Quotes: What role does ideology play in our thought?

Passages I've come across on how ideology influences thought.

Image by Graehawk on Pixabay. Quotes:

Democracy is premised on the belief that we can trust ordinary people to make consequential decisions. It’s in some ways an enlightenment ideal premised on another enlightenment ideal: the triumph of reason and the capacities of ordinary people. To buy into it, you have to believe that people will be more loyal to principles and discernment than to leaders and groups, and in that sense, democracy has always been a risky project. If democracy requires independent-minded people who can reason well, autocracy requires the opposite, people who will obey orders about what to think as well as do.
"Why Republicans Keep Falling for Trump’s Lies." Rebecca Solnit. New York Times. Jan. 5, 2022.

Now, credulity does not stand alone. In turn, it is part of an attitude called dogmatism — the belief in and defense of "truth." Those who believe strongly in "truth" will try to find it through the mechanism of belief. We are today a "belief explosion" which throws skepticism to the winds and attaches itself in a credulous manner to mental malpractice and intellectual humbuggery of every kind — to faking it, small and big. Without dogmatism, the Fake Factor could not exist. Because of dogmatism, that ancient enemy, everything goes, or very nearly.
Arthur Herzog. The B.S. Factor: The Theory and Technique of Faking It in America. (1973) Baltimore, Maryland: Penguin Books Inc., 1974. p. 183.

Constant development is the law of life, and a man who always tries to maintain his dogmas in order to appear consistent drives himself into a false position. That is why Emerson said that foolish consistency was the hobgoblin of little minds... * * * A devotee of Truth may not do anything in deference to convention. He must always hold himself open to correction, and whenever he discovers himself to the wrong, he must confess it at all costs and atone for it.
Gandhi. Young India, March 2, 1922 and September 20, 1928. Quoted in Louis Fischer's 1962 book The Essential Gandhi

No ideology can tolerate a full historical consciousness. Only realism can...
Clive James. Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts. (2007) New York: Norton, 2008. p. 44.

Our fearsome gods have only changed their names: they now rhyme with ism.
C. G. Jung. Aspects of the Feminine. (Collected Works.) Translation by R. F. C. Hull. New York: MJF Books, 1982. p. 93.

For an ideology differs from a simple opinion in that it claims to possess either the key to history, or the solution for all the "riddles of the universe," or the intimate knowledge of the hidden universal laws which are supposed to rule nature and man.
Hannah Arendt. The Burden of Our Time. London: Secker and Warburg, 1951. Published in the US as The Origins of Totalitarianism. p 159.

Ideology functions as a machine to destroy information, even at the price of making assertions in clear contradiction of the evidence.
Jean-Francois Revel, La Connaissance Inutile, p. 153. Quoted in Clive James. Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts. (2007) New York: Norton, 2008. p. 605.

In 1897, French sociologist Émile Durkheim theorized four different types of suicides — the egoistic, the altruistic, the anomic, and the fatalistic —
I love how sure and clear these words sound. I love anything that breaks suffering down into a clean taxonomy you might look to when lost and nod your head in the performance of understanding.
sam sax, Yr Dead, San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2024. p. 207.

Categorizing is necessary for humans, but it becomes pathological when the category is seen as definitive, preventing people from considering the fuzziness of boundaries, let alone revising their categories. Contagion was the culprit. If you selected one hundred independent-minded journalists capable of seeing factors in isolation from one another, you would get one hundred different opinions. But the process of having these people report in lockstep caused the dimensionality of the opinion set to shrink considerably — they converged on opinions and used the same items as causes.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. New York: Random House, 2007. p. 15.

But can it be avoided?

One suspects that philosophy of mind has not in fact been performing the task, which Professor Hampshire recommends, of sorting and classifying fundamental moral issues; it has rather been imposing upon us a particular value judgment in the guise of a theory of human nature. Whether philosophy can ever do anything else is a question we shall have to consider.
Iris Murdoch. "The Idea of Perfection" in The Sovereignty of Good. New York: Schocken Books, 1971. p. 2.

