IDEOLOGICAL CRITIQUE PART SEVEN

Part Two: Edwin Wilmsen, Richard Lee, and the !Kung of the Kalahari

We come now to the first of the three examples of ideological critique that I shall be examining in detail: The excoriating attack by Edwin Wilmsen on the ethnographic studies of a group of people living in the Kalahari, a desert that covers much of southwestern Botswana, northwestern South Africa, and southern Namibia. The focus of Wilmsen's attack is the work of Professor Richard B. Lee and associates, which was published in hundreds of scholarly articles, a number of books, and at least one documentary film. Lee is a Canadian, born in 1937. He did doctoral work at Berkeley and taught at a number of American and Canadian universities. He is currently Professor Emeritus at Toronto.

Before launching into my account of Lee's work and Wilmsen's critique, I want to say something about the sort of research that people like Lee and Wilmsen do. I am a philosopher, and it is my impression that a good many of the people who follow this blog are either philosophers or else philosophically inclined intellectuals. We philosophers don't do much in the way of actual research, save when we are studying the history of our own subject. We do not work in laboratories, and for us a day-long visit to a library not at our own university is as close as we ever come to a field trip. At Commencement or during meetings of the entire faculty of our university, we gather with chemists, physicists, ethnographers, and geologists, and since we all look pretty much alike on those ritual occasions, it is easy for us to suppose that what we do professionally, and what they do professionally, is all just about the same. But nothing could be further from the truth. An ethnographer like Richard Lee or Edwin Wilmsen spends months, years painstakingly gathering information about the lives, cultures, and practices of groups of people very, very different from themselves, one detail or fact at a time. They learn languages not at all akin to any tongue they studied in school, and a good deal of their time and effort must be devoted simply to getting food, arranging for toilet facilities, staying healthy, and developing good working relations with the people they have traveled many thousands of miles to study. Since we philosophers do not do anything remotely like that, it is fatally easy for us to ignore the complex difficulties of conducting ethnographic research, rushing eagerly and much too soon past the factual details in an ethnographic report so that we can get to the theoretical issues which are our bread and butter. As I lay out Wilmsen's ideological critique of Lee's work, I encourage you to do a little background reading to enrich your understanding of the facts that are at issue. Once again, thanks to a commenter, I can give you the following URL which, if pasted into your command line, will take you to Google's scan of the Wilmsen:

http://books.google.com/books?id=Zr783379T4UC&lpg=PP1&dq=Wilmsen's%20Land%20Filled%20With%20Flies&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false

An analogous caution must be issued with regard to the practitioners of an associated discipline, Paleontology. Paleontologists in a way have it even worse than Ethnographers. Since much of the human body does not fossilize, save under the most unusual of circumstances, and since language, diet, kinship practices, and religious beliefs leave only the most indirect traces on bones, if indeed they leave any traces at all, paleontologists seeking to learn something about the evolution of the human species are forced to make what they can from the bones left by the original subjects in whom they are interested. What is even worse, time and the slow alterations of the earth's crust most often bury the remains that have fossilized well below the present surface of the earth, so paleontologists must spend endless frustrating years digging about here and there hoping to hit upon some significant remains. When a tibia or a mandible or a tooth does pop up, paleontologists are agog with excitement, stretching to their limits the possibilities of indirect inference in an effort to fill in a bit more fully the gappy and spotty picture of human and pre-human life.

Much the same is true of archaeologists, who excavate the remains of human settlements. Things are not quite to bad for them, for quite often there has been continuous occupation at a site, so at least they can tell from what is on the surface where it might be fruitful to dig. [Not always, of course. As a twenty year old visiting Rome for the first time, I oohed and aahed at what I took to be Roman remains from Caesar's time, only to learn that I was actually looking at a building erected by Mussolini that had been bombed during World War II. It is probably just as well that I chose Philosophy as my field.]

Keep these observations in mind as we get into the details of the Wilmsen/Lee fight. I am, I confess, totally in Wilmsen's camp, but I think we need to be generous in our understanding of what motivated Lee.

The focus of our attention is a group of people living in a part of the Kalahari who speak a San language. Until relatively recently, these and other peoples in roughly the same area were referred to as "bushmen," a dismissive or derogatory term coined by colonial settlers of the Western Cape. Lee and his associates refer to the people they studied as !Kung San. I am going to follow Wilmsen's practice and refer to them as Zhu, which is a somewhat truncated transliteration of the words they use to refer to themselves. [For those of you to whom all of this is brand new, I will just explain that the San languages are click languages -- that is to say, languages which use a number of non-aspirated sounds that resemble clicks, in addition to the aspirated sounds with which we are familiar in Indo-European languages. There are many different "clicks," and I can testify, from walking across the campus of the University of Durban-Westville in South Africa overhearing student conversations, that click languages are extraordinarily beautiful, and monstrously hard for shlubs like me to pronounce properly.]

