Review--Creating Faulkner's Reputation · 4:38pm Jul 26th, 2017
The most significant fact about 20th-century English literature is that it was dominated by cliques and entangled with politics, from the very beginning of the century. As I explained in "Modernist Manifestos & WW1: We Didn't Start the Fire—Oh, Wait, we Totally Did", this process began in France in the 1850s, when, in response to the overcrowding of the Paris Salons (exhibitions of paintings), painters began forming groups to promote each others' paintings.
I've mentioned before that T. S. Eliot & James Joyce's reputation was not the result of neutral publishers and honest critics liking their works, but of a long-term, carefully-planned propaganda campaign orchestrated by Ezra Pound. Lawrence Schwartz has done the same job, but much more thoroughly, for William Faulkner, in Creating Faulkner's Reputation.
I've only read about half the book, but I doubt that I'll finish it. Not that it's boring; I'm just working on other things. The overall story is already clear, so I'll summarize from what I've read, the book's concluding chapter, and skimming the rest for key events:
In the 1930s, William Faulkner was considered by critics to be a bad writer who wrote unreadable, depraved novels about grotesque people, which were irrelevant to ordinary life. His books had sold few copies when released, and were out of print.
This was partly because Faulkner's novels weren't political. American literary scholarship in the 20th century was political. The politics of the writer were the first things considered (privately) by any reviewer. At least three groups fought for dominance in the 1920s & 1930s: the modernists fought to promote anything modernist, Marxists promoted novels about working-class misery and upper-class shallowness such as the writings of Sinclair Lewis & John Steinbeck; and Southern critics waged and lost a war in small journals created to defend Southern culture against Yankee morality and industrialism. The Marxist novels were more popular throughout the 1930s, partly because the times were so bad economically, partly because most modernist novels were slow-paced and harder to read, and the Southerners were at odds with their best authors. The Marxists didn't yet control the academy, however, so they could not displace Hemingway as the most-reputable literary author.
The Southern critics did not at that time like Faulkner, presumably because Faulkner did not display Southern culture in a flattering light. I suspect that they gave up on their small journals partly because all of the major Southern authors--at least, all the ones we consider major today--seemed to conspire against them to depict the South as a place of madness.
When Stalin made a pact with Hitler in 1939, and when the Cold War started in 1946, the Marxists lost ground, and their authors were (not unfairly) exposed as inept stylists with the exception of Dos Passos and Steinbeck (see eg p. 109). Malcolm Cowley, a major communist literary critic, and the Partisan Review, a major American literary magazine founded by the US Communist Party, rejected Stalinism and turned to what they called apolitical criticism. They still wanted to radicalize literature, but would focus on its style rather than its content. (There was some waffling on this point, as shown on p. 117-118 in which the Partisan Review claimed in The Partisan Reader (1946) both that it was committed to politics and that it was apolitical.)
Today's modernist devotion to style over content appears to be an accidental result of the brutal nature of Stalinism being exposed at a time when writers believed only radical content could be good content, but could not imagine any radical content other than communism. Writers in the 1940s were so sick of politics, and yet so incapable of imagining any content to writing other than the political, that they simply threw content out the window (see for instance p. 90-91 and 186).
The modernists were based in New York City. The Southerners became the new core of the New Critics, starting a new series of journals pushing a different agenda. Rather than defending the entire structure of southern culture, they tried to rescue one part of it that was most important to them and most under attack: the idea that some things are better than other things. So their new journals were dedicated to proving that one could discriminate between good and bad poetry.
One thing that comes up over and over again in the book is how much winning literary wars depends on money. Literary critics fought each other with "little magazines", which had circulations of a few thousand, none of which were ever profitable. They had to continually search for donors to pay their editors and writers, and the donors were always political.
A key piece of the puzzle which is not mentioned in Schwartz's book is that the Soviet Union had been and still was pumping money into publishers around the world to promote communism, including for example the Partisan Review. The Rockefeller Foundation, which provided the money to publish the little journals that manufactured William Faulkner's reputation, was a counter-offensive against communist-subsidized publications. The Rockefeller Foundation provided money to the southern new critics to publish journals, including the Kenyon Review and the Sewanee Review, that were supposed to uphold high literary standards and American values, and somehow make them popular and rescue American culture.
Like today's Congressional bribes, it took a shockingly small sum of money for the Rockefeller Foundation to eventually make major changes in American life: about $200,000-$300,000 / year, including about $50,000/yr to each major literary journal (p. 131-137). That was because they spent years deciding how to spend that money so as to have the greatest cultural impact.
Meanwhile, America had emerged as the dominant power in the world, and Europe was fascinated with all things American. They wanted American literature, and Americans didn't know what to tell them--American critics at the time didn't like any American literature very much.
The Southerners, using the money from the Rockefeller foundation, decided they had to pick one American author to promote as a great author. They wanted, of course, to pick a Southerner. Faulkner was not at first a contender. He became one through the efforts of two men: Malcolm Cowley and Robert Penn Warren. According to Schwartz, Faulkner's reputation today is entirely the result of the admiration of these two men, in very influential positions, with money from politically motivated donors, at a moment in time that demanded radical change in the canon.
The Manhattan modernists and the Southerners would come to blows in the 1960s, but at this time they were allies against popular culture. They were not, however, ready to consider Faulkner a major author (p. 174). The Southerners, realizing that the New Yorkers admired Europe, and the Europeans were temporarily fascinated with the United States, began offering European (and New York) authors Rockefeller money to write reviews praising Faulkner (p. 176), to persuade the New York critics.
They failed in 1947--they could only find two respected critics interested in Faulkner. "It would take two more years for aesthetic formalism and avant-garde modernism to thoroughly dominate literary culture and, with some bit of help from the world of commercial publishing, to shape Faulkner's role as postwar moralist." (p. 179)
That's what the book says, anyway. It argues that the crucial turning point was Mark Schorer's 1948 essay "Technique as Discovery" in the Hudson Review:
Schorer argued, in an explicitly anti-Marxist analysis, that in fiction, as in poetry, technique must be considered as primary…. Essentially, he believed that highly developed technique ultimately yielded works with "satisfying and rich content." Without concern for technique there could be no greatness: "Technique alone objectifies the materials of art; hence technique alone evaluates those materials." … Thus, style became the measure of greatness. -- p. 186-187
It curiously discounts the importance of Faulkner's Nobel prize, awarded in 1950. I find this entirely unconvincing; the timing suggests rather that Faulkner was held in low regard in America and Europe until Sweden, out of the blue, gave him a Nobel prize--and an odd Nobel at that, given a year late because the committee said in 1949 that they could not find any author in the world worthy of the Nobel.
So we're left with two plausible accounts of Faulkner's high reputation. One is that it was the result of two Southerners determined to promote some southern author, who were given money to do it at just the right time in history. The other is that it was the result of a somewhat inexplicable decision by a Nobel committee, which was probably not reading little southern magazines, and so it's hard to know how Faulkner was even on their minds in the first place. But Schwartz has thoroughly disproven the idea that William Faulkner's high reputation today was caused by a significant number of publishers, critics, or readers liking his work in the decades in which it was published.
That doesn't mean that Faulkner wasn't a great writer. We might expect that even if literary criticism works, that critics must argue for years before great works of genius are properly appreciated. But at least in Faulkner's case, the historical and political background was at least as important as the writing.
If one of you wants to read the entire book and blog on it, I'll scan it in and send you a PDF.
References
Lawrence Schwartz, 1988. Creating Faulkner's Reputation. Knoxville: U of Tennessee.
So... you've got a book report due, and you want one of us to write it for you?
:P
Interesting. Did the book mention why the Rockefeller Foundation backed Faulkner of all authors?
Okay, FTFY jokes aside, I feel like this is a more accurate statement.
English literature has always been either entirely or mostly politicized, take your pick. Indeed, literature as a whole has this quality. Art as a whole often has this quality. Making art is very rarely an apolitical act; indeed, trying to make apolitical art is in and of itself a political choice.
Whether this is a good or bad thing depends on the specific nature of the politics involved.
