[Main Blog Post] The Trouble with "Ideology"

[jprussell]

A much shorter post than my last one, this time fleshing out something that came up in a discussion with a friend: does everyone have an ideology? Should he? Join me to explore what the word means to different folks, what value (and risks) come with it, and what we might do going forward.

Comments

[k_a_nitz]

Given "Ideology" is a key term in Karl Marx's writings I was surprised not to see it mentioned - though it sounds like Jordan Peterson is drawing a bit on Marx there.

[jprussell]

Oh yeah, of course to both counts - Marxism and its intellectual descendants is likely the ideology Peterson mostly takes aim at in his critiques, and I certainly had it in mind when talking about Englightenment-derived rational systems of how to think about the world and what to do about it. Also, Peterson has acknowledged that Marx had some valid critiques mixed in there, even if he strongly disagrees with Marx's prescription on what to do about it. I just 1) didn't want to get too bogged down in specific ideologies, and 2) have not yet read Marx, so he's only been an influence on my thinking on this or any other subject at a remove or three.

[causticus]

It's almost like Jordan Peterson wants religions and ideologies to be entirely distinct things. When in fact they've been intertwined for a very long time. But I get what he's pointing to: the loss any divine or transcendent element from out belief systems.

I do agree that definition games can get quite obnoxious. People get very emotionally attached to a particular definition of some term or phrase and defend that definition like it's their baby.

[jprussell]

Yeah, I think his core insight seems mostly right to me: humans think "religiously" no matter what, and long-standing organic ways of shaping that thinking are less likely to have egregious traps still there, whereas short-lived, artificial ways of shaping that thinking are almost guaranteed to have them. I think he gets (over?) excited about "ideology" as a label for the second category since he was/is literally in his own words obsessed with how Communism and Fascism (definitely ideologies) caused so much badness. But I think, if anything, your point about the need for the divine/transcendence might be even more important than the "incompleteness" of ideologies like Communism, which is what he mostly focused on in Maps of Meaning. Don't know how much that's changed for him in the last few years.

And agreed on over-attachment to definition games. I think it's a symptom of Vico-style "barbarism of reflection" where for highly abstract, linguistic thinkers, the name "is" the thing. Regular contact with stuff that can be meaningfully experienced in ways that aren't its name or how to talk about it is a helpful reminder that words, as useful as they are, are just pointers, and fairly arbitrary ones at that.