The fundamental premise of the ethnographic work of Lee and his associates is clearly stated in one of their many books, Kalahari Hunter-Gatherers: Studies of the !Kung San and their Neighbors, published by Harvard University Press in 1976. "One justification for studying the !Kung is that they are relatively pure hunter-gatherers living in an ancient territory, and they in many ways may be typical of South African hunter-gatherers in Paleolithic times." [p. 217]

Melvin Konner, one of the contributors to this volume of studies, writes in his essay on "Maternal Care, Infant Behavior, and Development among the !Kung," that:

"[I]t seemed wise to plan a specific study of infancy as part of the long-range Harvard project. Like other aspects of the expedition, this study suggested itself with a certain amount of urgency. Hunter-gatherer life did not seem destined for a lengthy future, and with it would pass an important chapter in our knowledge of human infancy, especially of the evolution of human infancy. That is, its importance lay not mainly in its uniqueness as an ethnological variety, but in its position as representative of a group of societies resembling, in their basic subsistence ecology, the original human sociocultural form." [p. 219]

Lying behind these two brief passages is an entire world-view, not only of Ethnography as a scientific discipline but more broadly of the history of human beings as a species. Before I can tell you what Wilmsen has to say about the work of lee and the Harvard Project, I need to recall for you [or tell those of you to whom this is all new] a good deal of what led up to the point at which Lee, Konner, and the others could make such statements.

IDEOLOGICAL CRITIQUE PART SIX

Mannheim's initial characterization of the liberal-humanitarian orientation toward time is, at first, somewhat puzzling. Here is how he introduces the idea:

"The utopia of liberal-humanitarianism ... establishes a 'correct' rational conception to be set off against evil reality. This counter-conception is not used, however, as a blueprint in accordance with which at any given point in time the world is to be reconstructed. Rather it serves as a 'measuring rod' by means of which the course of concrete events may be theoretically evaluated. The utopia of the liberal-humanitarian mentality is the 'idea' ... here .. conceived of as a formal goal projected into the infinite future whose function it is to act as a mere regulative device in mundane affairs." [p. 219]

Mannheim has in mind, I believe, what at a certain point was referred to, in connection with nineteenth century English historiography, as "the Whig interpretation of history." Time is conceived as flowing smoothly, evenly, without chiliastic eruptions or abrupt revolutionary breaks, but always steadily, gently upward, toward a better future guided by a conception of the good society projected into an indefinite future. In this worldview, there is always room for experimentation, for observation, for accommodation, but all of these in the service of a utopian ideal as goal of social and political action. Whereas the Chiliast holds herself always at the ready, prepared for the unpredictable moment when the infinite will erupt into the finite world and transform Being, the liberal-humanitarian considers each moment in time as simply another opportunity for incremental improvement. For the Chiliast, the world is divided without remainder into True Believers, who will be welcomed into the Kingdom to Come, and all the rest, who are of no importance whatsoever. [Once again, I encourage you to apply all of these descriptions to contemporary American Born Again End-Time Christian Fundamentalists.] But for the liberal-humanitarian, the world exhibits no such binary divisions. Anyone is a potential colleague in limited projects of social improvement; no one is forever an enemy.

The liberal-humanitarian refuses to accept the ideological claim of the ruling classes that nothing of any importance can be changed, that all is as it must and always shall be. As Mannheim says, "The liberal idea is adequately intelligible only as a counterpart to the ecstatic attitude of the Chiliast which often hides behind a rationalist facade and which historically and socially o ["Rationalism in Politics", in the book by the same name.] offers a continual, potential threat to liberalism. It is a battle cry against that stratum of society whose power comes from its inherited position in the existing order, and which is able to master the here and now at first unconsciously and later through rational calculation." [p. 226] As Michael Oakeshott says of "the Rationalist," which is his version of Mannheim's liberal-humanitarian, "With an almost poetic fancy he strives to live each day as if it were his first, and he believes that to form a habit is to fail."

The conservative orientation toward time and social reality is, in many ways, the inverse of the liberal-humanitarian orientation. [Once again, I must break into my exposition to urge you to read Mannheim himself. Mannheim was perhaps the greatest theorist and analyst of Conservatism, and I cannot begin to do justice to the richness and complexity of his account.] By Conservatism, I mean here, as Mannheim does, the traditional conservatism of Burke, of De Maistre, not what calls itself Conservatism today in American politics, and is really an incompatible, internally illogical fusion of classical laisser-faire liberalism and nativist Fundamentalist Protestantism.

