Ideologies

IDEOLOGIES
Wed. May 17th, 2023

Religions as the Largest and Longest-Lived Category of Ideologies

For the first three thousand years after writing was invented, all ideologies were religions, or working parts of religions (for example, the ideology that kings were the shepherds of their people was a working part of the religion of the ancient Israelites).

 

Ideologies and the Invention of Writing

After writing was invented, we can study ideologies by studying texts -- by reading things which have been written, ancient and modern.  People almost certainly had ideologies before writing was invented, but studying those ideologies today is much much harder.  We have to deduce what we can from studying what articles people wanted their surviving relatives to bury with them after they died -- articles that could survive (or at least leave traces) in the earth in the vicinity of the skeleton of the dead person, so that we can study them -- "grave goods" -- thousands of years later.  But for the period after writing was invented, we have whole books we can study, filled with ancient ideas -- and ideas are the stuff of ideologies.

 

The Great Ideologies

Colleges teach courses on the great religions of the world.  Perhaps in the future there will be college courses on the great ideologies of the world.  These could be of two kinds -- good courses on the great ideologies, and bad courses on the great ideologies.  The bad courses on the great ideologies will omit religions entirely, based on the false assumption that religions are not ideologies.  The good courses on the great ideologies will include religions -- while also including Karl Marx and Ayn Rand.

In other words, if religion and political science are two different college subjects -- two different disciplines -- then the good courses on the great ideologies are going to be inter­disciplinary.

 

Why Do People Have Ideologies?

Ideologies are not a disease of the human brain.  They provide a system for integrating knowledge of the world with beliefs about desirable behavior.  Most people want an organizing system which does that kind of integrating.

There can be, I think, a small number of people who organize their knowledge and beliefs without an ideology.  Trying to do without an ideology is like organizing your knowledge and beliefs using Library of Congress Subject Headings.  Subject headings were a system invented by librarians -- including a lot in the United States -- for finding books on a  particular topic in large libraries -- a system that achieved its highest level of success and sophistication in the last years before computer catalogs for libraries were invented and reached a certain level of competence -- after which subject headings gradually faded out of the picture as a way to help people find books on a topic in libraries.

Basically, a large set of subject headings, such as the Library of Congress Subject Headings, provide a way to put topics in alphabetical order in a catalog, with cross-references leading back and forth between related ideas and/or different names for the same idea.

Something like a system of subject headings could, in theory, function as an alternative to an ideology as a way to organize knowledge and beliefs in a person's brain .  Not so much the alphabetical order, but the cross-references.

            Oppression.  See also Discrimination.
            Hate.  See also Oppression.
            Discrimination, Types of.  See, for example, Racial discrimination.

If any one of us could have neural pathways in our brain connecting different but related topics like that -- to assist us in the storage and retrieval of relevant memories, and relevant ideas that we have learned from reading and from hearing the talk of wiser heads like our parents and teachers -- then -- well -- wow.

But an ideology is simpler than having hundreds or thousands of home-made cross-ref­erences in our brain.  In fact, buying into an ideology is a lot like inheriting a set of cross-references from our ancestors.  Or to make another metaphor, specifically for people who read, buying into an ideology is sort of like purchasing a set of great books, to organize the less fun-oriented part of your reading. 

If looked at from a point of view like that, ideologies do not seem like a dumb idea.

 

But Ideologies Do Start Wars

But ideologies do start wars.  For many centuries in our history, those wars are labeled the "wars of religion."

But for the twentieth century, one can call those wars the "economic theory wars."  In the twentieth century, the ideological wars  were the shooting wars that were fought between two competing economic theories, capitalism and communism.

In the future, there will be other ideologies, and those ideologies will be competing with each other, and will give rise to new categories of ideological wars.  By wars, we mean people killing each other because of their differing beliefs -- usually people pre-organized into nations.

Really, being starry-eyed about the future of human history is just a dumb idea.  Ideological wars are a bad thing, but how can we stop people from fighting them -- it isn't any different from asking how can we stop people from murdering other people.  Do you really believe that we will get noticeably closer to an ideal universe in the next ten generations?

 

The Future and the Past

In our day and time, people are enamored of the future.  People say that the future is where we will live the rest of our lives.  But our ideas cannot come from the future.  Our ideas can only come from an organized knowledge of our experience -- which is our past.

What we carry with us into the future is our experience of human nature, and our experi­ence of the natures of the other beings and creatures we live with on our planet.

DO NOT underestimate the importance of our past as a resource for planning for our future.  HE WHO ignores our experience of human nature is a fool.

 

Wars and Self-Sacrifice

Wars are the main part of human life where people sacrifice their lives for a cause.

Wars are fought between nations, but different nations often make different choices between competing ideologies.  Then a war is not only fought between two nations -- or many nations lined up on two sides -- but it is also fought between two ideologies.

But to restate the previous point, wars are an arena where sacrifices take place -- specifically, an arena where people sacrifice their lives for a greater good or cause.

The word "arena" is both literal and metaphorical.  In the literal sense, the ancient Colos­seum in Rome was built around an arena where Christians sacrificed their lives for an ideology, namely their religious beliefs.

But while we are talking about the Colosseum, we should also mention that people sacrificed their lives for other causes in that Roman circle of bleachers for shows.  Gladiators also sacrificed their lives according to the principle that one man is killed, and the other man is fed at the public expense; while crowds of people of average and below-average virtue came to watch.