I'm hesitant to call it a "problem." It's just a thing. Creating art for consumption is a social act, and social relations among humans are governed by... politics.
4613387
Calling Faulkner himself apolitical suggests a rather technical and peculiar definition of 'political', at least from the one Faulkner novel of his I've read - and the various pull-graphs that he is famous for, the 'last dingdong doom' Nobel speech, and the Intruder in the Dust pull-quote about Pickett's Charge - Faulkner had a very firm and distinguishable political attitude, one of individualism, naturalism, locality, and moralism.
And I can kind of see why the Rockefellers' NGO would latch onto him. He was moralistic, without being religious; Southern, without being bigoted; aesthetic and modern and individualistic, which is an interesting hat-trick when you think about it. He matched their political requirements marvelously, that post-war liberal consensus thing. Like bauhaus architecture and Abstract painting and sculpture, Faulkner's high level of complexity and abstraction suited the corporatist aesthetic consensus of the Fords and the Rockefellers' foundation people.
4613387
This isn't false, but the way you're presenting it, the kind of conclusions I think you mean it to justify (I admit I'm imputing Marxist tendencies to you), have not been universally held. They have been very widely accepted, by those people who promoted political art, which has dominated art in most times and places. But I think believing it has had very bad effects on art, throughout history, and that the best art, like the tragedies of Shakespeare and the ancient Greeks, or Don Quixote, have always been created by people for whom contemporary politics were only a secondary consideration.
4613368 I meant to post on your blog, not to write something for me.
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Speaking only for myself, I have noticed that a lot of people (not saying this is happening here) try really, really hard to define "political" and "ideological" in ways that exclude their own moral, social, organizational, and policy preferences from the things thus defined. What you want is "ideological;" what I want is "pragmatic." You're "playing politics;" I'm just using "common sense." The art you like is "political propaganda;" the art I like "transcends politics and is universal."
I don't think doing this is either accurate or helpful to anyone involved, and it contributes to the notion that politics and ideology are suspect, somehow impure and inherently corrupt motivations.
4613381 See Mitch H's comment. I didn't find that information, but it would be in the part of the book that I skimmed.
4613425
My comment was not serious. Hence the :P
4613426 You're right that people do that. I think Schwartz meant Faulkner had no direct comments on the cold war.
But the flip side of that is that people who just want to use art for politics try really, really hard to pretend that everyone else does, too, and that that's in fact all that people do or can do with art. Whereas I believe politics and ideology are inherently corrupt motivations for art.
4613423
How do you know politics was only a secondary consideration to Shakespeare and the Ancient Greeks? For heaven's sake, look at the subject matter.
From what I've seen of my own study of art history (admittedly with quite an emphasis on music), good things have NEVER succeeded upon their own merit, but only when somebody brought to bear the combination of merit and some form of skulduggery. I can cite numerous examples out of visual arts and music and have no reason to believe it's ever been any different in literature. When the art's seriously not supported by any sort of merit, it's got the shelf life of a mayfly and people are asking very quickly 'why did we care about this again?'. I think that's the case for a lot of the rather silly writing that annoys you: I don't think it'll stand up to the long view.
When the art's not supported by nefarious boosterism and at LEAST its own clique of friends, cohorts and believers, it doesn't even get to the long view. Even starving artists who were unknown in their lifetimes had boosters who got real strident about it after they died! You cannot go looking for art of any kind that catches on without a cabal. There is always the cabal, even if it's 'Brian Lane' (a pseudonym, after Pink Floyd's 'Arnold Layne') rigging the pop charts with Richard Branson when the makers of the usual pop charts were on strike… to get attention for the very talented and capable Yes. And I have that straight from Bill Bruford's autobiography (drummer for Yes, King Crimson etc: I assume the statute of limitations had run out!) And this little cabal happened BEFORE the band's best records, and made their existence possible, as the band was broke and would have had to quit.
I understand by 'political' you're thinking of cabals and boosters, but you will never not find those. Doesn't matter what it is, anything that's a big deal has had people behind it, the only question is how cabal-licious they've been. Brian Lane rigging Virgin pop charts with Richard Branson is mighty caballicious. I don't know how nefarious the folks you decry, have been, but you must let go of the idea that the behavior is unusual.
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Then I must be some kind of freakish exception since I've written a bunch of "apolitical" art just because I didn't feel like talking about politics at the time. Which isn't to say I don't write political art. I write a ton of it. Even one of my ponyfics has a shade of my libertarian phase. Thing is - I also write a lot art that isn't about politics, and I'm not producing it as some bold conscious statement about politicality, I'm writing it because I've just chosen a theme that isn't political in nature. Forgiving yourself for fucking up and hurting other people and meditations on reincarnation and immortality aren't really political topics... so the stories aren't political.
And that's that.
4613423
Is there a conclusion to anything that's universally held? I can probably find someone to argue with "the sky is blue."
Okay, that's me being a bit of a jerk. I'm not sure what conclusions you think I mean to justify with what I think you agree is at least a vaguely true statement of fact.
I feel like "contemporary politics" is doing a lot of work here. Hamlet, to pick a tragedy at random, is an intensely ideological and political piece of art; it might not have been directly commenting on contemporary politics in Elizabethan England, but it had a lot to say about morality, decency, justice, honor, and peace at both the abstract and the personal levels. Those are politically and ideologically charged concepts that actually don't have a lot of meaning outside of those frameworks.
Mmmmm, maybe?
I would formulate this as "people who think that art's only use is for argumentation-by-proxy regarding current salient politics contemporary to them pretend that everyone else does to" &c.
I'm not comfortable with any taxonomy that casts John Steinbeck and Sinclair Lewis' motivations as inherently corrupt.
More to the point, your above statement is, in fact, an ideological position and represents an ideological motivation if you try and make art with it in mind.
I have trouble seeing how "I'd like to create a piece of art that stirs people to make the world a better place or to drop the scales from their eyes and deliver to them wider insights about the world and the people around them, which I'd encourage them to act on" is an inherently corrupt motivation. What the person who is saying that considers to be making the world a better place, or whether the insights into the world and people around them they wish to convey are accurate or not, might or might not tarnish the enterprise, but it seems no more inherently corrupt or any less meritorious than "I want to make something that people consider beautiful" or "I want to create something that makes people feel these particular emotions."
And, hell, those two later motivations have underlying ideological components to themselves as well.
4613446
This is going to depend a lot on how we're defining "politics," I fear.
I myself tend to take a very, very broad view of the term. Essentially, I view "politics" as being essentially the methods and principles by which people self-organize and govern themselves and others. By this rubric, stories about forgiving yourself for fucking up and hurting other people and meditations on reincarnation and immortality could be, but aren't necessarily, political topics, depending on how they're engaged with and what the overall goal and themes of the narratives they contain are (You'll have to forgive me; I've not read your corpus of works.) They might not be relevant to contemporary nation-state politics, but they could still be politics. And the creation of them might still be a political act even if the stories themselves aren't political in nature.
They're definitely ideological in nature, tho, even if they aren't political. It is, in my opinion, very hard for a piece of art to be purely shorn of ideology, because even something as simple as "I think this is a story worth telling and sharing" has an ideological underpinning to it.
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May I suggest that your conceptions of political art are at odds?
Because if you define 'politics' in the sense which contains all notions of morality, honor, normalcy, &c &c &c, then yes. It's trivially correct that all art, everywhere, is political.
But if you define 'politics' in art as, say, writing deliberately for the benefit of one political tribe and against another, then, again, obviously not all art is political.
It's easy to furnish examples. Romeo & Juliet is steeped in the mores and politics of its time, but it isn't written for any cause and doesn't attempt to convert, proselytize, or preach. Atlas Shrugged, whatever your opinions on it might be, is explicitly out to convert, proselytize, and preach for a very specific ideology.