The Conservative is not, Mannheim tells us, in the first instance a theorist. Indeed, the Conservative mentality, the Conservative orientation toward society, is at first implicit, unformulated. The Conservative cherishes what is simply because it exists, because it has persisted over time. He accepts and enjoys quirky, particular, inexplicable immemorial customs of actual political institutions: The quaint forms of speech with which Members of Parliament address one another, the wigs that barristers wear, the long settled inconsistencies in the allocation of seats to the States that makes the United States Senate so thoroughly unrepresentatve. The Conservative hesitates to alter what has stood the test of time, believing that embodied in it, in ways that may not be apparent, is some measure of collective historical wisdom that we would be wise not to ignore.

Mannheim writes, "The time-sense of this mode of experience and thought is completely opposed to that of liberalism. Whereas for liberalism the future was everything and the past nothing, the conservative mode of experiencing time found the best corroboration of its sense of determinateness in discovering the significance of the past, in the discovery of time as the creator of value. Duration did not exist at all for the Chiliastic mentality, and existed for liberalism only in so far as henceforth it gives birth to progress. But for conservatism everything that exists has a positive and nominal value merely because it has come into existence slowly and gradually." [p. 235]

We come finally to the fourth form of utopian mentality, the Socialist-Communist Utopia. The focal point of the Socialist-Communist mentality is that singular moment that it calls The Revolution. In sharp contrast to the liberal-humanitarian mentality, which denies to any particular moment in time any special world-historical weight, the Socialist [as opposed, say, to the Social Democrat, who is really, in temporal orientation, a liberal-humanitarian] sees all past and all future time as having a kind of virtual existence in the Moment of The Revolution. "Historical experience," Mannheim writes, "becomes thereby a truly strategic plan. Everything in history must now be experienced as an intellectually and volitionally controllable phenomenon." [p. 247]

But in contrast to the Chiliast, the Socialist-Communist does not merely keep herself in perpetual readiness for the unpredictable eruption of the infinite into the present; instead, she prepares for the Moment, strategically choosing actions designed to bring the Moment into existence. [Aside: we may see here some kinship with the form of Jewish Messianism to which Disgruntled Goat alludes. I do wish you folks had more plausible names. :) ]

Let us step back and reflect on what Mannheim is suggesting to us. He sees these four forms of utopian thinking as united in their determination to go beyond the existing socio-economic order [Conservatism does not fit perfectly into this schema, but I will do my best to include it.] But each differs from all the others in its orientation to time itself, as one of the fundamental structures of human experience, as opposed to what occurs in time. To the Chiliast, time is divided into a single unpredictable Moment of transcendence or immanence, and an undifferentiated and unimportant sequence of moments that are merely to be borne, or put up with, while waiting in a condition of perpetual unchanging anticipation for salvation. To the liberal-humanitarian, time is a steadily flowing stream without distinguished or differentiated Moments, but with a direction, from the past toward an ideal future that hovers always at the horizon of social possibility, guiding us in reformist adjustments designed to bring us ever closer to the idea. To the Conservative, time is weighted with meaning and value merely by virtue of its passage, so that what is has substance and worth as a consequence of its survival. The Conservative orientation to time, unlike that of the liberal-humanist, is backward looking, for it is the institutions and practices and associated sensibilities of bygone times that have value for the Conservative. And finally, to the Socialist-Communist, time is a strategic matrix preparing for a Moment of Revolution that will be brought into existence by careful planning and uncompromising commitment. The time beyond that Moment will be the fulfillment of utopian dreams. As the old joke goes, "Now, only the bosses eat peaches and cream, but after the Revolution, we shall all eat peaches and cream."

For the Chiliast, there are only the Saved and the Damned. The Saved will go to heaven with us; the damned do not matter. For the liberal-humanitarian, there is a world of people of good will who can join with us in reforms and projects to make incremental improvements at each moment in the unfolding of time. For the Conservative, there are the bearers of traditional roles and responsibilities, who are to be honored and respected by virtue of their inherited status. And for the Socialist-Communists, there are Comrades, Fellow-Travelers, Class Traitors, and Enemies, in a struggle to the death for The Revolution.

I will leave it to each of you to reflect on Mannheim's insights in order to discover whether they throw light on the world as you know it. Speaking purely for myself, I realize as I read him that my ideological beliefs, which are Socialist-Communist and Anarchistic, do not comport with my practical politics, which are liberal-humanitarian, nor entirely with my sentiments, which are sometimes sympathetic to the Conservative orientation to time.

After reading Mannheim for the first time many decades ago, I wondered whether it would be possible to develop an ideological and utopian critique of space consciousness, like Mannheim's analysis of time consciousness. The point would be to tease out the political implications of such notions as neighborhood, nation, and [spatial] world. If anyone is looking for a brilliant, albeit difficult, topic for a doctoral dissertation, there it is.

Tomorrow, we travel to the Kalahari.

