The Trauma of Ideology

Karl Marx famously stated, “philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.”

Leo Strauss less famously used to refer to the “permanent problems” of political life. Life for him is a permanent question, requiring persistent questioning of all aspects.

Marx, on the other hand, sought to prohibit questioning. In his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, he has this response to someone who persists in asking about human nature: “Give up your abstraction and you will give up your question along with it.”

The contrast between Strauss and Marx shows the contrast between political philosophy and ideology. The ideologue wants to change the world, will prohibit questioning when the world resists, and will refuse to apply his ideology to himself. The political philosopher leaves no rock unturned.

The difference between political philosophy and ideology comes to mind when watching the documentary, “Nightmares,” on the CBC over the past couple of nights (posts here, here, and here). A comment on one of my previous posts suggested that Strauss and Qutb are equivalent because both exerted a lot of influence on people. But influence is not the distinguishing mark between a political philosopher and an ideologue. The mode of thinking (or not thinking) is the better distinction.

The 20th century has witnessed a lot of examples of philosophers turning to an ideological mode of thinking, and ending up beguiled by totalitarians. Mark Lilla provides a useful summary of thinkers including Kojeve, Michel Foucault, Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger, and Jacques Derrida. All of them darlings of the left and some of the right. What unites these thinkers is not only an activist bent, but also a kind of messianic hope that the world will change, just as Marx hopes for in the statement I quoted above.

Another less noticed feature is one that I see more and more these days. Ideologues have always been willing to ignore the bad press of their favorite totalitarians because of a blind hope that the totalitarian will fulfil their messianic hope for a new world order. Moreover, their political opposition to the (usually) “right wing press” drives them to becoming apologists for those totalitarians.

A prime example of Pierre Trudeau. Kevin Steel over at the Shotgun reproduces some juicy examples of Trudeau’s defense of China’s Cultural Revolution that left 20 to 50 million dead:

‘Hold on a minute, please! Isn’t famine raging in China a this very moment?’

Do you mean the famine in which the conservative press of the West takes so much delight?

…

‘But still, it’s a totalitarian regime–a dictatorship!’

Of course. Chiang Kai-shek and the emperors were also dictators, but their power was not directly founded on the people, and they were not so well organized for giving thought to the people’s problems. The present regime, in contrast, since it attacks the feudal lords, the capitalists, and the superstructures of the old days, is bound to be as little alienated as possible from the Chinese masses. And it takes the trouble to convince them of its good faith, to convert them to its teaching. By every means.

These passages show how Trudeau’s disdain for the “conservative” press led him to justify Chinese totalitarianism because 1) it fed the poor better than its older “feudal” rulers (despite its outright slaughter of millions of them), and 2) it promised a utopian future.

One sees a similar process today, among many of the left who justify Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Assad’s Syria, and numerous other tyrants, because they oppose George Bush and the Republicans. Bush is seen as worse than these guys. And they only hate the tyrants of Saudi Arabia because they’re friends of the Bushes, not because they’re tyrants.

And so a documentary like “Nightmares” is part of that leftist narrative because it creates and sustains the myth of the neocon cabal that allegedly runs the US government, and exerts influence over US culture including its media. This cabal has the function of preventing the leftist utopian vision of fulfilling itself. Instead of understanding the incoherence of their own utopian visions, they blame a cabal of frustrating the march of history. Sometimes this leads them to impute near omnipotence to the cabal. Consider how Karl Rove often gets blamed for nearly everything. Consider too how the US gets blamed for everything.

The cabal (and the US in general in the case of anti-Americanism) plays the role of the dark angel in the Gnostic myth of liberation. The Gnostic noble soul believes that the force of darkness is preventing him from escaping into a perfect world in the beyond (or here and now). Thus the force of darkness, be it the American neocon cabal (for anti-Americans), the bourgeois (for Marxists), the Jew (for Nazis and anti-Americans). I’ve even heard conservative teenage attitudes toward sex and marriage explained away by as the result of Focus On the Family’s alleged intervention in schools. Again, this overlooks whether teenagers, as children of the “me first” generation, might have good reason to hold more conservative views on the family than their parents, who habitually regarded them as their “choice.”

Attributing such a high providential power to a designated cabal constitutes a kind of primitive religiosity - much the same as the kind that documentaries like “Nightmares” impute to the neocons. Takes one to know one, I guess.

By proceeding in this manner, the ideological left contributes to a nasty identity politics where simply labeling someone as neocon or simply as conservative constitutes a way of preventing them from having a legitimate place in public discourse. Conservatives in the US did that during the 1990s when they used “liberal” as a smear against their opponents, and it helped get Clinton re-elected. Democrats are finding the same thing’s happening to them.

The ideological mode of thinking among many leftists drives them into justifying the unjustifiable. This intellectual swindle has its roots in the kind of Promethean revolt expressed in Marx’s desire to change the world instead of understanding it.