Ideology: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) (15 page)

Others who speak of ideological fragmentation see that as a reflection of social dislocation and the disintegration of conventional social structures. This view is common among post-Marxists and poststructuralists, of which more in the next chapter, but it is widespread also among those who challenge the uniformly stultifying effects of globalization or even of hegemonic nationalisms. Those challengers applaud the rise of local ideologies, even when they promote single issues, or amalgams of such single issues. The new social movements of the late 20th century are one such example. They encouraged a heady mixture of alternative lifestyles, participatory democracy, ecological responsibility, and equal respect for a multitude of group, gender, and ethnic identities. But fragmentation also makes people more vulnerable to control and manipulation, since horizontal ties among individuals weaken. Observe the enormous growth of surveillance by means of closed circuit television in so-called liberal-democratic societies. The incessant regulation of people’s lives through mechanisms of bureaucratic accountability, performance league tables, and the imposition of ‘good practice’ fortified by threats of legal liability, are
other examples. Technology can now deliver invasions of privacy undreamt of by totalitarian ideologies that pose a considerable challenge to liberal and progressive systems.

For students of ideology a new problematic arises. Which analytical tools are the most appropriate for studying ideological segments, as well as for studying the new or reinvigorated ideological families – such as feminism, green political thought, and nationalism – that do not claim to be catch-all receptacles with an all-inclusive agenda? Well, segments and modules are not ideologies. A table and chair in an otherwise empty room would be a pitiful semblance of a furnished room indeed. Rather, it conjures up the image of a prison: a room with a constrained and constraining purpose. None the less, minimalist furniture can offer very striking arrangements and highlight a few aesthetic and functional messages, as would an interest group with a singular ideological aim. We are left with two interpretative options. The first is to explore the extent to which ideological modules are actually contained in broader host ideologies, despite their bid for ideational independence. The second is to announce the existence of a new morphological variety, namely, a thin ideology.

A thin ideology is one that, like mainstream ideologies, has an identifiable morphology but, unlike mainstream ideologies, a restricted one. It severs itself from wider ideational contexts by deliberately removing or replacing many concepts we would expect an ideology to include. It does not embrace the full range of questions that the macro-ideologies do, and is limited in its ambitions and scope. Take nationalism, an ideology that concentrates on the
exceptional worth of a nation
as the shaper of human identity while often emphasizing its
superiority
over other national entities, and that justifies the demands a nation can make on the conduct of its members. The point is that is does little else. It certainly does not produce a scheme for the just distribution of scarce and vital goods – the famous ‘who gets what, when, how’ question that is seen to be central to politics. While it constantly
talks up national self-determination, or emancipation from external rule when the nation in question is not governed by an independent state, it is silent on individual liberty and rights and on the desired relations between the public and private spheres.

Nationalism in fact rarely appears in this raw and thin form, unless a specific ethnic group is demanding a nation-state of its own against a hostile political system (for example, the struggle of the Basques against Spain), or an existing nation-state is being threatened by an external enemy threatening to swamp it (for example, the British bulldog image during the Second World War). It is far more likely to be found sheltering within broader host ideologies. Conservatives are happy to find space in their room for the nationalist love affair with an invented history and an exclusive territory. Fascists, of course, exploit nationalism as the justification of offensive militarism directed at real and imagined enemies. This comes with a very physical and racial view of what constitutes the fibre of a nation. Even liberals have periodically come to terms with nationalism, a word they have also shied away from frequently. After all, it sanctions the principle of self-government, and it can be tweaked to advocate the universal right of all nations to possess their own state.

But there is a different take on thin ideologies, as can be seen from the case of feminism. Feminists regard the issue of
gender
as the crucial ingredient of ideological contestation, and the presence of
patriarchal power relationships
as potent a divide as class conflict was for Marxists. They make us face yet again the question of boundaries: what
are
the major ideological groupings, and what
are
the central features of the map that best covers the terrain of ideologies? Whereas many 20th century feminists have regarded their arguments as extensions of liberal or socialist principles, radical feminists argue that the existing array of political concepts and issues often deflects our attention from what really matters. Underlying ‘innocuous’ uses of the phrase ‘human rights’ are men’s rights. Political power is better understood as patriarchal power.
The dichotomies universal/particular, culture/nature, mind/body, reason/emotion all too frequently mirror those of male/female, with the first of each pair a desirable feature and the second a disorder or pathology. A reordering of political language, and through it of social practices, is the aim of that feminism. Thus what seems a thin ideology from the perspective of conventional ideological analysis may be interpreted as an attempt by feminists to cut the cake differently. On their account, thick ideologies should contain, at least in part, a different set of concepts, including care, nurturing, empathy, and altruism. The ideological struggle over the control of language is not just that of competing over the meanings of prevalent political concepts such as liberty and justice, but one that endeavours to endow concepts customarily held to be apolitical with political import. Throw away much of the existing masculinist map, proclaim radical feminists, and re-explore the territory.

The fracturing and reordering of ideologies has shaken up the ideological scene in another sense. The ideologies under challenge have typically presented themselves as universal. But once that universality is questioned, once universal ideologies are recognized as emanating from a particular cultural area, space suddenly opens up for non-Western ideologies to appear and be noticed. In part this is the triumph of multiculturalism, in part the outcome of a political flexing of muscles of non-Western viewpoints, hitherto made to feel inferior to the ‘modern’ implications of the West, or deemed to be at a supposedly earlier stage of political and intellectual development. Many Eastern ideologies are curious amalgams of Western theories and of indigenous cultural paradigms. Japanese politics assigns the term liberal to a broadly conservative movement, and mixes traditionalist norms with hi-tech lifestyles. Technology introduces Western notions of markets, while regional cultures constrain against the Western-type individualism that would normally accompany them.