IDEOLOGICAL CRITIQUE PART FIVE

Mannheim begins with a definition. "A state of mind is utopian when it is incongruous with the state of reality in which it occurs." Such states of mind he describes as "situationally transcendent" or "unreal." Situationally adequate or congruous ideas are those which, in effect, fit perfectly the way things currently are. Most people, most of the time, go through life operating with "situationally adequate" ideas. That is to say, they accept as given the social and economic order in which they are embedded, and negotiate the ordinary passages of daily life without any sense of incompatibility between their world and their understanding of their world. [Don't get edgy -- we will get shortly to the folks who don't do this, among whom I suspect are numbered many of the readers of this blog.] So, for example, I walk out of my apartment here in Chapel Hill to run some errands in the little faux village that is my community [Meadowmont Village, constructed seven or eight years ago from scratch as a deliberate effort to create the feel of an old-fashioned small town. Never mind.] I walk first to the bank across the street, where I deposit a check, and then withdraw some cash from the ATM. Then I cross the parking lot to the Harris Teeter supermarket, where I shop for some things for dinner. I may be a Marxist, an anarchist, and an atheist, but none of that come into play as I run my errands. My notions of where I am, who I am, and what I am doing are "situationally congruous" and "adequate." I.e., I make my deposit, get my cash, and buy my groceries easily and smoothly, leaving my mind free to think anarchistic or Marxist or atheistic thoughts.

But at least in the society of the past several hundred years, Mannheim notes, there are also a number of ideas abroad that are not "situationally congruent" or "adequate" to the social reality in which they occur, and the two main categories of such ideas are ideologies and utopias. Now those in positions of dominance at any given time in a society will deny the very possibility that their world can change in any fundamental way. "They will label as utopian," Mannheim observes, "all conceptions of existence which from their point of view can never in principle be realized." [p. 196] Economists will deride as utopian the very idea of a society in which decisions concerning the allocation of capital are based on considerations of common need rather than profitability. Agricultural experts will dismiss as utopian any suggestion that a modern society could provide for its food needs without the massive use of pesticides and additives. The defenders of the existing order tend to blur the distinction between ideas that are unrealizable in any state of affairs, such as the idea of a society in which there is no deferral of gratification whatsoever, and ideas that are simply unrealizable in the present social order, such as the idea of an economy governed by the principle of production for human needs rather than production for profit. Mannheim rather acerbically observes that "the reluctance to transcend the status quo tends toward the view of regarding something that is unrealizable merely in the given order as completely unrealizable in any order, so that by obscuring these distinctions one can suppress the validity of the claims of the relative utopia."

[I am quoting these passages simply to give you the flavor of Mannheim's discussion, so that you will perhaps be prompted to seek out his book and read the entirety of what he has to say, but it ought to be clear already both that these remarks, written first in 1929, describe perfectly the character of the public discourse in contemporary America, and also that his analysis is much more profound and insightful even than that of the many radical critics who are writing now. In my judgment, we really have lost something in the past half century, especially in disciplines like Sociology, Political Science, Economics, and Philosophy.]

As an application and illustration of his conception of utopian thinking, Mannheim now analyzes the core orientation toward time itself of four kinds of such thinking, which he calls the "orgiastic chiliasm of the Anabaptists," the "liberal-humanitarian idea," the "conservative Idea," and the "socialist-communist utopia." All of you will familiar with the liberal-humanitarian, conservative [in the old sense], and the socialist-communist frames of mind, but you may be somewhat puzzled by orgiastic chiliasm. When Mannheim was writing, there were no prominent examples of this form of thinking in his world, and he was forced therefore to reach back to a group of Protestant sects of the 16th century who came to be referred to as Anabaptists [since they denied the need for the rite of baptism.] However, recently there has been a revival of orgiastic chiliasm in the form of the beliefs of End-Timers eagerly awaiting the Rapture, so you will probably have no difficulty understanding that particular mental orientation.

"The only true, perhaps the only direct, identifying characteristic of Chiliastic experience is absolute presentness. ... For the real Chiliast, the present becomes the breach through which what was previously inward bursts out suddenly, takes hold of the outer world and transforms it." Chiliasm, from the Greek for "one thousand," is originally the early Christian belief that Jesus will return to earth and rule for one thousand years [hence also referred to as millenarianism.] For the Chiliast, the moment of return of Jesus to earth is the only moment that matters. It is a moment will can come at any time, without warning, without a series of events leading up to it. It is a moment into which the divine, the transcendent, will erupt, completely changing the world forever. The Chiliast is conscious of simply marking time, waiting with perfect confidence and infinite patience for The Moment. Time for the Chiliast is anisotropic [meaning the denial that every moment of time is of equal weight or significance with every other moment.] The Chiliast thus does not have a politics, in any recognizable sense of that term. The Chiliast has no interest in altering the configuration or characteristics of secular society, for those configurations and characteristics have no significance or importance for The Moment. The Chiliast does not "make preparations" for the Second Coming. He is prepared, permanently and perfectly, for the arrival of The Moment.