It is perfectly reasonable to term either of these concepts 'politics,' but doing so does make it rather hard to communicate
4613521 If I could make sweet, tender love to this comment I would do so.
To expand on your own thoughts... I myself wouldn't define politics to contain all notions of morality, honor, normalcy, etc., but I would definitely define politics as containing how we act on those notions vis-a-vis other people. And I might define "ideology" as containing all notions of morality, honor, normalcy, &c.
Defining terms is always super important to clear communication.
4613423
I can't speak for the Greeks, but Shakespeare's work was heavily informed by the politics of his time; and a good deal of his work, comedies as well as tragedies, included a lot of subtle satire and jabs at the political figures and beliefs of his time. There is a great deal of evidence that Shakespeare was a secret catholic, and much of his writing was directed at the Protestant monarchy and nobility. He certainly had no problem attacking and satirizing many of the social trends of his time that he considered absurd.
Cervantes may or may not have been political; but Don Quixote itself was a satire of a particular type of popular literature.
4613435
This is so true. It's the "everybody does it" peer pressure approach to artistic creation and review.
"No one can be impartial, so anyone who tries to be even handed or not hit you over the head with an anvil is just a lying hypocrite!"
4613581
I would argue such a concept is to be so broad as to be almost useless and basically is redundant with philosophy.
At that point the statemeant "all art is ideological" is almost tautological, since ideology has been defined as a set of all abstract ideas pertaining to human value and art is (generally) about communicating abstract ideas pertaining to human value.
I also worry it runs afoul of the Motte and Baily as most people associate the concept ideology with the idea of a particularly zealous political cult, and I in fact have seen people use that confusion to argue that all art is basically manufactured for the benefit of political cults.
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Indeed, my own study of art and art history has been a study of trends and patronage. For most of history, art was predominantly religious, in more modern times, popularity became a significant factor. Religious art always had the support of whatever religious group it was motivated by, and was subsequently propagated by said religious group. Non-religious art was always at the mercy of the wealthy and powerful, much of it commissioned to memorialize them, to attack their enemies, or simply as a display of their wealth and social status. When the nobility became less of a force, and the rising merchant classes more of one, patronage simply moved down a rung, and the salon became a powerful factor in promoting artists, pushing galleries to display and sell their favored artists. Along with the salon, the académie was a powerful force in shaping the popular perception of art, creating and maintaining fashions in painting and music and literature.
Many of the Modernist and pre-Modernist art movements, most notably the Impressionists, were rebellions against the stultifying influence and creative bankruptcy of académie-based art, and of the culture that created and supported it. Some of it was Marxist in nature, due to the highly stratified social class system that was seen as oppressive to the working classes; but just as much of it was anarchist, or apolitical. Subsequent fascist governments attempted to reinstate the académie and patronage system, and suppress any art that did not serve their desired propaganda purpose; triggering yet more rebellions and reactionary movements.
4613462
Indeed. Tell it to the Clash, Dead Kennedys and System Of A Down. Then try the idea out on Bob Marley. Of course, those are all musicians. I suppose it's possible that all ideological writers, such as Tolkien and emphatically C. S. Lewis all the way back to Jonathan Swift and all the way forward to Pratchett (who's incandescent with ideology on some levels, notably class struggle) are doing garbage work because they're using writing as a cudgel, rather than an instrument of abstraction and truth.
Mind you, to them (and the musicians) their work IS truth, and that's why they're so driven to do it.
I find this idea of 'corrupt motivations' puzzling, even when it's clear the ideologies are distasteful to you. Surely you mean that work you don't like is corrupt RESULTS because it's saying bad things? Aren't the motivations pretty common, isn't it normal to tell tales or sing songs that speak one's truth? It sounds like you feel there are better motivations to be had, and I'm not sure what those would be. Why would a more enlightened, less ideological person be making art/writing/music?
4613697
This is a sensible worry, and it's something that makes me a bit angry.
As I said upthread, I dislike the way that many people attempt to define "ideology" as "the beliefs that other people have that I find wrong or bad" while exempting their own beliefs from that label. And the reason that's done is because a lot of people think "ideology" equals "inherently suspect."
Well, I don't think ideology is inherently suspect. My only moral, philosophical, and political views might be wrong, or even evil. So might those views which stand in opposition to them. But they're both the result of ideology. My moral code is an ideological matter. So is the moral code of everyone else.
I readily accept the notion that people might create works of art for bad reasons, or repugnant ones, or suspect one, or that they might create works of art that are morally monstrous and grotesque. But I feel that the case for that has to be made on specific context and content. I don't buy "this person clearly created this piece of art to advance an agenda pertaining to beliefs they have" as at all damning or problematic in and of itself. What is that agenda? What are those beliefs? "I think I have something true and beautiful about the human condition that would be interest and perhaps even joyful to others to share" is an agenda. (And to get even more granular, what that something is also matters.)
That agenda may have jack shit to do with what matters are currently before the United States Congress here in the real world... or it may have everything to do with it. In isolation, at that level of abstraction, I've no problem with this.
4613505
This is how ideologists excuse writing ideological fiction. But if "ideology" were so broad, it would be a useless word.
You have an especially wide definition of ideology. I use a rather narrow definition of it. Consider when Galileo published Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. Let's ignore the personal invective and just consider the pro-heliocentric and pro-geocentric views. Let's also pretend that the debate had happened a little later in history, so that the physical evidence was more clearly on the side of Galileo.
The geocentric view [ADDED: of the Church] was definitely an ideology. It was a view on a matter of fact held for reasons independent of that matter of fact, which were part of an entire theology, a way of life, which came with a long, explicit list of things you were not allowed to think and books you were not allowed to read. That's ideological.
The Church, of course, said that Galileo was just as ideological--that he was an ideological heliocentrist. Which is a common rhetorical move by ideologists--to pretend everyone else is as ideological as they are.
But Galileo did not organize his life and worldview around heliocentrism. He did not have an a priori list of things heliocentrists must believe or the kind of art they should produce. Galileo would have said he was a heliocentrist not because of his ideology, but because heliocentrism was right.
I realize that today it is fashionable to pretend that no one can tell the difference between being right and being ideological. This view, of course, is favorable to ideologists. And no one can be certain of the difference, not even Galileo. But one can certainly ascribe a higher confidence to the proposition that the Church's position in that debate was ideological, than to the proposition that Galileo's position was ideological.
Even granting that Galileo was right, the modern Church would say (or at least, I have heard people say this of similar issues) that Galileo held to the ideology of truth, the ideology that the truth of a proposition should have more weight in our decision whether to believe it than other considerations. And I reject the idea that there is an "ideology of truth", that you can call wanting to believe the truth ideological. My belief in Bayes' law and information theory, and the way I interpret statistical tests, is not ideological, and to the extent that I can demonstrate a belief depends on them, I demonstrate it is not ideological.
This is less clear with ethical issues, but we can still try to make the distinction. Huckleberry Finn was powerfully anti-slavery. Was that ideological? Certainly it was relevant to a recent political debate. But unless you can make a solid argument showing that the pro-slavery position was also ethically tenable, you should say that being anti-slavery was not ideological, but simply right (or not crazy).
Similarly today, if I say I'm against ISIS, or that I don't believe the Earth is ruled by lizard-men, that doesn't make me ideological; that just makes me (on at least one issue) not insane. "Not being crazy" is not an ideology.
Can a person then say that their ideology is right, and so their book in favor of it isn't ideological? Of course they can say that--but if the point in question is not clearly right or wrong, then they are wrong. We are not obligated to set our definitions in ways that prevent people from being wrong, or from having arguments, or from being certain of the truth of propositions using those definitions.
Even if a novel is not right, there are still degrees of ideology. A novel that highlights a particular social problem may be ideological, in that one political party is concerned about that issue. But a novel that blames a specific group of people, or that proposes a particular solution, is more ideological than one that does not. Mein Kampf and Left Behind are more ideological than Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, which is probably more ideological than Thomas More's Utopia, which is more ideological than Hamlet.
Acknowledging different degrees to which a book is ideological is important. What you've said above treats "ideological" as a Boolean predicate, so that Hitler could have said, "Sure I'm ideological, but so was Shakespeare!"
