Webster says a prism is “a medium that distorts, slants, or colors whatever is viewed through it”.
It appears to me that Marx was the first great thinker to have coined the word “ideology”. Ideology is a distinctive form of reasoning about the individual and about the individual in society. Ideology is a systematically biased mode of thinking. Ideologies vary extensively in so far as the idioms used, the extent of bias, the degree of sophistication, the manner in which bias permeates various aspects of theory, and so on.
While ideologies vary widely in certain aspects all ideologies share some common characteristics. An identifiable logical structure is shared by all. This structure includes: 1) a moral dimension, 2) it is biased toward a specific group and is biased against those out side this group, 3) an ideology cannot not directly defend it self because it rests on assumptions that have never been critically examined or even formulated, and 4) Marx believes these assumptions to be “nothing more than the intellectual ‘transcripts’ of the conditions of existence of the social group whose point of view it reflects”.
Like viewing the world through a prism, the ideologue experiences the world in a distorted manner. “What a man does not transcend in reality, he cannot effectively transcend in thought either. The limits of his existence are the limits of his thoughts. His basic assumptions are therefore ultimately nothing but his conditions of existence ‘reproduced’ in thought.”
Quotes from Marx’s Theory of Ideology Bhikhu Parekh
coberst:Why is ideology like a prism?
Webster says a prism is “a medium that distorts, slants, or colors whatever is viewed through it”.
K: so far so good.
C: It appears to me that Marx was the first great thinker to have coined the word “ideology”. Ideology is a distinctive form of reasoning about the individual and about the individual in society. Ideology is a systematically biased mode of thinking. Ideologies vary extensively in so far as the idioms used, the extent of bias, the degree of sophistication, the manner in which bias permeates various aspects of theory, and so on.
K: The very act of thinking is biased. You cannot escape bias, so ideology being a “systematically biased mode of thinking” is a good working definition
of an ideology.
C: While ideologies vary widely in certain aspects all ideologies share some common characteristics. An identifiable logical structure is shared by all. This structure includes: 1) a moral dimension, 2) it is biased toward a specific group and is biased against those out side this group, 3) an ideology cannot not directly defend it self because it rests on assumptions that have never been critically examined or even formulated, and 4) Marx believes these assumptions to be “nothing more than the intellectual ‘transcripts’ of the conditions of existence of the social group whose point of view it reflects”.
K: Now we have problems. 1. a moral dimension. Not so sure about this one. an Ideology does not need to encompass a moral dimension.
2. it is biased toward a specific group and is biased against those outside of this group" This is simply assuming that we are talking about an ideology
such as Nazism or fascism. an ideology doesn’t have to make moral judgements and to say it’s biased against against a group depends on
how you define, say democracy. You can state democratic ideals without an biased against groups outside of this group.
3. this is my biggest problem because it is an assumption itself. How can you know an ideology has never been critically examined or formulated?
My ideologies has gone through the fires and I hold them because they have been formulated and examined.
Now than, you must be speaking of group ideologies which then requires you break out group ideologies and individual ideology, but even here
you run into trouble. For it is an assumption that individuals within a group do not critically examine their own personal or group ideology.
C: Like viewing the world through a prism, the ideologue experiences the world in a distorted manner. “What a man does not transcend in reality, he cannot effectively transcend in thought either. The limits of his existence are the limits of his thoughts. His basic assumptions are therefore ultimately nothing but his conditions of existence ‘reproduced’ in thought.”
K: An ideology is a person’s reflection of the world. In other world, how we see the world becomes our ideology.
So ideology comes afterwards. We see the world and than adapt the ideology that reflects what we see.
The bias comes from our initial reflection which determines the ideology we adapt. If we see the world as cold, mean,
no fair, we adapt a conservative ideology. If the world is positive and changeable, we adapt a liberals ideology. The vision
creates the ideology. Now our vision, our experience, may change which creates a change in our ideology. So the eternal question
about what came first, the chicken or the egg is reflected in this example, what came first, our ideology or our vision of the world.
and here, it seems that the vision of the world came first and the ideology came afterward, reflecting what we saw.
Thank you for that well considered opinion. The above quotes are two aspects to which I must respond.
Centricities are centers of irrational influence.
A child clinging to her mother’s skirt is not an uncommon site. A child with wide eyes and a look of apprehension seeking security and assurance by remaining very close to his mother (his center of balance) is similar to the centricities we all carry forward and often remain with us until we die.
Our centricities, our centers of irrational influence, are often the ego and the group. I suspect that as we get older we focus less on the ego for guidance and more upon the social group. Our nation centric, our ethnic centric, our political centric forces provide us with illusions of security without any independent thinking on our own.
I think that it is worthwhile to focus our attention on the metaphors ‘egocentricity is a disease’ and ‘sociocentricity is a disease’. The cure for both diseases is self-consciousness. Being self-conscious permits us to combat the fever of irrationality caused by both tendencies.
Of the two I suspect sociocentricity causes us and our community the greatest harm. When our ego leads us to do stupid things the harm done is limited because we generally affect only our self and maybe a few others. Sociocentricity, however, can easily be identified as the cause of the destruction and death of millions.
Ethno centric is one form of socio centric attitudes and behavior. Ethno centric is placing ones own race as the privileged group. This form of socio centric behavior is perhaps the most predominate and lethal form of social bias. Regardless of which group we belong to I suspect that one of the most important things one might do to make the world a better place in which to live is for all of us to become self-conscious of these innate human tendencies.
Basic concepts become weapons of warfare within social groups. Basic words such as capitalism, socialism, communism, democracy, freedom, oligarchy, plutocracy, evil, patriotism, terrorism, etc. are twisted and maneuvered to confuse, distort, and to excite members of a group one way or another.
I think that people often have difficulty distinguishing ideological uses of such words from their non ideological uses.
It appears that the key question of an egocentric is “How can I get what I want and avoid having to change in any fundamental way?”
I agree that we are all a product of what we have becone and as such we are biased. However I think that this bias is a matter of degree and its degree of influence is based upon on our Critical Thinking skills. We can minimize our irrational influences if we have prepared our character before hand. As you say we are all biased but we can also become critically self-conscious. Our critical self-consciousness can do battle with our irrational centricities to result in a much less degree of ideology. I think that Obama is a good example of the rational overcoming the irrational to a large degee.
Interesting post and it proposes two things that have come up a few times in various things I’ve read:
That is the vision of human understanding (and, by extension, communication) as consisting of two fundamental components; that is a ‘lens’ or ‘window’ onto a ‘view’ or ‘plain’. The point is that The glass can either clarify or obscure the view from beyond (note that this is not naive realism; the arguments are about our ability to understand and represent various vistas not about our relationship directly to them).
The basic point is that the glass is a barrier that cannot be escaped; it can be changed; maybe if we polished it enough it would be barely noticeable, but it would still be there.
An obvious counterpoint would be the Rortyian concept of walking through new vistas in science. I don’t have his papers to hand but he argues that our engagement and our ideologies are acts of creation, not perception, and that our progressive endeavours (science) can be measured by the new and expansive vistas they open for us to explore. His ideas represent something more creative at first appearance, an ideology through the looking glass as it were, but fundamentally also quite destructive. Also there is a fair amount of choice he posits is available to the gazer.
Are ideologies really a choice?
Does ideology distort the light or does it distort the view?