Insofar as Chiliasm expresses itself politically, it does so in "revolutionary outbursts," but this revolutionary impulse is not programmatic or rationally oriented toward secular ends. Rather, it is expressive. As Mannheim says, the Chiliast "awaits only that moment when the external concatenation of circumstances coincides with the ecstatic restlessness of his soul." [p. 218]

Tomorrow, the liberal-humanitarian orientation toward Time.

IDEOLOGICAL CRITIQUE PART FOUR

To Continue:

Note too that this world view may come to be, indeed most often is, accepted by the entire society, including those who suffer as a consequence of its acceptance. The peasants see the world in much the way that their feudal lords do, albeit from a different perspective. As Marx showed us, it requires a considerable socio-economic development and a great deal of deliberate effort for the workers to penetrate the ruling bourgeois ideology and begin to see their capitalism as exploitative.

Let me repeat for emphasis one of Mannheim's central claims by quoting a pregnant passage from the opening pages of the second chapter:

"If we confine our observations to the mental processes which take place in the individual and regard him as the only possible bearer of ideologies, we shall never grasp in its totality the structure of the intellectual world belonging to a social group in a given historical situation. Although the mental world as a whole could never come into existence without the experiences and productive responses of the different individuals, its inner structure is not to be found in a mere integration of these individual experiences. ... Every individual participates only in certain fragments of this thought-system, the totality of which is not in the least a mere sum of these fragmentary individual experiences." [p. 58] This was the profound idea that I attempted to illustrate in a preliminary way with my little story about Beverly Rosenberg teaching me to walk on the curb side of a lady.

With the universal appropriation of the powerful weapon of ideological critique, a problem arises to which Mannheim devotes a good deal of anxious thought, albeit unsuccessfully, in my judgment. The problem is this: So long as I alone deploy ideological unmasking against my opponents, I can maintain the conviction that my thought processes are objective and non-ideological, that my reasoning is grounded in principles of logic and scientific observation. But once I am forced, by the responses of my opponents, to confront the previously unacknowledged and inevitable ideological distortions of my own world view, I seem ineluctably drawn to the conclusion that objectivity is impossible, indeed that truth itself is an illusion. The Feudal and the Bourgeois worldviews fight to the death, and when the bourgeois worldview conquers, the feudal world view is not proved incorrect but is simply extinguished, consigned, in that great trope of Leon Trotsky, to the trash heap of history. So too, if Marx is correct, the bourgeois worldview will eventually [deo volente!!] be defeated by the socialist worldview, after which, a suitable period of adjustment having elapsed, it will appear simply incredible and incomprehensible to ordinary people that the means of production should ever have been privately owned.

This conclusion, which the logic of his analysis seemed to require, was to Mannheim utterly unacceptable. In a desperate effort to avoid the relativism and hermetic situationalism to which he was being driven, he put forward the idea that in modern society there are certain people whose social location lies outside any of the major socio-economic classes. These "marginal men," or grenzmenschen, are capable, he suggested, of achieving something like an objective perspective on their own society. Who are these "marginal men?" Not the homeless or the permanently unemployed, not the mad, not even the artists, but -- "free-floating intellectuals."

It would be too easy to mock Mannheim for this blatantly self-serving rationalization of his own social position. Instead, I ask you to reflect on how deeply wounded he, and many others of his generation, felt by this mortal threat to their principles of objective inquiry and wissenschaftlichkeit. Since I devoted many years of my life to the unsuccessful quest for objective principles of morality, I can sympathize with him. By the way, one of Mannheim's many brilliant apercus is that the it was the breakdown of the medieval consensus that gave rise to epistemology in the early seventeenth century! Those of you who have a good command of the history of philosophy might meditate on that idea for a while. It is extraordinarily suggestive.

In an attempt to introduce some order into his discussion, Mannheim distinguishes two classes of systematically interest-driven worldviews. Ideologies are worldviews that exaggerate the stability of the existing order and deny the possibility that it will ever fundamentally change, in an unacknowledged attempt to shore up that order. The bourgeois worldview, for example, by representing laisser-faire capitalism as the endpoint of a long process of the rationalization of economic activity, denies the very possibility of anything "beyond capitalism," and thus contributes to the stabilization of the capitalist order, just as the feudal order was rationalized and stabilized by its representation as the will of God. In interesting, although trivial, example of this sort of ideological buttressing of the existing order is Francis Fukuyama's famous 1989 essay, "The End of History," which claims that Western liberal [which is to say capitalist] democracy is the endpoint of human social evolution, and hence the end of history. [Take that, Socialism!]