4613793
A wolf has a moral code, but a wolf is not ideological. Unless you can find some principled distinction between canine and human morality, you should realize many humans also act out instinctive human morals, which shouldn't be termed ideological.
4613725
There are 2 general approaches to art. One is by people who think they already know a truth and wish to express it in art. That is the view you're endorsing. The other is by people who know they don't know the truth, and wish to use art to explore or discover it. That is the kind of art I like.
Every culture needs both types of art. The former serves to unify and define the culture when it is produced according to the culture's current consensus beliefs. The 2nd type, or the 1st type when it expresses some individual's "truths", help the culture question its beliefs and improve or adapt.
The ratio of the two that is best for the culture depends on its circumstances. But it is usually best for the ruling class to have none of the second type.
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It isn't morally corrupt. But it usually leads to bad art. If you already know the truth, then your truth is logically provable. Something which can be demonstrated logically is inherently a poor subject for art, and requires the artist to sabotage their own work at every step by eliminating ambiguity, tension between viewpoints, and unpredictability.
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If I may stick my fat, uninteresting nose in...
"We ought to help the poor" is, I think, an ideology; income redistribution and the abolition of minimum wage are two (near opposite) political views motivated by that ideology, but not informed by it. An ideology that informs, or determines, your politics is, I think, "people are inherently bad" or "people are inherently good", which will influence which political method you agree with. It is a factual assertion (about the moral nature of mankind) while "we ought to help the poor" is a moral assertion. Yet both are, in my opinion, ideologies. One stirs you to action, one determines the nature of that action.
You can write a story that argues "we ought to help the poor" that is apolitical, in that no political method is ever mentioned, and people with differing politics will agree. But your story will motivate them in opposite directions. You can write a story that argues "people are inherently good" which is apolitical in the same sense, which will garner agreement from one political side and not the other.
If you understand the ideologies that inform and motivate particular political methods, you can cleverly argue for those methods by arguing for the right combination of ideolgies, without ever mentioning those methods. In that sense, your story is apolitical like the others, and yet is actually solely political.
A reader who is quite conscious of their politics may read two stories which are both apolitical in practice, and not tell the difference between the one which is apolitical in intent and the one that is very political in intent. Just as one who is unconscious of their politics may think both are completely unpolitcal.
That's my two pennies on this conundrum. ^.^
4614025
Are not the latter following an ideology of "I ought to use art to explore the unknown" or "I ought not pretend I know"?
In your opinion, is the questioning novel allowed to posit an answer, or must it end on a question mark, carefully neutral?
And if it must, why is our 'must' better or different from any other 'must' placed on art?
4614105
That's an example of the kind of response I talked about in the big long comment above. No; proper methodology and epistemology is not an ideology. I might even say that an ideology is something people have instead of a good epistemology.
4614116
Not quite, I am arguing that the choice to use a proper methodology and epistemology is based in an ideology, since, as you can choose an improper one, you are a making a value judgment between the two.
A rod cannot measure itself after all, and even the scientific method makes a priori assumptions.
I agree, lots of people use poor reasoning, and have poor justification, or none, for many of the things which they believe. However, there is no camp which "knows only, and believes not".
4614149 The scientific method does not make a priori assumptions. That is a myth promulgated by people who think rationalism is scientific. Assumptions live in the land of true and false, and "knowledge" in the Classical or Humean sense, which science has no truck with.
If there is a lion behind door A and a lady behind door B, and you survive only if you pick door B, that doesn't make picking door B a value judgement. And yet, you will predictably end up with a population of people who prefer door B.
4613995
You would appear to use a rather narrow definition of it because you have the viewpoint that ideology is a bad thing, as opposed to an entirely neutral thing whose goodness or badness is completely dependent upon content and context.
It really wasn't. Many people hewed to the geocentric view because they thought it was correct as a matter of fact for various reasons they found highly compelling. Highly factual. Those people were, of course, wrong. But they didn't think they weren't dealing with facts. Although of course it is also true that many hewed to a geocentric view in bad faith.
More to the point, they said that he was, you know, wrong. He wasn't wrong. They were the ones who were wrong! Their ideology was bad because it led them to accept things that were objectively wrong as matters of fact. Galileo didn't share that ideology; his ideology was such he was able to discern matters of fact more clearly than the Church was. This makes his ideology more useful and morally superior to that of the Church, in my view. The facts he was able to discern weren't ideological in and of themselves. But his ability to discern them depended on his having ideological priors that let him actually do that.
His ability to discern that it was correct was an outgrowth of him being ideologically flexible enough to do so, however.
Moreover, his decision to broadly disseminate that truth in the face of great personal risk is in and of itself an ideological position. "I am in possession of the truth, and disseminating that truth is important even in the face of personal risk" is a moral and ideological position.
It's difficult to be right about things without correct ideology. Someone who rejects empiricism is going to be wrong an awful, awful lot.
The position itself, "the sun is the center of the solar system," is a question of fact, not of ideology, you're right. That's something that's either true or not true. But your ability to discern whether that position is correct or incorrect is going to depend an awful lot on your ideological priors.
I don't think the Church would say this, as it would be an implicit admission that they don't believe that the truth of a proposition should have more weight in our discussions than other considerations. This would be a very curious position for an institution that claims to be in possession of broad universal truths to take.
Historically, the Church has tended to instead take the tack of "we aren't required to prove our truths in the same way you are because we have a direct line to the font of all universal truths in the form of the godhead." That's important but subtly different, I think.
Hmm! Interesting. I've encountered ideologies that posit the dissemination, promulgation, and enforcement of lies as a positive societal good (usually either extreme far-right or extreme far-left ones) but they're always at least predicated on the notion that people do want to believe things that are true and that there'll be a ruling elite who knows the actual truth, they'll just be hiding it from the proles.
The thing is, tho, that even if I grant the point here, "wanting to believe the truth" doesn't mean much by itself. In order to find out the truth, you have to engage with the world and the people in it. And beyond things that are grossly obvious parts of objective reality ("I drop something and it falls") how you do that is going to involve a large dose of ideology.
This is only going to be very narrowly true, tho. "My linear regression, based upon what we all agree is good data, has produced the following plot." That's pretty non-ideological.
But something like "this plot demonstrates that if we give starving people food, they're more likely to survive. Therefore, I believe we should give starving people food" is not a statement shorn of ideology. It depends on believing we have a moral obligation to help people who are starving to death if we are able to do so, which is an ideological stance. There are going to be people who say "I fully agree with your empirical findings. I'm still not gonna give starving people food." Now you're in an ideological fight.
I guess my question here is "why? To what useful end?"
Yes. Absolutely. That's an ideological position, because "slavery is wrong" isn't an objective fact about physical reality like "things fall if dropped" and "the sky is the commonly-agreed upon color blue." Whether you believe that slavery is wrong depends, among other things, on if you buy into the ethical and moral frameworks undergirding anti-slavery arguments. Those are ideological positions.
Whether or not slavery is ethically tenable is going to depend on what a persons specific ethics are. Some people have absolutely appalling ethics, but they're still recognizably ethical codes and are often completely internally consistent.
Something can be both right and ideological in nature. Indeed, the entire point of ideological edifices, in my view, is to try and uphold frameworks that will result in people being right as often as possible. If your ideology lacks a useful method for self-examination, it's probably bad. (This method may itself not be strongly ideological, but deciding that it's a useful tool isn't an ideology free choice.) If it's leading to you being wrong more often than you're right, it's probably bad. You should construct or find a better ideology in both cases!
"Not being crazy" is not an ideology. But the underlying framework that results in your coming to non-crazy conclusions almost has to be in many if not most cases, because what's crazy or not is a subjective statement open to wide debate.
See, I wouldn't qualify this. At all. I'd just say "Of course they can say that, but they are wrong." The rightness or wrongness of the point in question isn't relevant. You've written a book in favor of your ideology. That makes the book ideological. It can be the most correct, most right ideology in the world, that's irrelevant.
And that's okay. Publishing a book in favor of your ideology is okay! It doesn't somehow throw the book into question or tarnish it in some way. The specific details of your ideology might do that. It might be some powerfully bullshit ideology. But that's a separate question.
