IDEOLOGY IS THE WAR OF PERSONAL BELIEFS AGAINST OBJECTIVE REALITY:

DISCUSSION: What Is Ideology? A Conversation with Mark Shiffman and James Matthew Wilson</a> (James Matthew Wilson, Mark Shiffman and Austin Walker, 6/27/24, Public Discourse)

Mark Shiffman: Thank you, James. And thank you all for being here. I’m extraordinarily grateful for this event. I am grateful especially to James for being more responsible than anyone else for the fact that this appears in print. And of course, I’m grateful for all of you turning out tonight and very, very grateful to the Lumen Christi Institute. And I should say, partly as an apologia for myself, the fact that it took me ten years to get through the University of Chicago is in significant measure due to the fact that when Thomas Levergood started up the Lumen Christi Institute, he roped me into doing all of the nitty-gritty stuff that he couldn’t do because he was the idea man and the salesman. But those were marvelous times, and Lumen Christi has been extraordinarily important in my own development as a scholar, as a thinker, as a Catholic. So this is especially marvelous to be here on this occasion.

My contention in this book is that the word ideology gives us a helpful name for a particular form of political thinking, a form that is distorting and destructive, and from which we should all strive to free our minds if we need to, and most of us do. This liberation, however, requires seeing clearly what the word means and why what it names is bad. So the brief remarks I’m going to give here will fall into three parts: a short history of the word ideology, a concise description of how ideological thinking operates, and some remarks about how it is in direct conflict with a Christian understanding of created order and human dignity.

We use the word ideology all the time to mean a set of beliefs that provide a rationale for some political agenda, and of course, it’s true that political agendas do generally have central organizing ideas, if they’re organized agendas, but that doesn’t mean that they should all be described as ideologies. So we need to know what we’re saying when we use this word, and that requires a little bit of linguistic history. Now this history begins very, very exactly in 1796, but I think it’s more interesting to fast-forward seventeen years to 1813.

In 1813, John Adams wrote a letter to Thomas Jefferson, and in this letter, he was referring to a disagreement they had had years before about the French Revolution. Adams says to Jefferson:

You [were] well persuaded in your own mind that the Nation would Succeed in establishing a free Republican Goverment: I was as well persuaded, in mine, that a project of Such a Government, over five and twenty millions people, when four and twenty millions and five hundred thousands of them could neither write nor read: was as unnatural irrational and impracticable; as it would be over the Elephants Lions Tigers Panthers Wolves and Bears in the Royal Menagerie, at Versailles. Napoleon has lately invented a Word, which perfectly expresses my opinion at that time and ever Since. He calls the Project Ideology.

What Adams is suggesting here is that the word “ideology” is a really good name for a certain kind of political thinking, one that we might describe as an intellectual scheme of reform that’s full of enthusiasm and confidence about its imagined benefits, but which suffers from a lack of any clear vision of relevant political realities. And I think he’s right. It’s a very good word for that kind of thing. But it hasn’t generally turned out that that’s how we use ideology in intellectual and academic discourse.

So now I’m going to tell that story and come back to the Adams sense of the word. Jefferson, in reading this letter, would know very well that Napoleon did not invent this word. And he would know that in 1796 it was coined in Paris by Antoine Destutt de Tracy to describe his theory of how our ideas originate from sense impressions and abstraction. Tracy’s theory combines what we would call epistemology and cognitive psychology to propose an individualistic and empiricist account of human intelligence. And Jefferson thought this was great. He had Tracy’s works translated into English and published in America. There weren’t a lot of books published in America at that point.

Tracy, in this, is following in the footsteps of John Locke, and he’s reaching similar conclusions about politics. That is to say, a politics of liberal individualism that seems to follow from these premises about knowledge and where knowledge and our ideas come from. And what Napoleon is expressing is scorn for this whole thing by using the word sarcastically. He is deriding the kind of deductive argumentation for political arrangements based on rationalistic philosophical premises by people who don’t actually know how to make things happen like Napoleon does.

This is the usually unknown origin of this word. But the real history of the word as we know it begins with Karl Marx. In 1846, Marx co-authored with Friedrich Engels a short book called The German Ideology. And this book criticized the dominant Hegelianism of the time, which considered the formation of ideas and the relationship of ideas to practical realities, that ideas somehow are the fundamental thing and they get played out in the world according to their inner logic, they get institutionalized, and so on. Marx, in criticizing this theory, was using the word “ideology” in continuity with the way it originated. It’s a term for a theory of ideas and one that he’s criticizing. And Marx’s own theory is that ideas don’t precede practice, they don’t lead to practice. Rather, ideas are the products of practical and economic realities. By Marx’s account, those economic realities shape our worldviews. The ideas of the dominant class are unconsciously tailored to justify their domination. In Marxist thought, then, ideology comes to mean the legitimating worldview imposed by the dominant class.