Utopias, by contrast, are worldviews that exaggerate the weakness of the existing order and represent as possible, or even as inevitable, its replacement by an alternative social and economic order that the proponents of the utopia long for and see as preferable to the current social order. Mannheim views Marxism as an example of a utopian weltanschauung, as you might have guessed.

At this point, we have before us enough of Mannheim's analysis to allow us to proceed to our three case studies of ideological critique. But before we move on to Wilmsen and the Kalahari, I shall devote a day to discussing one particular piece of analysis offered by Mannheim that I consider to be among the most brilliant passages ever penned by a sociologist. Let me prepare the way with a few words of explanation.

Mannheim, like all the great German social theorists of his era, was a student of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. If I may steal a line from George Harrison in Hard Day's Night, Kant "loomed large in their legend." [Another brief autobiographical aside: German intellectuals of the mid-twentieth century held Kant in the same high esteem as did French intellectuals Descartes. It was because I am an expert on Kant's philosophy that such emigré(e) scholars as Herbert Marcuse and Hannah Arendt looked kindly on me, and were willing to forgive my ungetoverable Amerikanischkeit.] Kant taught us all that space, time, and causality are the most fundamental organizing concepts of empirical knowledge. What Mannheim does in Chapter IV of Ideology and Utopia, "The Utopian Mentality," is to undertake nothing less than an ideological analysis of forms of time-consciousness as such [or an sich, as we Kant scholars like to say.] Tomorrow, we shall see how he does this.

IDEOLOGICAL CRITIQUE PART THREE

Before moving on to Mannheim's development and elaboration of this core idea, I am going to pause for a moment to reflect on its significance. We are these days quite accustomed to the attempt in political discourse to unmask, humiliate, delegitimize, shame our opponents. Despite the ritual calls for "bi-partisanship" or even for "non-partisanship," the standard polemical move in contemporary political debate is to accuse one's opponent of being covertly a representative of "special interests,' a "secret socialist," a radical, a paleo-conservative, a misogynist, a French-lover, the Anti-Christ. The goal of such speech is not to demonstrate that one's opponent is mistaken about some matter of public policy, but to reveal him or her as unworthy to be taken seriously, as a person not to be accepted into decent society.

Contrast this with two older modes of disagreement, which I shall label the Academic and the Parliamentary. In Academic disagreement, all of the participants begin with two assumptions that frame the debate: First, that all of the participants are recognized as having achieved some level of professional expertise that warrants their being listened to; and Second, that all participants, however strongly they may disagree, are acknowledged to be engaged in a search for truth. In the German sense of the word, they are all wissenschaftlich. [This word carries a meaning much broader than is implied by the English translation "scientific." It means, roughly rational, systematic, regulated by recognized canons of objective research, and so forth.] In ordinary Academic debate, no attempt is made to unmask one's opponent as having a secret and unadmitted agenda, as being prepared to warp the data to fit secret purposes, or as acting as an agent of an interested party. Such corruptions of Academic debate occur, of course, but when they are alleged, all serious discussion stops until the truth of the allegations is ascertained. If the allegations are shown to be true, the guilty party is henceforth excluded from the debate, is ostracized or driven from the Academy.

In Parliamentary debate, the participants are understood to be the chosen representatives of groups of citizens having legitimate interests or concerns that they seek to express and advance through their representatives. There are two underlying assumptions of Parliamentary debate: First, that the groups of citizens being represented have a fundamental right to have their interests taken seriously in the deliberations of the elected body; and Second, that all of the citizens are committed to the well-being of the political community as a whole, whatever they understand that well-being to consist in. The debates then take two forms: Negotiated agreements about public policies, in which the elected representatives act as negotiators for the interests of those who have chosen them as representatives; and Debates about the best way to pursue the common good to which all parties are committed. It is understood that the groups of citizens being represented will have different and often incompatible interests, and that the results of the negotiations will therefore inevitably fall short of what any one group of citizens desires. In a normal Parliamentary debate, no representative seeks to unmask or humiliate or delegitimize another, for to do so would, in effect, be to deny the legitimacy of the interests of the group of citizens being represented. It would be to say that that group of persons are not genuine citizens, do not deserve to have their interests represented, are interlopers or enemies of the common weal.

These, or something like them, are the models Mannheim has in mind as the ideals of public discourse in a modern, advanced, secular national society. He sees the introduction into the public discourse of the tactics of ideological unmasking as a terrible loss, a falling away from the ideal, as something therefore that he seeks to counteract insofar as he is able.

But alas, his own analysis leads him inexorably in another direction.