 

Animal Sacrifice

The idea of sacrifice is very ancient in the human mind.  Animals were sacrificed.  But animal sacrifices were, in their origin, a performance of a ritual before eating meat.  The ritual included the killing of the animal -- which is necessary before eating it.  When the ritual is removed -- as it is in modern times , aside from the saying of grace -- the animal still has to be killed to be eaten.  But in modern technologically advanced societies, the animal is killed out of sight of most of the eaters.  It would actually make sense to say that in the United States today, and many other parts of the world, most of the eaters of the meat are paying NOT to have to watch the killing of the animal.

 

Self-Sacrifice

We can assume that the idea of self-sacrifice is also ancient.  Wars are an ancient human behavior, and when one side wins a war, the survivors can say that the dead sacrificed their lives for the sake of their group, their tribe, their village, their kingdom.

Usually one side loses a war, and then other words are used; the winning side may use the words "dying in vain."  But the group, the tribe, the village, the kingdom that lost the war can still say that the dead sacrificed their lives for the group.  They can still honor their dead.

People remote from the experience of war can say that the idea of sacrifice is "a fancy" or "a fantasy" or a "tendentious interpretation."  But if we inquire carefully into people's emo­tions and behavior, we find that many people are sincere in honoring their country's dead.  Ultimately, the gratitude and its sincerity, if present, is the longest surviving memory of the war by its survivors (as opposed to its historians).

 

Another Form of Sacrifice

Then there is a form of sacrifice where human beings sacrifice human beings other than themselves.  We call this human sacrifice.  It is ancient too.  It needs to be mentioned, because if we do not mention it, our classification of types of sacrifice will be a failure.  But for this essay, we do not need to dwell on it.  It was also accompanied by ritual.

 

Ideology and Its Sacrifices

The types of sacrifice which we have described are major forms of sacrifice.  Major forms of sacrifice are always tied in with ideologies.  Part of the function of ideologies is to justify and honor sacrifices.

Sacrifices are an important theme in the Bible.  In the book of Genesis, Abraham almost sacrifices his son Isaac based on words which Abraham heard his God say.  At the last minute, Isaac's life was spared when an angel provided an animal -- a ram -- for Abraham to sacrifice instead. 

Long ago, some silly ancient fool tacked on a moral to that story, that Abraham was rewarded -- he received the reward of not having to kill his son, and a blessing along with it -- because Abraham was prepared to obey the command which he heard from his God.

But a human being -- one who can fight their way free of the ideological clutter which is the overstock of every single human brain -- can easily see that that is not the moral of the story of Abraham, and Isaac, and the knife, and the bundle of firewood.  The moral of the story is that it is better to sacrifice an animal in worshipping God, than it is to sacrifice a human being in worshipping God.  God set up the situation so that this point sank in unforgettably with Abraham, and unforgettably with Abraham's descendants in perpetuity.

And some fool sneaked into the story the idea that it is a story about obedience.  But the truth is that if Abraham had said to God "Lord, I will not sacrifice my son on your altar" then God would have said to Abraham "Blessed are you, Abraham, and blessed will be your descendants forever, because you knew that I your God will never lay human sacrifice upon you as a duty."  Hear, O Israel:  hear, O United States:  hear, all ye followers of the Abraham­ic religions: The belaying of the order to kill Isaac was God's plan from the beginning!  God made an impression on Abraham his worshipper, and the impression remains with all of Abraham's children unto this day.  That is the real moral of this story in the Bible.

This story shows that our ideas about sacrifice are regulated by our ideologies.  And sometimes, when some ancient anonymous fool has tacked on a false moral to a story about sacrifice, we can still fight our way free to appreciating the real moral of the story in our hearts -- even if we cannot find the words to get the real moral across our tongues.

Sacrifices may also be an important theme in the sacred books of other religions.  But the current writer is without any knowledge on that topic or question.

But the fool's moral does advance the ideology of war.  Men like Abraham do expose their sons to the danger of losing their lives for the sake of their country.  And obedience is the key to understanding the sacrifices people make in wars.  But when that happens, it is a self-sacrifice by Isaac.  Abraham returns thanks to God for the bravery and obedience of his son.  But when a son goes to war, his father does not carry the knife.  His father does not order his son to carry firewood as part of a plan that the father will tie up his son and kill him and burn him on an altar.  The knowledge of these things is an unstated but implicit but very, very deep part of the ideology of the Abrahamic religions.

 

A New and Despicable Ideology, Not Yet Named, in My Country

There is a new ideology walking up and down and going hither and yon in my country, as yet unnamed.  It is the ideology that says all politicians are crooked and corrupt.  We could call it the ideology of distrust or mistrust.

This ideology is worthless and immature.  If you have a low opinion of the honesty of your leaders, it can only be because you have a low opinion of your own honesty.  Every honest person knows that some leaders are honest, and other leaders are to various degrees dishonest.  Honest citizens have a special sense of smell which helps them determine which of their leaders are honest.

The ideology of distrust can only lead to one outcome, namely the replacement of our democracy and republic -- the political ideology we have inherited from the writers of our constitution -- with a dictatorship.  With a dictatorship comes a Hobson's choice of no voting or only pretend voting, in which the votes are not honestly counted.

 

A Sort of Conclusion

Joni Mitchell wrote a song about trying to look at things from both sides.  In this essay, we tried to look at ideologies from several different sides.  We tried to talk about the good side of ideologies, and the bad side of ideologies.  We suggested that human ideologies are closely connected with war -- war as an activity which human beings take part in -- and closely connected with every major kind of sacrifice. 

At the end of this essay, we can only ask people to think about their ideologies.  We can only ask people not to approach ide­ologies as a mere object of loathing.  But then we can also only ask people -- especially survivors -- to examine their ideology with re­spect, but also with every ounce of intelli­gence which they can muster.

Frank Newton