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Roy Moore's movement to promote the Ten Commandments in American civic life

For years, there has been a movement to place large monuments representing the Ten Commandments outside U.S. courthouses. An activist in this movement is Roy Moore, who is currently running to represent Alabama in the U.S. Senate in tomorrow's election (Dec. 12, 2017).

Roy Moore's monument

In August 2003, Alabama's Judicial Inquiry Commission suspended Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore because he refused to obey a federal court order to remove a 2.6-ton granite Ten Commandments monument from the Alabama state judicial building. Moore claimed that the Ten Commandments are the foundation of U.S. law. "Moore installed the privately funded monument in the early hours of August 1, 2001, without consulting any of the other justices on the Alabama Supreme Court," according to CNN. He personally supervised the installation. Three Alabama attorneys claimed offense and sued in October 2001. In 2002, U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson ruled in favor of the attorneys and, upon Moore's appeal, in July 2003 the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals also ruled in favor of the attorneys. Moore was given a deadline of August 20, 2003 to remove the monument. A week in advance of that deadline, he argued: "It is not a question of whether I will disobey or obey a court order. The real question is whether or not I will deny the God that created us." Responding to a last-minute appeal, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to involve itself in the case.

Moore did not comply with the order to remove the monument and he was suspended with pay. The monument was moved out of public view on Aug. 27 and, the next day, about a thousand supporters of Moore rallied at the building. Rev. James Dobson, chairman of Focus on the Family, addressed the crowd: "The separation of church and state is not in the Constitution." Dobson also complained about rulings against prayer in public schools, abortion rights, and the repeal of anti-sodomy laws. Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, attributed these rulings to "activist judge[s]" and said: "The symbolism as well as the substance of this moment cannot escape us. One federal judge has placed the Ten Commandments in a closet. That came after the United States Supreme Court recently welcomed everything else out of the closet." Mississippi Gov. Ronnie Musgrove offered to display the monument at the Mississippi capitol building for a week "to show support for our common Judeo-Christian heritage."

It was not Moore's first time doing this:

"Moore was a circuit judge in Etowah County, northeast of Birmingham, in the late 1990s when he fought a lawsuit seeking to remove a wooden plaque depicting the commandments from his courtroom.

The legal battle propelled him to statewide office in 2000, when the Republican jurist was elected chief justice after campaigning as the 'Ten Commandments Judge.'" [CNN, 8/28/2003]

Choosing a version of the Ten Commandments to display, Bob Minor wrote in 2003, “is to take sides in centuries-old battles between Protestants and Catholics as well as in the history of anti-Semitism” and, furthermore, to accept the final commandment in its entirety is to accept a definition of property that includes a man’s “slaves, his animals, his land, and also his wife.“

As a result of Moore's 2003 protest, the Alabama Court of the Judiciary removed him from office in November 2003.

He returned to the bench when he was elected Alabama's Chief Justice in 2012. The previous year, he had expressed interest in running for President, but his early campaign in 2011 did not succeed.

Influence throughout the nation

In 2003, the city of Casper, Wyoming voted to move a Ten Commandments monument out of a public park where it had been since 1965 and into a separate plaza to be dedicated to showcasing history. The city had been threatened with two lawsuits: one from the Freedom From Religion Foundation and one from the infamous Westboro Baptist Church. The latter wanted to install their own monument in the park to announce that a gay victim of a hate crime was burning in hell.

In 2006, the Christian ministry Faith and Action built a large granite monument outside its headquarters in Washington, D.C. The headquarters are located behind the U.S. Supreme Court, and "the group's president said the tablets were angled so that justices arriving at the high court would see them." (As per Fox News, Sept. 23, 2013. I have removed the link so as not to link to Fox News on principle.) It was vandalized in 2013.

In 2011, in Ohio, Judge James DeWeese, upon being challenged by the ACLU, removed a poster of the Ten Commandments in his courtroom and replaced it with a poster called “Philosophies of Law in Conflict” [see it here] that contrasted the Ten Commandments with the “humanist precept” of "moral relativism." The poster asserted that there are “only two views: either God is the final authority, and we acknowledge His unchanging standards of behavior. Or man is the final authority, and standards of behavior change at the whim of individuals or societies.” The 6th Circuit ruled against DeWeese, who was represented by Pat Robertson’s American Center for Law and Justice, and the Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal. (The ACLU had previously sued DeWeese in 2000 and 2008 for similar displays.)