You seem to be taking the position that a position being correct elevates it to not being a matter of ideology anymore. If that is the case, I don't agree with that, at least not as a universal statement. I think "slavery is a tremendous moral evil" is an absolutely correct position, well-supported by good arguments and a positive moral framework. That still makes it an ideological position. And that's okay.
I agree fully, with the proviso that this is a very high-level abstract statement of principles and like all such statements of principles might need exceptions carved out for specific circumstances in order to not produce bad results.
I roughly agree with all of this, including your rankings. But you seem to almost concede the points for me, that all those things are ideological to one degree or another.
It's both things, I would say.
And my response to that would be "Yes? And?"
From my perspective, this hypothetical Hitler (Hypothitler?) has just said something akin to "I'm a human, and so is Shakespeare." I'd be waiting for him to come to some kind of point there after stating an obvious truth, especially if he were phrasing it as some kind of justification or defense.
I'm not sure something that's instinctive can be usefully be termed "morality." People have an instinctive startle reaction if someone sneaks up behind them and makes a loud noise. This isn't a moral response, it's a physiological one beyond a persons actual control. Morality doesn't exist in the absence of being able to make meaningful choices, and if you can make meaningful choices, which ones are correct or not are going to be matters of ideology.
There are definitely instinctive modes of behavior humans fall into. These are only matters of morality inasmuch as they're also ones we can examine and chose to change. (Which we have an astounding ability to; a lot of things people view as immutable facts of human evolution are actually highly mutable. We as a species have a crazy ability to hack our own brains.) And if we can choose to do that, I don't see why these modes of behavior should be privileged as matters of morality just because they're "instinctive."
Can dogs conduct meaningful moral calculus and act based on that? Can you persuade a dog to change its instinctive behavior based on appeals to its reason, ethics, and intellect, as opposed to brute force, indoctrination, and controlled breeding?
If the answer to both of those is "no" then I'm not sure dogs have morality in a useful sense.
Not at all. Many people cheerfully believe things that readily admit can't be proven logically. Indeed, whole swathes of philosophy, morality, and ethics have a lot of trouble with logic, because while logic is an immensely powerful tool, it has a tendency to break down hard when you go looking for first causes or when you try and use it to make decisions about things with enormous degrees of subjectivity.
Just because something can be demonstrated logically, that in no way imposes any obligations on an artist to sabotage their own work in the ways you propose.
Determining what methodologies and epistemologies are proper is not an exercise that can be shorn of ideology.
The statement "I ought to use art to explore the unknown" is an explicitly ideological statement. In order to be correct, it requires "exploring the unknown" to be something that's a desirably good, or at least not actively harmful, activity. That's not true in a vacuum; like everything else, it has to be justified. And you can't justify it with appeals to objective reality; there is no physical law of the universe which makes it correct. You have to use reason, logic, morality, and ethics to justify it. Those are all ideological exercises. They're important and vital ideological exercises!
And once you've done that, you have to settle on productive and proper methods for exploring the unknown.
This, of course, is also a strongly ideological statement.
It's just a damned dangerous attitude, this being offended at 'bad art and ideology'. It's fun from a fictional top-hat-wearing equine supervillain, but gets creepy when it starts to look real and tangible.
My experience of you is of an exceedingly earnest person, and a gentle person, one dismayed by conflict and confrontation outside of a largely artificial rational construct (which I perceive as 'reasoned debate in the English language'). In that context I find myself expecting a similarly gentle worldview, and it's incongruous to stumble across landmines like 'siding with ISIS would be literally insane, like flat-earth insane' when in my experience and context, something like ISIS is created through the wanton obliteration of a country for geopolitical gain: in particular, it's difficult to get otherwise rational people to adopt a deeply self-destructive politics of vengeance unless you keep stoking their fires by continually and plausibly telling them they're going to be exterminated because they're just evil and should be exterminated. And this balance and counterbalance between intolerant ideologies becomes like a Calder mobile (and that's a nicely abstract non-ideological sort of artwork) where each new height of intolerance is based upon historical actions and attitudes from the opposing intolerance.
Makes me wonder what you'd make of Picasso's 'Guernica': Cubism goes to war, against war. I remember you having a distaste for most of 20th century modern art, and you might find Cubism a degraded form of art, but the interesting thing about Guernica and what gives it much of its power (I think) is that since Picasso was like a gifted child and approached things without the rationalist framework you require, his statement against the carnage of war is without rational support. It comes off as a chaotic horror, without defining an enemy all that clearly: an emotional reaction that completely ignores making a rational argument or spotlighting rational blame of any particular aggressor. There are hints of who caused the destruction in 'Guernica', but mostly it's the gut reaction that is front and center.
I have to wonder whether you feel it's an admissible reaction to experience such feelings upon being bombed to gore and shrapnel. It seems to me like a deeply human, even animal reaction.
4613995
The problem comes in when it becomes difficult to separate addressing facts from expounding ideology. Galileo is actually a good case study for this, because if you don't discount his personal invective, it becomes clear that he's propounding heliocentrism as much because of his anti-church ideology as because of its scientific factuality. Even more obvious when you realize that Galilean heliocentrism was less scientifically accurate than the the Copernican heliocentrism that he took his inspiration from.
The truly odd thing is that the fight wasn't between The Church and Galileo per se, it was between Cardinal Bellarmine and Pope Paul V. Heliocentrism was a controversial topic in the church, with roughly equal numbers of supporters on both sides. The Church's official position up to that point had been agnostic on the subject. Had it not been for the invective directed at the church, the controversy would likely have continued, with the heliocentric position eventually adopted as official. Unfortunately, Galileo's staunch anti-church position lent weight to the arguments of the geocentrists, who had Tycho Brahe's geocentric model to support their views, and the pig-headed attitude of Paul V pushed the church into officially supporting geocentrism.
As humans, it's often difficult to separate ideology from observation, we all have filters; which is why tools like the Scientific Method were eventually developed. Tools that allowed scientists to minimize the effects of ideology, subjective interpretation, and outright error on the reporting and interpretation of factual data.
4614074
I disagree with this. Some of the best art has been profoundly ideological in nature. A large part of the problem is that ideology is very much tied to a zeitgeist, a particular time and place, and separated from that time and place, it can be difficult for us to recognize, without a great deal of study, what ideology is expressed in a particular work of art. That is a large part of what the study of Art History is for, not just the "who", "what", "where", and "when", but the "why" as well.
Much of the Renaissance art, as an example, was created to exemplify a particular worldview and philosophy, much of which is effectively dead. This is particularly the case where the Catholic Church held strong sway, prohibiting the expression of certain worldviews, such as Gnosticism. Art was created using classical themes, but depicting gnostic and other Greek philosophies and belief systems, much of which contained coded messages, although the key to reading many of the codes has been lost with their creators and supporters.
The writings of Michel de Nostredame, aka Nostradamus, are the most blatantly obvious example, if one ignores all the mystical nonsense that has grown up around them. Although the trick of decoding them has been lost, it's obvious by reading contemporary sources that the majority of his works were in part coded and satirical attacks on the Church and his political enemies, and expressions of his own explorations of proscribe occultism, combined with the garden-variety mysticism that was popular in Renaissance Europe. In fact, a large part of the problem with interpreting is work is due as much to the hodge-podge of various mystical and occult traditions, and his own idiosyncratic supernaturalism, as it is to his codes.
As has been previously noted, Shakespeare was fond of doing this, with Hamlet being a classic case in point. He even tells us that's what he's doing, with Hamlet's modifications to the "Murder of Gonzago", the play-within-a-play. He was limited by the socio-political atmosphere of the time in what he could say, and how sympathetically he could portray certain types of people, but the messages were there for those who could see them.