Mannheim begins by distinguishing the particular from the total conception of ideology. By the particular conception Mannheim means the idea that what people say in political contexts is, or may be, more or less self-consciously self-serving rationalizations for some proposition that serves their real [but very possibly concealed] interests. A good example would be the repeated appeal, by conservative defenders of the interests of capital, to the supposed "proof" offered in Neo-Classical Economic theory that a minimum wage drives up prices, increases unemployment, and introduces inefficiencies into the market. Sophisticated economists are quite well aware that the mathematics underlying this claim actually apply only to economies in long-run equilibrium in which there are constant returns to scale, a zero profit rate, and a linear homogeneous production function for the entire economy -- conditions that never exist even a Milton Friedmanesque wet dream. But the politicians and conservative think tank epigones who studied this nonsense in their Freshman economics courses and never got any further with the subject, may be quite unaware of the fact that they are spouting self-serving absurdities. Similarly, champions of the mission of "democratic nation building in the Middle East" may know that they are offering blatant rationalizations for the corporate interests of the oil industry. But they may also actually believe that what America does is not imperialism because [as Marvin Kalb once explained to me] "we have good intentions."] Mannheim has a good deal to say about the progression from simple lying to ideological self-deception.

A total ideology, by contrast, is what we have already called a world view or weltanschauung. [anschauen, by the way, is German for "to look at."] A total ideology is a complete way of seeing the social world that encompasses everything in that world, and understands it from a perspective whose self-interest is almost certainly hidden from the possessor of the world-view. Think, for example, of the way in which a fourteenth century French landed aristocrat sees his world and his place in it. His conception of property, of the place of himself and of women of his social class in the life of the family, of the church, of honor, of the proper role and behavior of the peasantry, of his obligations, or lack of same, to the craftsmen and merchants in the nearby walled city, all taken together constitute an entire integrated understanding of the objective social reality of the world. We can see with very little trouble that everything he believes is a patent self-justifying rationalization of his privileged position in that world. But he is virtually incapable to recognizing this obvious fact. That he personally is fortunate to have been born an aristocrat may be something he can grasp, if he has a generous enough imagination. But that the entire world order within which people are born aristocrats or peasants is itself a constructed rationale for his privilege and that of his fellow aristocrats is simply beyond him.

It is easy enough to conjure up a number of different [and competing] world-views, of course: The world-view of the 3rd century A. D. Roman senator; the world-view of the seventeenth century Puritan Roundhead; the world-view of the twenty-first century corporate executive [which may be in important ways different from the world-view of the nineteenth century robber baron]. Note that when a world-view dominates an era, as that of the French aristocrat mentioned above did, it may very well be shared in and accepted not only by those who benefit from its acceptance, but also by those who do not. The serf on the aristocrat's lands probably share's his lord's conviction that lords should be tried in different courts than priests, and different again than peasants.

[As I prepare to post this segment of my bourse, I find that I must once again warn you that Mannheim's discussion is incredibly rich and complex -- so much so that I cannot possibly do justice to it in these brief remarks.]

QUICK RESPONSE

While I write the next part of my bourse, let me respond quickly to a question that several of you have posed. Mannheim was deeply troubled by the sceptical implications of his analysis, especially as it unfolded beyond these preliminary stages [I shall get to that in the next Part.] He advanced a "solution" to the problem, but, as we shall see, it is almost a cry of desperation, and coming as it does after his extraordinarily powerful analysis of ideological critique, does not seem [at least to me] to be successful. I have been struggling for most of my life with the apparently relativistic implications of the work of people like Mannheim. Marx understood the problem very well, which is one of the reasons why he eschewed moralising and claimed merely to be identifying what he called "the laws of motion of capitalist society." Marx did not argue for socialism. He claimed simply to be able to show that socialism would emerge from the womb of capitalism. I engaged [pessimistically] with that claim in my essay, the Future of Socialism.

I eventually came to the conclusion that one must make a life choice. One must answer the question posed by the old union song, "Which side are you on?" Or, as I like to put it, Whom do you choose in life as your comrades, with whom do you make common cause? That is a question whose answer cannot emerge from a value-neutral theoretical analysis, but only from an existential choice.

IDEOLOGICAL CRITIQUE PART TWO

Before I continue, let me remind you that you can find Mannheim's Ideology and Utopia at the following place:

http://books.google.com/books?id=ndfa3Nl39KoC&lpg=PP1&dq=mannheim%2C%20%22ideology%20and%20utopia%22&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false

Also, with the kind assistance of a Reference Librarian at Duke University, I have now been able to put on box.net my 1990 essay, "Narrative Time: On The Inherently Perspectival Structure of the Social World," which deals with some of the issues I am raising in this bourse.