Marx himself insisted that these ideas were not worth taking seriously in themselves since when, finally, the Communist Revolution set the whole economic order straight, those ideas would just disappear. But a century later, the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci recognized that the battle between different social and political agendas was a real site of conflict with real effects in the world. And, in spelling this out, he gave birth to what we now know as cultural Marxism, which seeks to delegitimize capitalism and liberal order through ideological combat by taking over cultural institutions like universities, media, and entertainment and installing the correct ideology to lead the way into the glorious future. So that’s the history of how the word is mainly used and then we use it indiscriminately to talk about people’s ideas about politics.

Now, this critical sense in which Adams used it made a comeback in the middle of the twentieth century, primarily through Hannah Arendt, the political philosopher, in her 1950 study The Origins of Totalitarianism. According to Arendt, the true character of ideology comes clearly into view only in the middle of the twentieth century when totalitarian movements come to power and, as she says, proceed to change reality in accordance with their ideological claims. She says: “an ideology is quite literally what its name indicates. It is the logic of an idea. Its thought movement does not spring from experience but is self-generated. And it transforms the one and only point that is taken and accepted from experienced reality”—like there is class conflict in a certain sense—“into an axiomatic premise. Once it has established its premise, its point of departure, experiences no longer interfere with ideological thinking, nor can it be taught by reality. So when they attain power then, ideological movements treat human affairs,” as Arendt says, “with a consistency that exists nowhere in the realm of reality.”

And Marxism is a very good example. Fascism, Nazism, Randian libertarianism: all drastic simplifications of reality in accord with a very narrow set of ideas. This demand for unrealistic consistency in human affairs determines how ideology operates. It makes ideology inherently violent—in at least three ways that I would like to describe very briefly.

DO THE RIGHT THING, JOE:

What now for the Democrats?: Joe Biden’s performance at the first debate has deepened concerns about whether he can beat Donald Trump (LESLEY RUSSELL, 28 JUNE 2024, Inside Story)

Previous debates have shown that perceptions of performance — ahead of policy discussions and factual presentations — crown the winner, though voters generally find the debates useful rather than determinative. With his age always a strike against him, Biden’s debate performance was humiliating for him, concerning for his staff and not at all reassuring potential voters. When the fact checking is over (too little, too late) Trump should also be humiliated, but the chances are that he and the MAGA Republicans will be more than happy with the night’s performance regardless.

What now for the Democrats? Since Biden first declared he would run again, there have been those, in the party and outside, who have talked about an alternative. Biden’s claim that he is the only candidate who can beat Trump rings increasingly hollow for many, and calls to replace him are now being openly voiced.

At least three significant steps are required for this to happen, all of which should preferably happen ahead of the Democratic Convention, which begins on 19 August.

First, Biden must be persuaded to step aside.

If the election is existential then running Joe is the least responsible act since a dying FDR ran for a 4th term and left the choice of VP to chance.

THE LAST AMERICAN HEROES:

It’s Time to Give Moonshine Some Respect: It’s an American tradition and as worthy a liquid as any unaged spirit (CAROLINE EUBANKS, June 26, 2024, Inside Hook)

“We just don’t have a better word, so moonshine has come to fill that void, and it’s problematic because moonshine can also mean an illegally-made spirit,” Spoelman says. “Then that suggests a dangerous or poorly made spirit, perhaps to some ears.”

The legacy of moonshine also counteracts many of the stereotypes. “A good moonshiner would try to give his customer a good value,” Schumaker says. “If you sell somebody 180-proof moonshine, it’s really not moonshine, it’s almost vodka at that point. There’s a misconception that that’s the only thing that a moonshiner would sell.” Unfortunately, the majority of the recognizable brands on the market don’t create anything that could truly be identified as moonshine, instead offering neon-hued flavored drinks made from neutral grain spirits in mason jars.

Moonshine is actually a uniquely American product with roots back to the earliest days of the nation. The Scots-Irish settling in the mountainous east coast are primarily responsible for bringing their centuries-old distilling traditions stateside, using corn and water straight from the source to carefully craft flavor. Kings County sources corn from upstate New York, and Highlands gets its materials locally in southwest Virginia and Pennsylvania, allowing for the spirit to pick up the terroir.

