Ideology: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) (10 page)

Moving to cultural constraints, we may note that culture refers to
the symbolic and material goods that societies produce. Those will include artefacts, science and technology, art, and social practices. It involves imaginative creativity and encompasses the systems of ideas and of thought that order our worlds and direct our conduct and activities. The cultural constraints on ideologies serve to anchor them firmly into the contexts of time and space, and to fine-tune the logical interpretations that their conceptual arrangements can carry. Take for instance the question of how to eradicate poverty in a particular country. Logically we have a very broad range of possibilities. One solution would be to exterminate the poor. Another would be to transport them to Ruritania – we might call that economic cleansing! A third would be to redefine the concept of poverty so as to exclude the entire living population, say by claiming that we are impoverished only at the point of death. A fourth would be to pre-empt the unequal distribution of resources in the first place, by designing a society in which members contribute to a common pool according to their abilities and extract from it according to their needs (given sufficient resources in the first place). A fifth would be to redistribute resources from the better- to the worse-off.

8. The pun on ‘nothing to lose but our chains’ also conjures up the multiple and indeterminate routes that ideological decontestations can take
.

The first two options are not open to civilized societies: morality and decency, as well as practical considerations, render them culturally invalid. Logic, however, is quite blind to questions of good or evil. The third is an attempt to reconceptualize poverty, but it flies in the face of common-sense usages of the term – another cultural constraint that ideologies would ignore at their peril. Nor would it remove the fact that many people cannot make ends meet: we would simply need to coin a new term for what used to be called poverty. The fourth option envisages an organizational and ideological revolution. It might happen, but would require a major political upheaval. The fifth option, however, operates within current cultural constraining parameters. It is in line with prevailing understandings in many societies, though that is not to claim that it is therefore conservative, or that it is particularly successful in achieving its aim. Moreover, even within those
constraints, there are many alternative methods of redistribution – recall the many conceptions of the concept of equality.

We conclude that meaning is culturally privileged and that, when ideologies construct their arguments, they draw on an exceptionally broad range of conventions and symbols, such as value-systems, religious beliefs, common practices, and scientific and artistic fashions. In that very important sense, ideologies are always located in a particular context. Even when they employ the language of universalism and of abstraction, it refers to understandings that emanate from particular societies at a specific historical time. The notion of universal human rights is a Western cultural notion, developed over the past 400 years or so, that attempts to occupy the high ground of a generic claim about human nature and needs. It is resisted by other cultures for whom differences among humans are more important than their commonalities, or for whom culturally justified suffering – at levels unacceptable to most Western societies – may be inflicted on individuals. However, while cultural constraints may trump logical ones, by blocking off some unpalatable logical possibilities, they may also – in the hands of ideologues – obscure the dictates of logical clarity. The novelty of the notion of cultural constraints, in the final count, is to advance the idea of context a little way further than it was taken by earlier analysts of ideology. Previously, they had seen context as a backdrop to understanding the genesis of ideological thinking and how it reflected the social interests of their bearers. Now, context as a cultural constraint becomes a continuous, living aspect of forming ideologies, integral to their structure and hence to the messages they impart.

Having paid attention to the complex conceptual structure of ideologies, all that remains is to add one final packet of ingredients to the morphological brew. That refers to the four Ps of ideological composition: proximity, priority, permeability, and
proportionality. The feature of
proximity
indicates, as we saw above, that political concepts make no sense on their own. They can only be understood when examined within a particular idea-environment of surrounding concepts. If individuality is proximate to an atomistic conception of human nature, a conception that sees the individual as largely self-sufficient, it will play a different role in the given ideology than it would have were individuality to be proximate to a highly sociable conception of human nature. In the first case it will entail political arrangements that secure an optimal private sphere for individuals; whereas in the second it will recognize the importance of social interaction in order to develop one’s individuality. Ideologies constitute the necessary space in which political concepts take concrete shape.

The feature of
priority
indicates that the meaning of every political concept in an ideology, as well as of the general arguments of that ideology, is dependent on which concepts (and which conception of each concept) are allocated core significance and which are relegated to the periphery of the ideology. Ideologies experience continuous shifting of the units of furniture within their ‘rooms’. A unit may be a centrepiece and be moved later to the side of the room, or even covered up. In the course of the 19th and early 20th centuries, private property migrated within liberal ideology from a core position in the liberal room to a more marginal one. One of the principal functions of ideologies is to rank the major political concepts. Together these concepts are available as a pool of ideas at the disposal of a society, but each ideology chooses those it wishes to emphasize and then arranges the selection in a pecking order. The result is to offer a menu for public consumption through which political decisions may be taken.

