Thursday, January 6, 2022

Quotes: What role does ideology play in our thought?

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

A crowd of people.
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.
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.

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.

No comments: