about their workers, nature, or the community they are supposed to be a part of beyond a calculation of profit and loss. The controllers of capital have been 'freed' from the normal obligations of decency and justice.  It is greed made into a science. That society as a whole benefits from this is bullshit. 

       If we are gonna permit corporations, then only with a limited charter that must be renewed based on the overall good of the workers, nature, and the community. Technologies that have to potential to transform society shall be permitted only after profound reflection on how this transformation will affect justice, democracy, the public good, etc. A new technology - Twitter, social media - is like a change in the constitution. That power can't be left to capitalists. Moreover, the ability of capital to influence or even control government - the agency responsible for the common good - must be cleanly cut. Private business must have a strict moral, ecological, and political framework, a fence around it so that it doesn't become the dominant force in society as it is now.  Rather than the totalitarian global regime of capitalism I prefer a mixed economy - worker ownership, family farms, some state-supervised firms (e.g. pharmacy, defense, energy), and more. I prefer a small-scale economies rooted in regions. And there must be sustainable economies, which means economies that use only the amount of energy that renewables can provide - even if that means small-scale technologies become necessary. That is the short version of my view of capitalism and economy. What we have now is a fantasy. We need to start getting realistic.