Compare, for example, his portrayal of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, to Christopher Marlowe's anti-semitic The Jew of Malta. "Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, do we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that." By contrast we have Barabas the Jew saying "As for myself, I walk abroad a-nights, And kill sick people groaning under walls. Sometimes I go about and poison wells; And now and then, to cherish Christian thieves, I am content to lose some of my crowns, That I may, walking in my gallery, See 'em go pinion'd along by my door. Being young, I studied physic, and began To practice first upon the Italian; There I enrich'd the priests with burials, And always kept the sexton's arms in ure With digging graves and ringing dead men's knells."
Both men are considered villains, but one is treated as a stereotype of the Evil Jew, while the other is portrayed as sympathetically as would have been possible at the time. Even Shylock's supposed conversion to Christianity at the end of the play never took place explicitly, and it's left unclear whether it had actually happened, although Shakespeare could depend on his audience assuming it had, given the tenor of the times.
This was at a time when being a Jew in Europe was a dangerous thing, when they were profoundly mistrusted, routinely portrayed as criminals and worse, ostracized, murdered, and stolen from with impugnity. The few who were tolerated were those who had professed a conversion to Christianity. Shylock's is a profoundly human portrayal of a people who were typically treated as cartoonish caricatures of evil, despite being made a villain. Indeed, many of Shakespeare's villains are more sympathetic than his heroes, which would have been the case from a contemporary perspective, not just a modern one.
This method of attacking social and political figures through coded and symbolic works of art and literature was hardly new even at the time. and was necessitated by the profound differences in power between the artists and the ruling classes. It continues throughout history, and has been commonplace even in the modern world where oppressive governments have attempted to crush any criticism of their actions.
Art has, throughout its history, been consistently and substantially ideological and political.
4614233
I think an ideology is a system of belief. So it's like a philosophy, but "ideology" adds connotations of controversiality and of having ethical implications.
I have the view that the degree to which a system of belief is ideological is proportional to the degree to which it prescribes behavior and the strength with which it is believed or importance it is assigned, and inversely related to the degree to which it is demonstrable.
"We should help the poor" is not a system of belief, but a single belief or emotion; hence not very ideological. An emotion, I think, is inherently not IDEO-LOGICAL, though of course it can have ideological causes.
Newtonian mechanics is very demonstrable, and doesn't dictate human behavior (cognitively), so is not very ideological.
String theory is not very demonstrable, but also doesn't tell people what to do, so it still isn't ideological.
The set of instincts people have to avoid danger and harm tell people what to do, but are demonstrably successful at keeping them alive, so they aren't ideological.
The desire to stay alive is a value, not an ideology. An ideology has or implies certain values, but is not the same category of thing as a value.
Scientology is a system of belief which tells people what to do, and is not very demonstrable, so it's very ideological.
Theories of fashion dictate behavior and aren't demonstrable, but they usually don't act like ideologies, probably because they don't impose behavior on other people, or because they don't carry much moral weight. You could have a pre-existing cultural value or ideology which made your theory of fashion function like an ideology.
I view ideology this way because there are ways of thinking and behaving that reliably co-occur with ideology as I define it. If I categorize people as more or less ideological according to my definition, it is helpful in predicting how they will behave.
Also, people use the term "ideology" to discount a belief system's imperativeness: "Oh, that's just ideological." Axis is doing that here on this page, when he says that the scientific method is an ideology. It's supposed to imply the scientific method is not superior to alternatives. But since "ideology" is used this way to identify belief systems which are all of equal status, then belief systems which are correct cannot be ideologies, as they are not of equal status with incorrect or not-yet-convincingly-demonstrated belief systems.
Yes, that's true. I misspoke; I meant the geocentric view as held by the Church authorities was an ideology, or rather an ideological belief, dictated by an ideology that was not primarily about geocentrism.
4614283
ISIS has been vocal about their beliefs and why they do what they do. They don't believe that they're being self-destructive, or that they're going to be exterminated, and they're not preaching vengeance. They believe they were ordered by God to conquer the world and to wipe out everything evil. Economic and political circumstances are important factors that incline people towards ISIS' view, but the ideology itself is literally insane, like flat-earth insane.
Do you mean, you think I would call Guernica "not art" because it's ideological?
First, the way I defined ideology in 4614683, Guernica is emotional, not ideational or logical, so it's not very ideological, though it was useful to people of a particular ideology.
Second, as I said in my first answer to you, "Every culture needs both types of art." Sometimes, such as when people are being bombed, they don't need reasonable debate, and art that helps them feel their feelings helps them get through the day.
Third, I think that if Guernica were shown to someone who knew nothing of the Spanish Civil War, and had no opinion on 1930s European politics, they might not think much of it. Its artistic aspect is overshadowed by its yanking at political beliefs and affiliations.
When I say ideological art is bad art, one thing I mean is that it has an average-case bad influence on people. The population of Europe from the years 1910 to 1945 did worse things than they would have done without any art. Some art had good effects, some had bad effects, but Europeans circa 1910 behaved pretty decently to each other on average. Art enabled sudden, large changes in behavior, which were thus on average for the worst; and people who wanted to make people behave more horribly had a stronger motivation to use art to do so then people who wanted to make them behave nicely, so the frequency of art designed to make people cruel was greater than the frequency of art designed to make people kind.
At other times in history, the opposite has been true, and ideological art may have had an average-case good influence.
4614233
I hate to bring it up, but I was a bit dishonest there, to avoid making this long explanation.
The claim "the sun is the center of the solar system" is, ironically, not a matter of fact. It is a claim which cannot be either true or false; it presumes things about the universe which are not true. We know from relativity theory that there is no truth to the matter, except that we can say the heliocentric system provides more information out per information required to specify it. But when we ask whether beliefs about it were ideological in the 17th century, we are (I claim) asking whether those beliefs, within the heads of those who help them, had the structure and properties of an ideology. We use the question of whether it was a matter of fact in evaluating how much evidence there was for each viewpoint at the time, so for that particular question we are interested not in whether it is a matter of fact, but whether the evidence at the indicated that it was a matter of fact.
(One reason there is so much confusion in philosophy about objectivity and subjectivity is that philosophers never keep track of their call stack, so they feel obligated to treat all concepts in the same manner, regardless of how they are used in the current computation.)
4614290
Hm, I disagree, Antsan. I'm arguing that whether an author asserts "stealing is wrong" or asks "is stealing wrong", they are enforcing a system of thought upon the reader (or an ideology). Both place requirements on me regarding how to approach the work and draw conclusions (I must look to myself, and not the work, or vice versa, for instance). While one has opened an inquiry as opposed to making an argument, that inquiry is held within a context of the work's creation and choosing, which matters, in the same way I can pose a question designed to trap you ("does your mother know you're stupid?"). The story which makes an argument also does so within it's own created context.
And that's okay. Posing a question is perfectly fine, as is asserting an answer. Both can be done well or poorly.
You're not escaping the use of a framework, is my basic argument, even though those frameworks are different and are effectual to differing degrees in differing circumstances.
4614193
Sure it does. It assumes an internal consistency in the universe, for one thing, a lawful order. Which is what predictability and repetition of results hinges on. You don't bother with science if you take the universe to be a conscious and fickle thing. This doesn't mean these assumptions are never born out by the data, and quite obviously the scientific method has chosen very accurate assumptions, it would thus far seem. But as you cannot test all instances of the universe everywhere at all times, and the untested instances far outweigh the tested, I would still consider them assumptions, because you don't know they are true, and must accept them as so in order to do any science in the first place. There's nothing wrong with this.
No, I don't discount effectiveness :) nor do I judge all systems as equal. Besides quite obviously at this point defining ideologies differently, I think you and I simply disagree on the degree to which these systems, er, make demands. For instance:
See, I would argue they do dictate human behavior and thought. But they do so within their realm, not outside of it. The first dictates entirely how you approach and think about the physical universe, mechanically, and how you go about testing and exploring it. It literally effects the nature of the experiments you perform, how you interpret the results and how you extend those into conclusions about the larger universe. This is demonstrated by the radical shift in paradigm Einstein caused with his two theories, Special Relativity and General Relativity. Another massive shift dawned with the (slow) build of Quantum Mechanics, which threw a number of terrifyingly philosophical implications into the works. Einstein hated QM and died, as far as I know, trying to disprove it.