“It’s very challenging to make a white spirit palatable, and that’s the job of the moonshine maker, whereas the whisky maker can fudge that piece of the process and sort of age out the imperfections over time,” Spoelman says.

So why doesn’t the industry appropriately recognize it? Moonshine typically falls under the category of “other American whiskies” in the awards, and very few have broken through to claim the medals like Troy and Sons in Asheville, North Carolina, which has twice been honored for its platinum whiskey.

Moonshines of this variety also rarely appear on cocktail menus outside of the territory where the spirit is traditionally distilled in Appalachia. But it has as much versatility as anything else you might have behind the bar.

“The cocktail opportunity of an unaged whiskey remains pretty unexplored, especially when you have tequila, silver tequila, white rum and various kinds of apple spirit ending up in cocktails,” Spoelman says. “I still think moonshine is maybe at the trough of its backlash, and it’s poised for a re-emergence as a more cultural mainstay once it’s better understood.”

One of my buddies is a moonshiner and I bring him any grains, sugars, fruit products we are getting rid of. Constantly amazed at the quality of the liquor he can turn them into. There’s even a reality show about them nowadays.

REBELLING AGAINST THE BEAUTIFUL REQUIRES EMBRACING THE UGLY:

Dune: The Perfect Deathwork: How the thought of Philip Rieff illuminates a modern epic. (William Batchelder, June 26, 2024, Modern Age)

To reengage fully with the dark myth at the heart of Dune, it is best to turn to the work of one of the most pessimistic of our contemporary social theorists.

Philip Rieff (1922–2006) offers an effective theoretical framework for interpreting Dune as deathwork and dark myth. Rieff made his early reputation as an interpreter of Freud. At the heart of his later work was a historicist interpretation of Western civilization, which he divided into three “cultures.” The first culture was the culture of paganism; in all such polytheistic cultures the gods themselves emerged from a “metadivine,” a source of power prior to and greater than the gods themselves. This source of fathomless power above even the gods Rieff called the “primacy of possibility.” Charged with the “constant energy of menace,” the primacy of possibility can turn men monstrous or destroy them. First culture man understood the primacy of possibility through myth; his relationship to it was mediated by unfathomable, amoral, and relentless fate. To keep his distance from its menacing power, he observed taboos.

Rieff’s second culture is that of the Abrahamic faiths. There is no metadivine; nothing stands above the God of Israel. In place of the taboos walling off the primacy of possibility there are the “interdicts”: directly commanded thou-shalt-nots declared by the God who reveals Himself. Man’s relationship to this God, the final authority, is characterized not by mysterious fate but by faith. The second culture sinks the interdicts into each individual beginning in a preconscious foundational process that builds individual character.

The third culture is the culture of modernity. It rejects God and the interdicts. Rieff believed that, because there can be no culture without either tabooed prohibitions or the character-shaping interdicts, the third culture is an “anticulture.” This third culture was ushered in by an “officer class” of intellectuals and artists. Nietzsche, Weber, and of course Freud were the most important theorists of the officer class; Joyce, Duchamp, and Wallace Stevens its artists par excellence. Rieff observed that this officer class, while godless, feels itself perpetually “god-threatened.” These intellectuals are compelled to address themselves to the God of the second culture in endless artistic acts of defacement and mockery. Rieff called such works of art the “deathworks”: intellectual and artisticassaults on the old, now disestablished, second culture.

To Rieff, the closest this modernist officer class can come to the affirmative creation of culture is to create deathworks that negate the second culture of faith while also attempting an unbelieving return to the “primacy of possibility”—the source of power beyond even the gods themselves—that marked the first culture. Of course, a skeptical modern cannot approach the primacy of possibility as a first culture man did. Instead, third culture imaginations invoke the oceanic power of the primacy of possibility self-consciously, even ironically. To some moderns, this primacy of possibility returns as atheistic invocations of what Rieff called “the Nothing,” which serve as a kind of anti-creed best expressed in endless hostile parodies of the second culture. Rieff cites as an example Joyce’s mockery of the Old Testament and his sneering “Woid” (void) in place of the “Word.”

