I've written repeatedly about Robert Kegan's developmental model of cognitive complexity, based on the earlier work of Piaget and Kohlberg. Among other things, it can provide a useful perspective on an aspect of debates about ideology. Kegan uses the term "ideology" in a very particular sense, which isn't necessarily the same thing we mean in talking about political ideologies, but it's a useful sense, nonetheless, and provides an angle of attack that illuminates some issues better than anything else I'm aware of.
Kegan's model seeks to explain common aspects of cognition across the entire range of areas studied--including reasoning about physical sciences (Piaget's forte), moral reasoning (Kohlberg), psychotherapy (Kegan's own area of expertise), and personality development (Erick Erickson), among others. It's essence is a common structural relationship connecting each successive developmental stage to the stage before: What is the background, subject or context of consciousness in one stage becomes the foreground, object or content of consciousness in the next.
Stage 3, which Kegan identifies with adulthood in a relatively static traditional society, has the social roles and relationships of that society as its background, subject or context. Other things identified as subject at this level include abstractions, inner states, subjectivity, and self-consciousness. At Stage 4, all of these become object-capable of being reflected upon and manipulated. Critically reflecting on abstractions as content requires a context of abstract systems, while reflecting on social roles and relationships as objects requires a context of self-authorship. Combined, these two produce an ideology (an abstract system of ideas) supporting personal autonomy (self-authorship)-otherwise known as liberalism. Only this last step is my own. All the rest is directly from Kegan.
When I was in college, I was obsessed with the first third of the twentieth century. It wasn't because I thought things were better back then-far from it. However, they did at least seem exciting and full of possibility: monarchists, communists, fascists, imperialists, anti-colonialist nationalism, and civil rights movements operated simultaneously in what was certainly the most diverse ideological mix the world has ever seen (the literature and art wasn't bad, either). Compared to the incredibly boring and corporate loving 1990's, it certainly was alluring.
Suddenly, he goes on, there are signs that we may be in for a bit of an ideological shakeup. Which raises the questions: what is ideological struggle, anyways? A minimalist answer, I think is fairly simple: it's a struggle over what sort of model to use in organizing society. Of course, in practice it gets rather messy, since each different model comes with its own set of assumptions that make side-by-side comparisons difficult, if not impossible. In his classic work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn advanced an historical argument that even in the refined rationalist realm of science, fundamental shifts from one model to another were in some sense trans-rational--competing models were incommensurable with one another, since they entailed different definitional frameworks that precluded straight-forward comparisons. Loosely speaking, we could think of them comprising different quotient spaces, dividing the world up in fundamentally different ways, as I discussed in my earlier diary, "Quotient Spaces In Politics".
Beyond the scientific realm, it gets much worse. For a true believer in the early-modern ideology of the divine right of kings, for example, anyone questioning the ideology was cast as an agent of Satan. That certainly puts a crimp in your attempts at comparative ideology. And, really, that's the way that most ideological struggle is carried out: true believers in one ideology cast all others as agents of evil, end of story. It's not about an intellectual exercise in model-building and testing, it's about quasi-religious belief. In a way, though, it's both. One key to understanding the past 40 years of American politics is that conservatives understand this in their bones, while liberals understand it not at all.
Lately, I've been thinking about quotient spaces in politics. What's a quotient space? Take a look at a wall calender, dividing the continuous flow of time into days, weeks, months and years-cycles within cycles within cycles, or an analogue clock, dividng time into seconds, minutes, hours and 12-hour cycles. These are commonplace examples of what mathematicians call quotient spaces. Wikipwedia explains:
In topology and related areas of mathematics, a quotient space (also called an identification space) is, intuitively speaking, the result of identifying or "gluing together" certain points of a given space. The points to be identified are specified by an equivalence relation. This is commonly done in order to construct new spaces from given ones.
For a mathematician, time is a space-a one dimensional space, a line. We glue it together by identifying all midnights, thus making every day, and every time equivilent with the same day and time of every other day. Or we glue it together by identifying all January firsts, making every year, and every day of the year equivalent with the same day of every other years. Okay, you say, big deal. A fancy poants way to talk about time. But what's that got to do with politics?
The proper perspective for viewing the NYT McCain story, the unfolding food fight, and the continuing fallout, is Gramsci's twin concepts of the war of position and the war of movement. I've written about this several times before, but here's a quick refresher.
(A) Gramsci's motivation was that the predicted worker's revolution did not occur in the mot advanced capitalist countries, as Marxist theory predicted. He therefore sought to explain why this was so, and what to do about it. The answers he came up with, described briefly below, have been adapted by people whose viewpoints are far removed from his--Rush Limbaugh, for one--so there is no need to accept his initial premises, if--like I do--one finds his descriptions of processes compelling.