Elaborating on the thesis that he advances at the beginning of his first chapter, Mannheim writes: "Strictly speaking, it is incorrect to say that the single individual thinks. Rather it is more correct to insist that he participates in thinking further what other men have thought before him." [page 5]

By the time Mannheim was writing, it had become a commonplace that every element of the culture of a people is a collective product, passed along from generation to generation, always evolving, but always experienced by each generation as something they have inherited from their ancestors. Ethnographers and Sociologists were busily engaged in studying the ways in which peoples wrest a living from the earth -- their "material culture" as it came to be called -- as well as their kinship relations, their religion, their art, their modes of dress, their practices of war, indeed the ways in which they arrange their bodies as they walk and sit and sleep. But even the most sophisticated students of the human comedy [excluding Marx] clung to the belief that in our thought processes, in our study of nature and of society, we are capable of extricating ourselves from our social matrix and thinking rationally, as Minds. Mannheim is denying that assumption. In this book, he is advancing the radical thesis that alongside a Sociology of Religion, a Sociology of Art, a Sociology of Politics, and a Sociology of Economics, we must also undertake a Sociology of Knowledge itself.

We are only at the beginning of a long and complex story, but it may help you to see where we are going if I remark that Mannheim is slowly moving toward the notion of a socially embedded and determined conception of the entire social world, an historically and socially determined "world view" or, as the German has it, a Weltanschauung.

After a good deal more development of these opening ideas [a development that it is well worth your while to read, by the way -- see Chapter One, "Preliminary Approach to the Problem," in Ideology and Utopia], Mannheim advances what I think of as the second major thesis of his book. [See pages 38-39]

"Political discussion possesses a character fundamentally different from academic discussion. It seeks not only to be in the right but also to demolish the basis of its opponents' social and intellectual existence. ... Political conflict, since it is from the very beginning a rationalized form of the struggle for social predominance, attacks the social status of the opponent, his public prestige, and his self-confidence. ... Physical repression is, it is true, harder to bear externally, but the will to psychic annihilation .. is perhaps even more unbearable." The tearing away of the facade of reasonableness, and the revealing of the "social-situational roots of thought, Mannheim says, takes the form of an "unmasking."

Let us take just a moment to reflect on this claim, which is, I believe, both true and very profound. Academic debates between acknowledged experts can be extremely vigorous, even contentious. Whether they take place between philosophers or mathematicians or physicists or economists, they often involve heated arguments and counterarguments. But the social legitimacy of one's opponent is not called into question in the course of the argument. One's opponent is assumed to be, so to speak, an honorable man or woman who genuinely believes what he or she is saying, however wrong one may think that is. By contrast, in political debates, especially those that we now have learned to call "ideological," the aim is to destroy the opponent, not merely to rebut his or her arguments. If I call my opponent a "mouthpiece for the pharmaceutical industry" or a "running dog of imperialism" or an "apologist for international capitalism," I am not just saying that his arguments are incorrect or unsupported by the evidence. I am attempting to destroy him, strip off his mask of ostensible objectivity and reveal him to be something else, something shameful and worthy of contempt. My goal, for all that it is only rarely achieved, is to drive him from the field of combat, his tail between his legs, ashamed and humiliated, unable hence forward to show himself in polite company. Sometimes, of course, I may attempt to achieve this objective by accusing him of abusing women or being on the take, but it is a far deeper thrust to say of him that he is in the grip of a self-serving self-justifying rationalization of which he himself is unaware. This is the nature of "ideological critique."

"At first," Mannheim observes, "those parties who possessed the new 'intellectual weapons,' the unmasking of the unconscious, had a terrific advantage over their adversaries." [Note that this is the use to which some people put the insights of Freud, trying to embarrass and humiliate those whom they dislike by purporting to reveal their actions and statements as nothing more than the eruptions of repressed and shameful wishes. Mannheim continues: "It was stupefying for the latter [i.e. the adversaries] when it was demonstrated that their ideas were merely distorted reflections of their situation in life, anticipations of their unconscious interests." This new mode of argument "must have filled [the adversary] with terror and awakened in the person using the weapon a feeling of marvelous superiority."

Sound familiar, anyone?

But the victory is short-lived, for it takes very little time for those against whom this new weapon is deployed to appropriate it for their own uses. This is, by the way, the pattern of all developments in the technology of warfare, whether physical or mental. The first person to demonstrate with the irresistible rigor of formal logic that the premises of an argument entail its conclusion had a weapon of seemingly god-like power. He or she could force an opponent who has granted the premises to accept the conclusion, no matter how unappealing. Thus the bow begets bows, the lance lances, tanks tanks, and nuclear weapons nuclear weapons. But, Mannheim, concludes, "in the measure that the various groups sought to destroy their adversaries' confidence in their thinking by this most modern intellectual weapon of radical unmasking, they also destroyed, as all positions came to be subjected to analysis, man's confidence in human thought in general." [p. 41.]