To fill the emptiness, other third culture imaginations have embraced, or even self-consciously invented, some supra-human power echoing the ancient primacy of possibility. Moderns have embraced everything from the Trotskyists’ “permanent revolution” to Wilhelm Reich’s orgone energy. Wallace Stevens, in “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” demanded the angels keep silent while the poet creates a self-conscious pseudo-religious abstraction as a substitution for the Trinity: “It must be Abstract. It must Change. It must give Pleasure.”

Dune is a perfect third culture deathwork because it offers an eloquent address to the Nothing and a invokes a fictive primacy of possibility almost profound enough to approach again the slopes of myth.

The constant need to define themselves in opposition to God is a confession. Richard Dawkins recent admission to being a cultural Christian was particularly hilarious.

WHERE’S THE BEEF?:

Argentina’s reforms are more than economic: For most Argentines, cooperation among political rivals is a reason for patience amid economic reform (The Monitor’s Editorial Board, June 25, 2024, CS Monitor)

Mr. Milei’s biggest challenge may be in keeping a political consensus for his difficult reforms. He has brought key opposition figures into his Cabinet. And in a June 13 vote in the Senate, he won incremental changes that mix spending cuts with measures to strengthen cooperation between national and local officials.

In March, Mr. Milei asked ordinary citizens for their “patience and trust.” The reforms enacted so far have exacerbated hardships. The percentage of people living in poverty has reached the highest it’s been in 20 years (57.4% nationally). Yet two polls this month found that as many as 63% of citizens are willing to stay the course.

Their confidence may rest on a willingness of Argentina’s political leaders to work together with transparency. “It was crucial that he showed that he can work with the opposition to get something approved,” Eugenia Mitchelstein, a political analyst at the University of San Andrés in Buenos Aires, told The Wall Street Journal. “If everything is a conflict, and no negotiation, he won’t get anything done.”

Mr. Milei received similar advice this week during a brief visit with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. While Argentina makes far-reaching economic reforms, it is important to protect “social cohesion,” Mr. Scholz said. Greece won that key battle. Argentina seems ready to do the same.

THE OTHER TRUMP:

Biden clings to Trump’s trade policy, preventing the US from overtaking China (NARUPAT RATTANAKIT AND IAIN MURRAY, 06/24/24, The Hill)

Not only have these tariffs failed to dent Chinese trade dominance, but they hurt the American economy by raising prices, disrupting supply chains, and inviting retaliation. The U.S. needs better trade policies to compete and succeed globally.

One enormous opportunity to restore America as the world’s biggest trade partner is to secure a deal with other Asian nations, especially in Southeast Asia, a combined emerging market projected to be the fourth-largest economy in the world by 2030.

So far, the Biden administration has failed to make progress on that effort. By sidelining for domestic reasons traditional trade issues such as market access, tariff reduction and market liberalization, the Biden administration’s stalled trade pillar in the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity has real limitations. This has frustrated key partners in Asia.

Launched in 2022 under the White House’s Indo-Pacific Strategy, the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity fails to offer a broad economic plan. The framework cannot even be called a free trade agreement; instead, its four pillars are modeled after former President Trump’s restrictive U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which U.S. Trade Representative Ambassador Katherine Tai views as the blueprint for modern trade deals.

More than a year after its launch, an annual survey by the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies reveals declining optimism about the framework among Southeast Asians, with positive sentiments dropping and uncertainties rising. Asians are concerned about the framework’s effectiveness and its failure to provide market access. The survey also highlights the frustration with the added compliance costs, necessary to adhere to the restrictive regulations, standards and agreements set forth within the framework, coupled with a lack of tangible economic benefits.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration’s use of export controls and tariffs are supposed to target China for its unfair trade practices, but these measures impact Southeast Asia, such as in its production of bifacial solar panels.

SCIENCE VS SINOPHOBIA:

Lab Leak Mania: Why did the New York Times publish an op-ed supporting the lab leak theory? (PAUL OFFIT, JUN 24, 2024, Beyond the Noise)

In a one-hour video, the TWiV team addressed each of the “Five Key Points” proffered by Chan. The group consisted of Vincent Racaniello (virologist), Alan Dove (microbiologist), Rich Condit (viral geneticist), Brianne Barker (immunologist), and Jolene Ramsey (microbiologist). The video was released on June 10, 2024, one week after Chan’s publication in the New York Times. This wasn’t the first time that the TWiV team had discussed the origin of SARS-CoV-2; it was the ninth. Previous guests have included evolutionary biologists who had directly investigated the events in Wuhan; specifically, Michael Worobey, Kristian Anderson, Eddie Holmes, Marion Koopmans, and Robert Garry, who had collectively published a paper in the journal Science in 2022 titled, “The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan Was the Early Epicenter of the COVID-19 Pandemic.” This paper showed that all the early cases of SARS-CoV-2 clustered around the southwestern section of a wet market in Wuhan where animals susceptible to coronavirus were illegally sold and inadequately housed. Worobey and his team had shown that 1) the early cases had direct or indirect contact with the market and 2) none of the early cases occurred around the Wuhan Institute of Virology. This single paper was devastating to Chan’s hypothesis.

