Ideological musings

May Day could have been so worth celebrating. Too bad all we're left with is those long demythologized notions about the rights of spring. OK, that could be a reason for celebrating too, but we decided in our enlightened ignorance that anyone who came before ourselves really didn't know all that much in the end. We think so lowly of our forebears and ancestors that you really have to wonder how you can explain that we have survived as long as we have as a species.

Of course, we're poised to take care of that too. You can lie to yourself all you want, you can have governments censuring employees (in a supposedly free country), but you can't change the fact that we humans are doing our damnedest to pollute and heat up our planet so badly that Mother Nature will have no choice but to retaliate. But that's a discussion for another time.

No, what I wanted to pick up on was an idea in my last post that might have been overlooked by some of you, namely the part "ideology" played in the workers' defeat. We tend to think that when the Soviet Union collapsed it was because our own ideology proved to be "right", but as Wadsworth points out in the movie Clue, "Communism is simply a red herring." And that it is. No, there's a new ideology on the street to get us all, and it's known "officially" as Neoliberalism, or, for the less erudite among you, unbridled capitalism.

First, let us get clear on what an ideology actually is. In simplest terms, it's an "idea" posing as a "science" (-ology), that is an objective, clear, and proven way of knowing about the world. The key here, though, is the word "posing", for ideologies are diametrically opposed to science of any kind. When it comes to ideologies it is not so important that you know. It is much more important that you believe. And that's why they're so dangerous.

Every single ideology is there for one reason only: to interpret the world, to tell us how the world "is". To do this, it constructs a system of expression and symbols that follow the ideology's own internal, relative autonomous logic (cf. Jean Ziegler, Retournez les fusils!: Choisir son camp, Paris, 2014). While that all sounds relatively harmless, it ideologies are belief systems that provide justification for the actions of its believers. For example, the ideology of American Exceptionalism says it's OK for the USA to do things that they believe others have no right to do, such as overthrow governments or assassinate foreign politicians who resist America's right to do as it pleases, simply because it is in a unique position in the world. Or, the ideology of, say, Calvinistic predestination in the 16th century which was provided justification for the rise to political power of the commercial class and even the genocide of indigenous populations in the name of expanding trade, for example, in the American, Dutch and British colonies.

In other words, a given ideology is not based on facts, evidence or experience, rather it is a way of seeing and explaining the world that is grounded in a set of beliefs that are then used to say why what someone or some group is doing is good, right, and proper. Challenges, of course, usually come from outside, but not always.