That Newton doesn't dictate whether you ought to eat pork or not doesn't make it any less of an ideology to me, but rather a different one. Both make dictates, but the dictates are different. This is apart from how true and useful they are, and the number of those dictates.
4614683
I would agree with this, yes. Thing is, how many people do you know who literally don't have a system (or systems) of beliefs motivating much of their behavior?
Moreover, I don't think you can cleanly separate the system from the components.
Most ideologies definitely have ethical implications. You're right that the word has connotations of controversiality. I acknowledge those connotations exist but I don't think I'm obligated to respect them.
I don't think the degree to which a system of belief is demonstrable has any bearing whatsoever on how or whether a system of belief is ideological. Being demonstrable adds weight to the contention that your system of belief is correct, but it doesn't make it more or less ideological.
It might not be very ideological but still is ideological, tho. If you believe "we should help that poor" you almost certainly have an entire system of beliefs and values undergirding that which has led you to the conclusion that this would be either a usefully productive or morally upright thing to do according to those values. That, to me, is ideology.
Quite. And ideological consequences.
I agree. Newtonian mechanics are gross physical facts about the nature of the physical universe that are easily proven according to most commonly accepted methodologies and epistemologies. Those facts, themselves, can't be very ideological; they simply are.
There's an ideological component to whether a person is prepared to accept the methodologies and epistemologies that lead to those facts, of course. But that's like a second or third order thing and has little to do with the facts themselves, although of course they can't be cleanly separated in a practical sense.
Right. I'm with you so far.
Hmm. I think I agree with the statement but not for the reason you state. I don't think demonstrability is relevant here; rather, I would say that actual physiologically ingrained survival instincts (as opposed to ones acquired by acculturation, which can be changed or overcome with conscious effort) can't be ideological, or moral, or ethical, because meaningful choice isn't involved. If my response to input X is output Y regardless of whether or not I want that output to be Y, and I cannot ever change this, it can't be ideological; it simply is.
I'm not sure you can separate things that cleanly. Values don't occur in a vacuum, although they may be unexamined. People hold values for reasons, and are capable of adding new ones or discarding old ones. I would say that an assembled set of values constitutes an ideology, and therefore any individual value held by a person is going to be at least somewhat ideological in nature. The value purely and utterly itself, unmoored from a person, maybe isn't, but values by themselves unheld by people are... I don't know what they are. Philosophical curiosities?
I agree that Scientology is extremely ideological, although, again, I don't think demonstrability matters much. Xenu could appear in the sky tomorrow and reveal his great power to the world, but that wouldn't make Scientology NOT ideological.
Huh! Now this is damned interesting! I'd never really thought of theories of fashion in the context of ideology before. This is opposed to the practices and values of the fashion industry, or the social and political causes of, and justifications for, fashion, which can be very ideological indeed and often do prescribe and impose behavior.
I'd always thought of abstract theories of fashion as being so massively about highly subjective aesthetics as to not have much of an intersection with much else.
I can't speak for Axis, but if I were to categorize something as an ideology, it would not be to imply that it isn't superior to alternatives.
Or, rather... hmm.
It would be to imply that it isn't a priori either superior or inferior to alternatives. Whether it is either of those things is dependent on its own merits. Being an ideology is neither a merit nor a flaw; it's merely a fact.
That said, I'm not sure I'd classify the scientific method as an ideology by itself. It's more of an epistemological tool, I would say. However, I would also say that someone stating "this tool is awesome, and we should use it" as making a statement that implies that we should incorporate the scientific method as a component of other ideologies, or that we should assign a value to it that makes it ideologically congenial to people sharing that value.
Ah, now we come down to it.
I'm going to put this out there: I believe that belief systems are all of equal status... in that they all have an equal burden to justify themselves and their merits.
To put it another way: if I make a statement of belief, or advocate a correct course of action, correct moral choice, or correct... whatever, and someone fires back with "Oh, that's just ideological" and then stops there as if they've somehow illegitimated or successfully rebutted my argument, my response will be "you're goddamn right it is. I hew to my personal ideology and values because I believe the courses of action and the moral choices it helps me to determine are correct. And I'm prepared to justify that with a giant fuckin' mountain of evidence, logic, reason and moral and ethical frameworks. These arguments may be bad. They may be risible. They may be lacking. They may be morally monstrous. They may be simply flat-out wrong. But you don't get to claim some kind of argumentative high ground by pretending that your own preferred course of action isn't ideological and that this conveys on it virtuousness over mine. You are under the precise same burden to justify your own personal ideology and the values and courses it prescribes as I am."
Identifying something as an ideology, or a choice or course of action as ideological, isn't a rebuttal, condemnation, virtue, recommendation, or demerit of that thing.
Similarly, if someone tries to prove they arrived at a course of action by non-ideological means and that makes it superior by itself... well, let's just say I'm going to be skeptical. You still gotta toss out some proof, buddy, and what proof you consider sufficient is gonna depend on your ideological priors if we're not dealing with things that are largely empirical. "I walked down the path and saw that it is washed out; we should go another way" is largely non-ideological and doesn't require much further justifying. "I think the answer to this pressing moral conundrum is X" is an ideologically charged statement and anyone pretending they got to that conclusion by raw, pure empiricism rather than by having their own ideological framework is probably guilty of sloppy thinking.
4614283
Ideological art has proven over and over again to be creepy and dangerous. People are quicker to turn artistic communities ideological than redditors are to shout "Hitler!"
Suppose you were moderating an online forum about MLP. Now suppose that ponies were a respectable art form. Fanfiction and pony art could advance your academic career, French critics argued on your forum about the implications of different MLP episodes, and the consensus on the meaning of pony art held powerful sway over public opinion.
But the MLP fanbase was never politically purged or unified, so you had political views in the forum represented in proportion to their popularity in the population. Most of your British members were in favor of Brexit, and half of your Americans liked Trump. Moreover, your forum keeps getting invaded by ideological types who don't really care about ponies at all. Every forum discussion degenerates after a few messages into arguments about politics.
You would probably have to institute a rule that people could not talk politics in the pony forum.
That's roughly what the situation is like in most fine arts today--concern for art is swamped by philosophical and political arguments between ideological partisans, some of whom aren't even interested in art. Ideological art has throughout history stomped out all competing art forms, over and over again.
4614233
Yes, it is. It absolutely is. The methodologies and epistemologies popular around the world 2000 years ago were: reliance on dreams, books of scripture, visions induced by drugs or self-abuse, tradition, divination, and so on. Modern empirical epistemologies are superior, and this is not an ideological judgement. Do you really want to claim that preferring modern engineering practices over the Oracle of Delphi when building a bridge is an arbitrary ideological decision?
See, you're using the word "ideology" there to imply that anything ideological is arbitrary. What does it matter that a decision "can't be shorn of ideology", unless that claim gives us additional information about that decision? You are implying that the decision is ideological, and thus problematic--and that it is problematic because the word "ideological" implies "arbitrary".
When you combine that with your claim that all decisions or stances are ideological, you are implying that there is no reality. You have gone fully postmodern; you are denying that we are capable of ever acquiring information on any subject. If we could, we could make a decision that was not arbitrary, and we could not call it ideological, since by your own usage "ideological" implies "arbitrary".
Wolf packs and chimpanzee groups both have a male pecking hierarchy (although they are structured differently and behave differently). But in both, males can advance up the hierarchy by beating up males above them (though in chimps rank also depends on the ranks of close relatives). In chimp groups, 2 or 3 lower-ranked males may gang up and form a coalition to bring down 1 or 2 upper-ranking chimps. In wolf packs, this is never done, or at least I've never found a recorded instance of it. High ranking wolves frequently gang up on lower ranking wolves, but low ranking wolves never gang up on a single high ranking wolf. They are capable of doing so; cooperative killing is their primary skill. But it is against the ethics of all wolf packs.
So what would you claim about this rule? Is it not instinctive? Then why do all wolf packs everywhere follow it? Is it not moral? Then what makes it not moral? Is it a meaningful choice? Then are you claiming that wolves are all ideological, and all share the same ideology?