(B) Grmsci attributed the failure to make an anti-capitalist revolution to the capture of worker's ideology, and organizations by the hegemonic (ruling or dominant) culture, transmitted by institutions such as the church, compulsory education, popular culture, etc. as well as appeals to bourgoise ideologies, such as nationalism, consumerism, careerism, etc. which also enjoy their own forms of instutional support.
Such institutions and ideologies have both their own independent rationale and function in their own spheres, as well as their function in the largr social system. Gramsci's conception allows us to view both institutions and narratives at varying different levels of abstraction operating according the same over-all logic, without denying or distorting the fact that they also follow their own particular logic as well.
(C) To overcome the power of hegemony, and create a workers revolution, Gramsci argued for a two-fold strategy, First, a "war of position" to build working-class counter-institutions, and take over bourgoise ones while promulgating working-class ideology. Second, once this stage was successful, then a "war of movement" to the actual insurrection against capitalism, with mass support that Marxist theory originally predicted.
Consciously or not, the American right has adopted Gramsci's fundamental insight, but adapted it to their somewhat different position in society. On the one hand, as Gramsci advised, they have dilligently built up their own institutional infrastructure, and attacked existing instriutional structures that they do not control, seeking either to take over or cripple or destroy them. On the other hand, they have combined the war of position and war of movement into a more integrated whole, frequently taking advantage of a constellation of positions to launch a "war of movement" attack on an insitution they wish to cripple, destroy or take over, or an idea, principle, value, or narrative they wish to discredit, or subvert.
With this in mind, the NYT McCain story can be viewed as particularly involving:
(1) The expression of conservative identity politics, a binary worldview that involves the valorization of all things "conservative" and the demonization of "liberals" specifically, and anything generally that stands opposed to, or outside of self-defined "conservatism." I've written about this previously, back in 2006 in diaries at MyDD here, here, here, here and here.
(2) The narrative of "personal virtue" as the foundational concern of politics, which is a core conservative belief dating back at least to Hesiod's Works and Days, and heavily inscribed into the DNA of the Western Worlds in the writings of Plato and Aristotle. This narrative is strongly connected to cognitive developmental levels two and three in Robert Kegan's schema, which I've previously described here and here, for example.
(3) The rightwing war on fact-based (i.e. "liberal) journalism as a specific facet of their overall attack on modernity, empiricism, reason and critical thought. The NY Times, as the nation's leading daily newspaper has long been a prime target in this war, and has long been significantly compromised by their successes.
For a more detailed description of how this perspective affects our understanding of the NYT-McCain story and its repurcussions, join me on the flip....
Among other things, the discussion thread of my diary "Obama Praising Reagan--An Echo, Not A Choice???", again surfaced the confusion that falsely jumbles together framing, spinning and lying. Because framing is so fundamental, so important, and still so badly misunderstood, I felt compelled to address it, with yet another attempt to set the record straight.
Here's the basic picture:
Framing:
A: "The glass is half full."
B: "The glass is half empty."
Both are objectively true, but represent different views.
Spinning:
A: "The glass is half empty."
B: "Why didn't you say it was half full?"
A: "But that's what I DID say! They're both the same, you know."
Objective truth is involved, but it's being played with. You don't lie outright, but you clearly mislead. The sense in which what you say is true is not the sense in which you intend and expect to be taken.
Lying:
A: "The glass is half full."
B: "Why are you saying it's half empty? You're such a pessimist! Liberals are all pessimists!"
B is simply lying, and then generalizing from the lie.
The false equation of framing, spinning and lying comes in two particularly pernicious forms-those who make the false equation in order to attack framing, and those who make the false equation in order to support spinning and lying. A couple of years back, I stopped posting at Booman Tribune, because Booman dogmatically insisted on this false equation, irrationally rejecting repeated solid arguments, not just from me, but also from a number of other diarists and commentators.
Now, here at OpenLeft, I'm getting it from the other side, from folks who are defending Obama's parroting of rightwing lies about Ronald Reagan as simple acts of "reframing." Well, yes, technically, that's true, since lying is a form of framing, and recasting a lie in a somewhat different form is a form of reframing.
But there are important differences between the essence of lying and framing, and when you obscure those differences, what you're doing is spinning. The best way I can think of to defend framing, and distinguish it from lying and spinning, is talk about where it comes from, and what it's all about-and then to show how deeply contradictory the arguments against it generally are, once you understand what it really is.
