The role of ideology keeps coming up again and again, often with people only barely recognizing it. And this seemed to be a moment crying out for some clarification. I'd like to start with a comment I wrote in response to comment by metamars. I wrote:
| | I Agree With Everything You Say Here
except for your bizarre insistence that "this has nothing to do with ideology":
I personally am not very ideological, so I don't look at this so much as "pushing Obama to the left". Rather, I look at this as saving the country from financial armegeddon, which will directly relate to the ability of the United States to lead the world to a greener, planet-saving future.
We can't afford to waste yet another 8 years, which could be well spent moving the planet to a sustainable future. To me, this has nothing to do with ideology. If the sea level is rising, water resources are getting stressed, arable farm land is being lost, and we are still hooked on burning hydrocarbons, 8 years from now, your ideology isn't going to make a fig of difference when it inevitably becomes your turn to suffer drought, lung cancer, hunger, and poverty.
The essence of ideology is how one parses the world--not just the physical world, but the moral and conceptual world as well. So the connections you make in this passage are your ideology made manifest. |
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This is a crucial point, deeply obscured by our history, and repeated mischaracterizations of ideology (typified by the trope, "I have ideas, you have an ideology!").
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One clarifying perspective on ideology comes from the developmental psychologist Robert Kegan, whose work synthesizing the tradition of Piaget and Kohlberg I've cited a number of times before. As I've explained, Kegan's elegant explanation for the logic involved was simple: at each stage, what was background/context/subject at the stage before moves to the fore, becoming foreground/content/object, so that it can be consciously dealt with. That gives rise to the following table:
| Kegan's Subject/Object Schema of Cognitive Development | | Stage | We Are:
Subject
(structure of knowing) | We Have:
Object
(content of knowing) | Underlying Structure | | 1 | Perceptions
SOCIAL PERCEPTIONS
Impulses | Movement
Sensation |  | | 2 | Concrete
POINT OF VIEW
Enduring Dispositions | Perceptions
SOCIAL PERCEPTIONS
Impulses |  | 3
Traditionalism | Abstractions
MUTUALITY/
INTERPERSONALISM
Relationship
Inner states | Concrete
POINT OF VIEW
Enduring Dispositions
Needs, Peferences |  | 4
Modernism | Abstract Systems
Ideology
INSTITUTION
Relationship-Regulating Forms
Self-authorship | Abstractions
MUTUALITY/
INTERPERSONALISM
Relationship
Inner states
Subjectivity
Self-consciousness |  | 5
Post-
Modernism | Dialectical
INTER-
INSTITUTIONAL
Self-transformation | Abstract Systems
Ideology
INSTITUTION
Relationship-Regulating Forms
Self-authorship
Self-regulation
Self-formation |  |
At level 3, abstractions are subject. At level 4, they are object, and abstract systems are subject. Abstract systems, paired with ideology, then become object at level 5.
What does this mean, in everyday terms? The bottom line is Simple: at level 4 one can think systematically about abstract ideas, taking them as object, and this is the essence of ideology.
Elaborating, things get a little more complicated, but not that much. Level 4, the stage associated with modernism, is where liberalism emerges as a coherent body of ideas, just as the potential for true individual autonomy emerges as well ("self-authorship"). Prior to that, level 3 is associated with traditional society, in which the background subject of the self is defined by the existing social roles and relationships ("MUTUALITY/INTERPERSONALISM; Relationship"). These social roles and relationships reflect implicit ideological relationships, but they can be incredibly murky.
On the other side, level 5 makes it possible to take ideology as object, which means, among other things, that one can essentially use ideology like a tool, in fact, one can use a whole array of different ideologies, just as one can have a tool kit with a wide variety of different tools.
From this perspective, one can look at the current financial crises and the Obama administration response, and certain things pop out that would otherwise remain murky at best. For one thing, the Wall Street mindset can be viewed as shaping its own particular form of level 3 consciousness, where the social roles, relationships and practices shape the very foundations of consciousness, the background of cognition used to think about the objects of the world. The abstractions cannot be questioned in terms of any larger framework. Which helps to explain the sort of puzzling situation pointed out by Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism:
What is amazing is the degree to which Bernanke has been unable to process what has happened over the last year and a half. It isn't simply that he is trying to restore status quo ante; he seems to see the only possible operative paradigm as the status quo ante. Worse, he has a romanticized view of it too.
We had a massive stock market bubble, followed by an even bigger asset orgy, with housing at the epicenter, but plenty of other types got dragged along with it. Having asset appreciation fueled by debt is NOT how a healthy economy operates. It is going to take some time for the excesses to work themselves through. Carmine Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff's study of major postwar financial crises have found stock prices take 3 1/2 years to bottom.
But Ben believes the trend from here has to be up, and seems unable to consider that rather than the risk appetite being irrationally low now, it may have been irrationally complacent earlier.
The question here is not a matter of IQ. Bernanke is a very smart man. But cognitive complexity is not IQ. Which is why it really doesn't matter how smart Bernanke is. He simply lacks the cognitive framework needed to grasp another reality beyond the one he is already familiar with.
And that's the problem in a nutshell. And not just with respect to the financial crisis. That's only the most pressing and most obvious example. On issue after issue, our political system has come to be dominated by "intellectual" cliques who are, essentially separate communities, each with their shared level 3 consciousness, incapable of engaging in true ideological thought, with is the bare minimum necessary for genuine, mature critical thinking. What we actually need to solve the most pressing problems we face is actually one step beyond that, at level 5. But getting to level 4 would at least provide a significant step forward, and would allow us to make progress, even on the most intractable problems, though fundamental solutions could still not be achieved.
As this viewpoint should make clear, all talk about "pragmatism" versus "ideology" is nothing but muddle-headed babbling. The most pragmatic thing we can possibly do is to get clearer, more conscious and more able to deal with things from an ideological perspective. It is only through becoming more ideologically adept that we can become free from limiting assumptions whose very existence we cannot even see without some degree of ideological awareness. |
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