THOSE DISAPPOINTED BY gOD:

The God-Haunted World of ‘Chinatown’: A look back at the neo-noir classic on its 50th anniversary. (Hannah Long, June 22, 2024, The Dispatch)

Whereas the god of Genesis pronounces creation good in its inception, reflecting himself, Chinatown reverses this. Every authority is fundamentally compromised or selfish. Women are liars; men are boors; fathers abuse their daughters; the police lack honor; there is no appeal to heaven. Even the act of life-giving is poisoned by power.

The makers of Chinatown were not unique in their cynicism. In the 1960s and ‘70s, screenwriters were bent on subverting the studio system rules and tropes established by the last generation. But like every rebellious teen, those anti-mythmakers fit into their own tradition. There are as many films portraying the seedy underbelly of Hollywood as there are lauding its glittering promise. From Norman Maine in A Star is Born walking into the ocean to Norma Desmond madly gyrating into the camera in Sunset Boulevard, disillusion and impotence are deep parts of the California myth. While Chinatown distills the trope with such clarity and feeling that it has become the platonic anti-ideal, it doesn’t create a new thing.

In fact, chucking the Christian myth actually means restoring a far more conservative vision, the “restoration of order”—but an ancient order. In Chinatown, time is cyclical, choice is an illusion, gods are ruled by their appetites, and the world will go on thus forever. It’s not the world of Yahweh, but the world of Zeus.

And yet, despair is the tribute that unbelief pays to faith. Chinatown wouldn’t be half as sad, or remotely as great—and it is very great—were it not a film that expected a good city and a righteous builder.

FIXING W’S BIGGEST MISTAKE:

Might Iran go soft on the West? (Sophia Burke, 6/20/24, GZero)

The council’s inclusion of reformist Masoud Pezeshkian surprised many, but even more shockingly, he has proven an unlikely but fierce competitor against prominent right-wing opponents. Pezeshkian is drawing support from younger voters and disillusioned Iranians who, in years past, boycotted elections. Meanwhile, the conservative vote is being split among the five other candidates.

On the campaign trail, Pezeshkian has shared his intention of improving relations with the US – namely by reviving the 2015 nuclear deal – and softening Iran’s hijab law, both of which would constitute dramatic shifts in policy.

They’ve been trying to come in from the Cold since at least 9/11.

YOU SAY YOU WANT A DEVOLUTION…:

The Evolution of Empire (JOHN ANDREWS, 6/21/24, Project Syndicate)

The trite answer to the question of why empires fall is that they become victims of their own success, growing too large, too corrupt, too exhausted to fend off energetic newcomers. As the Arab philosopher and historian Ibn Khaldun argued in the fourteenth century, empires are like living organisms: they grow, mature, and die. […]

Almost a half-century ago, John Bagot Glubb, a British general who commanded the Jordanian army from 1939 until 1956, published a book entitled The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival. His thesis was essentially the same as Ibn Khaldun’s, only with the added claim that almost all empires rise and fall over a period of roughly 250 years. Putting aside the obvious flaws in Glubb’s arithmetic (the Ottoman Empire certainly did not “end” in 1570), the core idea should not be dismissed too casually. After all, historians now give the Qing Dynasty a lifespan of 267 years, and the Mughal Empire of Das’s book began to lose territory after only two centuries.

A pessimist might point out that today’s China began with the Communist victory in 1949, and that America’s quasi-imperial power began 201 years ago with the Monroe Doctrine. Time may not be on the side of those who place their trust in America to protect democracy and “liberal Western values.”

What makes America unique is that our “Empire” has never expanded outward much–the Philipines and Cuba, Germany and Japan, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc were all turned back to their people in short order. Instead, we have become too large to be governed effectively entirely within our own borders. We exceed optimal state size by orders of magnitude. It’s why we will devolve into a series of smaller nations though likely still bound together in a British-style commonwealth.