Transcript Ideology challenges politics

Ideology Challenges Politics
Government is never perfect, yet it is needed
- Politics is a curse for the mankind – a necessary evil
- Can we find a better solution?
- No wars, no corruption, no poverty, no violence
- Problem: humans are no angels – Thomas Hobbes
- Christianity (before) and Islam (today) have tried to
get rid of politics altogether
- Religious communities: Munster 1534, Anabaptists
-
http://education-portal.com/academy/lesson/radical-reformation-anabaptists-and-antitrinitarians.html#lesson
- The project of a perfect society: philosophers
- Plato – the philosopher was able to escape the cave of
shadows in which most people live by seeing the reality
of things
- The true ruler could only be the philosopher, for only
philosophers had access to the knowledge needed to
guide a true community
There is a very small step from believing that
philosophers are the only ones to have the
knowledge to lead the people to the idea that the
people can be changed only through strong
leadership – despotism
- Accumulation of knowledge was seen as a sign by
the advanced thinkers that things should change
- The philosophes recognized that the new order
demanded not only knowledge but also unlimited
power – despotism strikes back
- Francis Bacon
- The purpose of human life is to accumulate useful
knowledge in the cause of improving human conditions
- First attempt at using the newly-found knowledge:
1789 France
- Just as technology has power over nature, so can the
advanced minds have power over society
- Win or fail?
- The search for magical power continues
- Adam Smith: the `invisible hand` that guides society
to higher forms of civilization
- The history of humanity was seen as a progression of
stages of evolution
- Nomads to agricultural society to the commercial society
- Each step was considered to be a higher form of
civilization
Hegel: history is more than just ups and downs
- History displays a rational structure
- History progressed – more and more knowledge
and experiences
- The rights enjoyed by his contemporary citizens were
only in the dreams of previous generations
Karl Marx – one of the most influential philosophers
- The fall of man was caused by the institution of
private property
- The destiny of mankind was to recreate that early
communal idyll in an advanced technological form
- Where Hegel argued that modern Europe had at
last achieved a civilization in which all were free,
Marx argued that this formal freedom was actually
the most subtle form of oppression ever created
- Was / Is Marx correct?
Marx and Engels: The Communist Manifesto
- A: The moderns were little more than puppets
moved by the mysterious force of capital
- It induces people to trade, migrate, work and even think
according to the concealed logic of the capitalist mode
of production
- B: Scientific socialism – the knowledge of the
human condition which allowed mankind to seize
the helm of the ship (of state) and guide it to port
- It only required those who had this knowledge to seize
the bridge and guide it to port
- There were other `socialisms` before (e.g., the
Anabaptists), but none of them was `scientific`
Marxism served as a model for many later revelations
of the same kind
- Marxism was the economic package which supplied
its followers with a politics, a religion, and a moral
identity all in one
- KM: Marxism is NOT a political doctrine – political
doctrines give reasons, they talk to each other
- Marxism could only declare the truth
- For Marx, politics is merely the froth cast up by deeper
processes
- Marxism is an ideology, something
that promises an earthly liberation
Ideology – a word with a complicated history and an
even more complex meaning
- The history of `ideology` covers the true, the false,
and the political
- Destutt de Tracy: 1797 – a philosophical
hygiene revealing the truth – he called it ‘ideology’
- Marx – the very falsity which needed to be cleaned
- 19th c political analysts – the arguments of the various
`isms` of which political debate is composed (everything
that looked like a doctrine)
- Ideologies: by contrast with political doctrines,
claim exclusive truth – they explain not only the
world, but the false believes of opponents as well
Ideologists possess the long-sought knowledge of
how to abolish politics and create the perfect society
- The logical character of Marxism, or of other
ideologies, is revealed in the actions of its followers
when they come to power
- They would institute a reign of truth, in which discussion
disappears and nothing else but the ideology is taught in
schools, universities, the media, the law courts and
everywhere else
- Culture does not seem to affect it: the same form in the
Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Cuba, China …
- It is easy to confuse ideologies and political
doctrines, because how they look is always in large
part determined by audience and context
- Enthusiasm can infect any doctrine with the belief that
its principles alone can save the world from evil
- E.g., neoliberalism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_ideologies
Ideology is commonly signalled by the presence of a
tripartite structure of theory
- First stage: reveals to us that the past is the history
of the oppression of some abstract class of persons
- Workers as a class OR women in general OR this race
- Second stage: the duty of the present is to mobilize
the oppressed class in the struggle against the
oppressive system
- The struggle happens everywhere, not only in politics
- Third stage: to attain a fully just society through a
process called liberation
Politics, by contrast to ideology, assumes that any
state will contain many ways of life, and that a
responsive political order must make it possible for its
subjects to follow their own bent
- There is no one-size-fits-all
- Most of life will NOT be about politics
- The doctrine that everything is political is an
infallible sign of the ideological
project of replacing the rule of law
by the management of people
Ideology challenges politics in the name of
an ideal in which all desires are satisfied
- however, it first simplifies the issue by ruling out all
but a remarkably limited schedule of approved
desires, usually called needs
- E.g., community – a simple way of life, all are equal
- Working out how to make this grand event come
about generated the drama of revolutions over the
past two centuries
- Did those revolutions satisfy all desires?
http://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind.html
Marx
The philosophers have only
interpreted the world; the
point is to change it.