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Communities ARE ideological. There's the old adage: "How do you paint a perfect picture? Turn yourself perfect, then paint as you naturally would".
People tend to skip the first step… because (shh, I has a sekrit) it's impossible. If ideological art throughout history has stomped out all competing art forms, that is simply an argument that anything else is rather rare and precious and possibly not even art anymore, and worth celebrating for its
Seems worthwhile. For instance, I quite like some of Art Spiegelman's experimental comics. On the other hand, they pale in significance next to his 'Maus' comic, which is an eloquent and personal overview of many ideologies: a Holocaust memoir, it's not his. He's the son of a Holocaust survivor, and he's a freaky artist with lots of issues, and he's working out where he stands in relation to a societal crime that touched his life very personally.
'Maus' stomped out everything Spiegelman did in the more experimental, non-ideological vein, because it's human stories. Often it's as simple as that.
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It may not be, but making that judgment requires ideology. You have to build a case that the results of modern empirical epistemologies are better than those they supplanted. This requires defining what better is, then proving your case.
Those who first promulgated those epistemologies did this. With great success. They did not simply assert betterness.
An arbitrary ideological decision? Of course not. That'd be silly.
I am doing no such thing. Ideology is often the antithesis of arbitrariness, since it often involves elevating a systematic framework over random chance and pure id-based reaction. Indeed, you yourself asserted upthread that you associate strong ideology with predictability of behavior, which is a damn strong indication that ideology isn't arbitrary and in fact reduces arbitrariness.
The claim by itself does not. However, it does tell us that the additional information is out there and maybe we should go looking for it; if the decision can't be shorn of ideology, that ideology might be worthy of interrogation and question to see if it holds up.
I am not. Decisions that are ideological are not automatically problematic. They might be. They also might not be. Whether or not they are is a completely independent question.
It does not. It often implies the opposite, in fact.
No, I am not.
I am not.
It really doesn't.
I mean... I don't even see where in my statements you're getting this from. Are we using different definitions of arbitrary?
Completely unrelated question: are you on a new device or something, or is my own device fucked up somehow? Your replies to me are riddled with numerous words that are double-spaced instead of single-spaced, and it makes the text look weird.
This isn't even annoying, and I'm not at all asking you to stop. But it is curious to me as either a deliberate stylistic choice or a limitation of an input device.
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Is this an inopportune time to point out that MLP has an ideological component to it?
Lauren Faust's motivation for creating it and writing it were explicitly ideological: she wanted to make quality entertainment specifically for girls, because she felt like there wasn't enough of that and that this was a bad thing.
That requires rendering judgment upon something that's at least somewhat subjective (the amount of entertainment available that's for girls) and then making a moral evaluation that the lack you've discerned is a bad thing that ought to be corrected, and then taking action to correct it.
And of course the show itself often promotes messages that the writing staff consider to be moral lessons or instruction of some sort. Twilight's letters to Celestia in the first two seasons are often explicitly meant to convey a moral lesson, usually about how people should be behave, endorsed by the art the viewer has just finished watching, to said viewership.
How is all that not ideological?
I've done moderation work among fiction-based communities myself. What usually happens in these situations is that you make a "General" or "Off-topic" sub-forum that you make clear is almost completely unmoderated and tell people to go play in there.
However, in the rest of the forum you don't usually implement a BLANKET ban. What you do is try and enforce on-topic discussions. If someone writes "Princess Ayn Rand Saves Equestria From The Moochers And Looters" you would allow a lot of libertarians to let their freak flags fly in that thread, and you'd also let a lot of socialists come in and argue "this story is appalling on a lot of levels; the moral instruction it is attempting to provide is odious." That's relevant to the piece of art created; indeed, the piece of art was probably created with the purpose of provoking such a conversation, which is an entirely legitimate reason to create a peace of art.
You would not, however, probably allow someone with the username "xxxHotDagny69xxx" to drop into the thread of the story "Applejack And Big Macintosh Watch The Sun Set Over The Orchard" with a ten thousand word post about how Applejack and Big Mac are immoral for not eschewing altruism. You'd ban them for that. You might let them drop in with a fifty-word post doing the same thing if they put a veneer of relevance over it. But you'd keep an eye on them.
It's really, really hard to moderate communities over a certain size. Reddit has a reputation as a cesspool because it has such a ginormous userbase that its a microcosm of the internet (and maybe even the population?) as a whole, and paying actual human eyeballs to watch such a place would be highly cost-prohibitive.
The latter category of people who are bad-faith trolls excluded, most of the ideological partisans you describe are deeply, deeply concerned for art. You might argue that their goals and methods are actively harmful to the art they're concerned about, but that's not the same as "unconcerned."
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I disagree. My personal experience of Guernica came before my knowledge of its context. The emotional intensity, the darkness, the horror came through to a great extent. Learning of the Spanish Civil War helped put it in context, but it still evoked a visceral reaction without that context.
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Are you living in the same universe I am? Because here in the real universe, it is, in fact, true; and has been demonstrated to be true. The sun is, in fact, the center of our solar system. This is a well-established fact.
That statement was gibberish.
As was that. There's a little phenomenon known as "frame of reference" that you need to pay attention to.
The heliocentric model of the solar system was initially proposed because it created an explanation for the observations humans made of the movement of heavenly bodies, and provided a framework that would allow us to make useful predictions from those observations. That is what science is, it is about observing, creating an explanation for why what we are observing happens, and then proving or disproving the validity of that explanation based on the predictions that the explanation allows us to make.
Well, no. What explanations, and therefore predictions, can be made about a phenomenon is dependent on the limits of our ability to observe. When our ability to observe was limited to our own eyes, then both the geocentric and heliocentric models of the solar system that could be created at the time would have been so very limited in what they could predict as to be effectively identical, and thereby equally useful.
Once we were able to develop tools that allowed us to expand and refine our observations, we were able to make more useful predictions, and the differences between the models began to become apparent. One allowed us to make more accurate predictions than the other. As time went on and observation continued to improve, it became clear that the heliocentric model was the more useful one, and therefore the one more likely to be right.
That is the point where holding onto belief in geocentrism became ideological, and expressed using ideological language, rather than merely observational. Further refinements to and expansions of our ability to observe has further refined the model, allowing us to make even more useful and precise predictions based on it. Based on what we now know, the Copernican model was wrong, but it was less wrong than the other models available at the time. Modern models are so much less wrong that it would be more useful to say that they are right but not entirely complete on a very small level. We still limited by the limits of our ability to observe, hence the current search for "Planet X" to explain some of the movements of bodies on the outskirts of our solar system.
Anyone who still held a Copernican model today would be considered to do so as an ideology, since the observable evidence contradicts parts of it, and it doesn't provide as many useful predictions as our current model.
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eg. The "Natural Law" morality theory.
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Interesting you should use that example, since MLP:FiM was created in the form that it was explicitly in order to promote a particular feminist ideology held by Lauren Faust. It's entirely ideological in nature; and that ideology has been well-maintained throughout, despite the fact that Lauren dropped her association with the show early on, because many of the people who work on the show hold and maintain a similar ideology.
Leaving that aside, do you consider the novels of Charles Dickens to be creepy and dangerous? Because they were explicitly ideological in nature as well. Dickens was his era's equivalent of a "social justice activist"; and most of this work, especially works like Bleak House, Oliver Twist, and The Old Curiosity Shop. What about Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose Uncle Tom's Cabin was an unapologetic work of propaganda. Yet both are considered great writers, and Dickens frequently hailed as one of the greatest English authors of any era. They were just as ideologically driven as, say, Sinclair Lewis or any of the modernists.
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Agreed. I goofed on that point. To retreat to a less-specific version: I often get responses to the effect that wanting to believe things that are true, or using empirical evidence rather than faith, is an ideology. The Church has an ideology saying that faith or revelation can be superior to observation. That doesn't necessarily mean the converse view, that empirical evidence is superior to faith, is also an ideology.