Ranking results in a structure of sorts. When we suggest that, to begin with, all ideologies have cores, these are not immanent features that an ideology would have only ideally and irrespective of experience. Instead, these are the ineliminable key concepts that it is deemed to have in actual political usage. Liberalism contains
liberty and progress as core concepts not because this is ordained in some metaphysical outreach, but because that is a conclusion we arrive at by listening systematically to liberals and their critics, and by reading the texts they have written. By analogy, kitchens are not invariably products of a cosmic logic. They are convenient spaces that have developed over time in order to satisfy a basic need – food preparation. By common convention, itself a cultural elaboration of basic needs – and not by natural law – kitchens have cookers and sinks. Those are core units, a minimum kit, without which a kitchen would cease to be a kitchen. Likewise, what we have come to call liberalism would no longer be liberalism if it did not place liberty and progress at the core of its concerns – a necessary if not sufficient minimum for sustaining what has become known as liberalism. If this argument is circular, it is simply replicating the circular logic of a language game. But it also reflects sustained empirical, historical usage.

Surrounding the core are adjacent and peripheral concepts. Adjacent concepts flesh out the core. They restrict its capacity for multiple interpretations and pull it in a more defined direction (for liberalism, an adjacent concept might be democracy, as a way of guaranteeing liberty and progress). Peripheral concepts or ideas are more specific and detailed. Most are still significant to the central meanings carried by the ideology, though some may be marginal (for liberalism, a significant peripheral concept might be opposition to censorship, while an increasingly marginal one might be the right to inherit social status). Most of them are situated on the perimeter of an ideology, between thought and action. That is the point where concepts lose their abstraction (‘liberty’) and are interwoven with the concrete practices sanctioned or condemned by an ideology (‘free entry for refugees into a country’). Peripheral concepts are also historically context-bound and therefore more open to change within the broader framework set by the core concepts. Occasionally, though, changes at the periphery may work through back to the core: the equal rights of women, marginal to 19th-century liberalism, have
become central to the core liberal concepts of individuality and human rationality. Ideological morphology is neither fixed nor shapeless; it is fluid within the Wittgensteinian family resemblances we summoned up above.

9. M. C. Escher’s engraving ‘Concentric rinds’ evokes the complex relationship between the core, adjacent and peripheral concepts characteristic of ideological morphology
.

The feature of
permeability
indicates that ideologies are not mutually exclusive in their ideas, concepts, and conceptions. Rather, they intersect with one another at multiple points of contact. On one level, every one of the concepts an ideology hosts carries an assortment of components within itself. The concept of democracy does not stand on its own. It
contains
a conception of
equality (at the very least, one person one vote) and a conception of liberty (self-government, emancipation from the rule of others). But those are themselves distinct concepts. Hence democracy cannot be disentangled from other concepts, some of whose conceptions help to constitute the concept of democracy, while others undermine it. Thus, some conceptions of equality of opportunity may erode democratic values, and liberty of sorts can be claimed under a tyranny as well. On another level, components of ideologies also intersect with each other: there is extensive agreement among liberals and conservatives about constitutional liberties, and among liberals and socialists about some state intervention in furthering redistribution. Ideologies are not hermetically sealed: they have porous boundaries and will frequently occupy overlapping space. We can refer to them as holding patterns for political ideas, concepts, and words.

The feature of
proportionality
refers to the relative space within each ideology allotted to a particular theme, or cluster of concepts. In part, this is a question of how an ideology wishes to present its arguments. Most libertarians overemphasize individual liberty at the expense of other liberal values such as sociability, rationality, or progress. For them, the securing for individuals of the freedom to act with as little restriction as possible is the prime end of politics, even if this means that individuals make bad choices that inhibit their own progress and that hinder the rational coordination of the actions of one individual with those of another. Inasmuch as libertarians claim to be members of the liberal family, they expand the liberty theme within a limited ideological space in a manner that analysts of liberalism might judge to be disproportionate, while the other themes are squeezed into a small area.

In part this is a question of the best order of magnification for making an impact on the population towards whom the ideology is targeted. What do the authors and disseminators of an ideology want to achieve? Clearly, maximum impact and penetration with respect to their intended consumers. If their arguments are too
detailed and complex, they will attract only professional political theorists and philosophers, but be useless as tools of recruitment under an ideological flag. We may focus on a few pixels in detail yet have no idea of the photograph within which they are situated. If the arguments are too general, like a shot of planet earth from the moon, this may satisfy the undiscerning and those alienated from politics, but be ineffectual as a guide for proceeding on specific policy routes. Too much information is as worthless as too little, as we observed when discussing ideologies as maps. Simplification, and occasionally more dangerously oversimplification, is what ideologies do best.