The rise of religious fundamentalism poses a particularly interesting conundrum for students of ideology. Are religions also ideologies? Do ideologies and religions share common characteristics? After, all, communism has been described as a secular religion – it was even the subject of a famous book called
The God that Failed
. The answer to these questions is unsurprisingly both yes and no. Religions only become political ideologies when they compete over the control of public policy and attempt to influence the social arrangements of the entire political community. Even then, that is a necessary but not sufficient condition for considering them to be ideologies. A religion may serve as a powerful pressure group for the public observance of a day of rest. That does not make it an ideology, not even a thin one, but a single-issue group focusing on one ideological segment – in this case a defining religious and ethical custom of a culture it wishes to preserve. Religious fundamentalism can equally manifest itself in a retreat from the world, or in a utopian messianism that awaits salvation in an unspecified future.

Nevertheless, religious fundamentalism may be heavily politicized and, conversely,
it
can adopt some of the characteristics of totalitarian ideologies. One of these is an expansionist and aggressive attitude towards non-believers, who must either be converted or dispatched. Another is a shared morphological characteristic, namely, a striking inflexibility attached to the meanings of its conceptual clusters. Whereas secular totalitarians lock in the meanings of their concepts through arbitrary linguistic force, religious fundamentalists achieve the same end through their sacred texts. Their holy men assume the role of the guardians and purveyors of the truth, a role that intellectuals occasionally take on – with less authority – in secular ideologies. But in both cases the guardians may be stage-managed from within their midst by people indistinguishable from political dictators.

For the analyst of ideology the real problem of whether religions are ideologies is a question of differentiation. Political Islam, for
example, possesses the functions of an ideology in that it provides a collective political agenda, while maintaining a substantial overlap, even identity, between religion and politics. However, it does not possess the
specificity
of contemporary ideologies – distinct, reified, systems of ideas that exist as quasi-autonomous features of our world and can be studied independently. Since the 19th century, the major political ideologies have evolved to become systems of ideas detached from our religious beliefs – just as our ideas about art and about economics now display a considerable degree of autonomy – even though Western political thought itself used to be much more heavily interfused with religious convictions. The modern ‘Western’ attribute of idea-systems is their crystallization as separate specializations in thought and thought-induced conduct, though dedicated political ideologies and other inclusive thought-systems still exchange mutual influence. Religious fundamentalism, however, provides no space for a political ideology to emerge as a distinct set of ideas from under the wings of religion, nor for a range of religious interpretations to escape from the vice of political discipline. This evident absence of a boundary, in this case between a political ideology and a different kind of belief-system, means that the choice over what to believe in is more limited. You have to embrace larger packages without the option to ‘mix and match’, to aggregate and disentangle.

The age of the mainstream ideologies is not over. They will no doubt mutate into different variants that surround their core ideas – and they would ossify if they did not – but the constant tidal pull between the decentralization of political power and its recentralization will afford room for novel configurations, while the quickening speed of communication will result in a faster tempo of change. What is clear is that ideologies cannot come to an end, nor is there a winning ideology as announced by the ‘end of history’ prophets of the 1990s. For that to happen history would have to have a finishing post, and human imagination would have to grind to a halt.

The general impression of ideological fragmentation and malleability has led to new developments in the theory of ideology. Some scholars are more inclined to study the fragments, while others have reactivated the old Marxist scepticism about what lies behind these continual ideological permutations and what, if anything, is visible when we burrow under them.

The equivalent of the focus on micro-ideologies is the minute examination of the usages to which language generally, and political language in particular, are put. The branch of studies that sheds light on this is discourse analysis, nourished on the standpoints of hermeneutics, semantics, and postmodern studies. The central idea behind discourse analysis is to conceive of language as a communicative set of interactions, through which social and cultural beliefs and understandings are shaped and circulated. Like previous approaches I have examined, discourse analysis is holistic in its purview, attempting to delineate a total field of communication. Some of it is simply content analysis – an endeavour to explore systematically the patterns of ordinary speech. Other strands are preoccupied with the broader cultural messages exchanged in a discourse, involving assumptions about gender, ethnicity, or power and how these assumptions influence people’s
lives. Several strands go even further and also regard institutional practices as discourse.

This connects discourse analysis to questions of identity that have come to predominate the academic agenda of several social scientists. How do societies perceive themselves (for example, are they proud and self-congratulatory of their achievements or disillusioned and demoralized)? Which attributes of a society are brought into prominence through the use of narratives that tell us how we came collectively to be what we are (for example, is it our resourcefulness at times of crisis or our devotion to established political rituals)? How are distinctions between ‘us’ and ‘them’ fashioned (for instance, do territorial borders delimit the society, or is skin colour an effective divide)? Which linguistic and metaphorical devices are exploited to accentuate deliberately, or to form unconsciously, images and self-understandings of a discursive community (for instance, ‘the big apple’; ‘better red than dead’, ‘a green and pleasant land’)? As social and political groupings change more rapidly in the contemporary world, the fragility and ephemerality of discourse become more evident. A plethora of discourses, seemingly ever more pliable and alterable, is replacing the past dominant discourses of the Enlightenment or of Christianity. In a rather more hesitant process, even masculinity and hierarchical ethnicities are challenged, and consequently retreat or are reshuffled.