In 2012, two state representatives in Tennessee, Mike Bell and Matthew Hill, "introduced a bill authorizing counties and cities to set up displays of 'historical documents and monuments and writings' that have been 'recognized to commemorate freedom and the rich history of Tennessee and the United States.'" Bell said that "the Ten Commandments would be one of them." [read the bill] Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, said that the other documents mentioned in the bill were already legal to display, so the bill was only aimed at permitting the display of the Ten Commandments. Lynn pointed out that Protestants, Catholics and Jews recognize separate versions of the Commandments; half of the commandments are not reflected in current laws; and it is "absolutely false" that the Ten Commandments are the foundation of the nation's law.

In 2012, Oklahoma City placed a 6-foot-tall granite Ten Commandments monument at the Capitol in late 2012. (Two years later, a man who claimed to be mentally ill and off his meds and on a mission from Satan pissed on it and drove his car into it, and then walked into the federal building and threatened President Obama and the federal government.)

In 2013, American Atheists designed a 1,500-pound granite monument for the Bradford County Courthouse in Starke, Fla. in response to a Ten Commandments monument that had been placed there the previous year by an organization called Community Men's Fellowship. Bradford County agreed to allow the atheist monument following court-ordered mediation. (The county's attorney said: "What the atheists agreed to is something they could have originally been approved for without a year of money and litigation.") The atheist monument was funded by Stiefel Freethought Foundation and was to have "quotes related to secularism from Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and American Atheists founder Madalyn Murray O'Hair" and the Treaty of Tripoli. American Atheists director of regional operations Ken Loukinen said: "We'd rather there be no monuments at all, but if they are allowed to have the Ten Commandments, we will have our own." Community Men’s Fellowship posted a statement on Facebook acknowledging that “this issue was won on the basis of this being a free speech issue, so don't be alarmed when the American Atheists want to erect their own sign or monument. It's their right.” In 2014, Florida's Levy County, which already had a Ten Commandments monument outside its courthouse, denied a request by the local group Williston Atheists to build a monument similar to the one in Bradford County. The Levy County Commissioners said that the proposed atheist monument did not meet county guidelines because the quotations in the intended design were incomplete.

In 2017, a new Ten Commandments monument outside the Arkansas state capitol was intentionally destroyed by a man who drove his car into it. It was the same man who had driven his car into the Oklahoma monument several years earlier.

In mid-2023, Donald Trump was found liable for raping a woman; the media doesn't figure this topic as prominently into stories about Trump as they did when it was sexual misconduct allegations against Roy Moore.

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Understanding individualism and collectivism: Rick Perry on liberalism

Extreme individualism and extreme collectivism each pose their own problems. Common sense tells us to find a balance where we can work together collaboratively without succumbing either to selfish solipsism or to unthinking herd mentality.

Because political rhetoric often struggles to communicate nuance, politicians may appear to come down on one side or the other: either as individualists or collectivists. The lack of nuance may be even more pronounced in their characterization of their opponents.

William F. Buckley Jr. wrote of the Cold War in his book God and Man at Yale: "The duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world...[and] the struggle between individualism and collectivism is the same struggle reproduced on another level." (His biographer Carl Bogus said that these "may be his historically most important two sentences.")

Originally posted to Helium Network on Oct. 13, 2011.

A case study is the recent campaign literature by Texas Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican candidate for U.S. president in 2012. In On My Honor (2008), Perry complained that "liberals value the preservation of self-esteem above all else" and called out "counterculture activists" for "imposing a culture of self and moral relativism upon the nation." This characterizes the Left as a bunch of individualists. Not long afterward, he published Fed Up! (2010) which Newt Gingrich introduced with this comment: "The Left believes that most people are not capable of pursuing happiness and that a strong centralized government is best able to provide for them." This characterizes the Left as a bunch of collectivists.

Perry seems to have changed his mind, or at least his offensive strategy, over a short period of time. Unlike On My Honor, Fed Up! doesn't mention the terms "moral relativism" or "secular humanism" anywhere, nor does it identify individualism as a threat to "traditional values." Instead, Perry now seems to identify collectivism as a threat against the admirable virtue of individualism. For example, he is bothered by the Supreme Court's "intrusion into personal matters of morality and conscience" as well as by attempts to solve problems on a federal level when the local level usually provides better solutions "tailor[ed]...to our own values and perspectives."

Fed Up! contains laundry lists of the sorts of choices that Perry thinks the federal government should bow out of regulating: food, housing, healthcare, fuel, cars, guns, prayer, holidays, speech, contraception and capital punishment and everything in between. An important question remains: are these private lifestyle choices or can they be regulated by state (if not federal) law? He seems to go back and forth on the answer.

The problem presents itself in this way: Perry says that liberty requires permitting behaviors that don't hurt anyone and restricting only harmful practices. He also says that, under the idea of federalism and the Tenth Amendment, states have the authority to make their own laws. Are we to understand that there is more than one correct interpretation of liberty and more than one possible version of laws that uphold liberty? Or are some state governments mistaken in what they choose to regulate, and if so, does the Tenth Amendment nevertheless give them the right to impose their immoral law upon their citizens? This is a question involving the appropriate balance between individualism and collectivism.

Here is the same problem from another perspective: What should you do if you don't like the way your state government is being run? What if you suffer from a bungled bureaucracy, or worse, are victimized by intolerance? Should you, as a constituent who elects representatives, find a way to participate in politics to attempt to change your neighborhood for the better? On the contrary. Gov. Perry tells you that you should leave the state and go somewhere that is more to your liking. He says this multiple times in Fed Up!. He calls it "voting with your feet." He says that "the people" should call the shots to define the culture and the laws of their particular state, but at the end of the day, if you, as a political minority, remain dissatisfied, you should leave. Ultimately he seems to be saying that individual differences somehow threaten community cohesion and that people need to band together in collectives of like-minded people so that they do not rock the boat.

This is distressing for several reasons. Significantly, it assumes that the plaintiff has the ability to leave. Ill people and poor people may find relocation a hardship. Additionally, many Americans have family ties to a particular state, and telling them to leave the state is telling them that they need to choose between their values and their family. It also assumes that an individual who is bothered by a political situation should find a resolution that meets their own self-interest – moving away so that, in effect, they blind themselves to the problem by no longer having to see it directly – rather than taking the moral high road of putting personal effort into solving the problem, not only for their own sake, but on behalf of those who do not have the ability to advocate for themselves.

Deciding when to adjust our goals toward a particular side of the spectrum between individualism and collectivism, and when to tolerate, expect, or encourage dissenting input from others, is never easy. A good start is to avoid overgeneralizations about our own intentions and about the attitudes of others.

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A Substack post by Rupert Cocke (30 April 2022) pointed out the incompatibility (emphasis mine):

"anarcho-capitalism (A). It takes ultra-liberalism into toxic territory by proposing a hedgehog-like vision of society based purely on individual freedom, with no room for solidarity for the weak or unfortunate. ... reactionary traditionalism (B). These people want to turn the clock back to a golden age, when hierarchies were unquestioned. This approach often resonates with deeply religious people, who feel that modern society is changing too fast. ... the worst element of the left (the revolutionary tradition) [combined] with the worst element of the right (nationalism) (C). Fascism is a good example of this approach. It appeals to people who feel that their lives are meaningless, as Eric Hoffer memorably taught us. A little reflection should show that A and C are basically incompatible. Believers in A see society as being made up of atomized individuals, while believers in C are much more interested in tribal identities. Believers in B can go either way. This gives us two basic combinations, AB and BC."

Emperor Penguins by Terri Stalons from Pixabay

"...this is the modern conservative project: shatter the very idea of a shared society. No community, no only individuals of various ranks in the weird Christian Nationalist hierarchy. The complete inversion of classical definitions of liberal and conservative, of course, but not like any of these muppets have a context for the Locke they keep quoting." — John Rogers, Bsky post1, post2, July 26, 2024

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If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium. There, readers with a paid membership don't have to worry about the paywall.