~ 11 Ideology ~
Seeing as we’re told to abandon ideology as a casuistic rule[1], we generally need an introduction to what ideology actually is and Michael Freeden provides exactly that. His “End of Ideology?” section is worth looking at in Ideology: A Very Short Introduction. Coined by Antoine Destutt de Tracy, a liberal noble who lived through the French Revolution, ideology was originally supposed to usher in an Enlightenment “science of ideas”, just as sociology is a science of social life. Emmet Kennedy also explains that, at the time for de Tracy,
“metaphysics” was too discredited and “psychology” implied a knowledge of the soul, knowledge which no one could any longer claim to have. “Ideology,” on the other hand, “was very sensible since it supposes nothing doubtful or unknown; it does not call to mind any idea of cause…. Its meaning is very clear to everyone,” for it was the Greek for “sciences of ideas”.
– “’Ideology’ from Destutt de Tracy to Marx”, 354-5.
It was a “theory of the moral and political sciences”, says Kennedy, and, “since all sciences consist of different combinations of ideas, the science of ideas [takes] clear priority”[2]. One could even say it was Socratic in returning to the study of man, or his ideas, and not nature. But even Degérando, an ideologue and contemporary of de Tracy, wrote straightforwardly in 1800 that
A contemptible play on words has cast some ridicule on the expression “ideology,” adopted by different writers; as if ideas were not something very real, as if they were not even what is most real for us, since our knowledge is only our ideas. All science is truly an “ideology” or a reasoning on our ideas, and if this expression has any defect, it is its universality, which renders it too vague.
– As quoted in “’Ideology’ from Destutt de Tracy to Marx”, 355.
But when de Tracy coined the term “ideology” while imprisoned by extremists of the French Revolution, that didn’t exempt him or anyone from having ideology. Kennedy explains that “At stake was a whole political and social philosophy, a conservative post-Thermidorean liberalism of a part of the propertied class, an ideology which was strongly materialist in its conception of the relationship between the physical and moral.”[3] Yet Napoleon himself was very prompt in his own reign. He weaponized “ideologue” (in its pejorative sense) to opportunistically persecute those who opposed his own ideology, which sought to demonize de Tracy’s atheist-leaning Enlightenment and in favour of re-established Revealed Religion as social control[4]. Napoleon said in his speech at the Council of State, 1812:
We must lay the blame for the ills that our fair France has suffered on ideology, that shadowy metaphysics which subtly searches for first causes on which to base the legislation of peoples, rather than making use of laws known to the human heart and of the lessons of history. These errors must inevitably and did in fact lead to the rule of bloodthirsty men. Indeed, who was it that proclaimed the principle of insurrection to be a duty? Who adulated the people and attributed to it a sovereignty which it was incapable of exercising? Who destroyed respect for and the sanctity of laws by describing them, not as sacred principles of justice, but only as the will of an assembly composed of men ignorant of civil, criminal, administrative, political, and military law?[5]
Resentful of the “metaphysicians” at the National Institute – comparable to Burke’s own resentment of liberal revolutionaries, this correlated also with Napoleon degrading philosophy, writing, “We have finished the novel of the Revolution: the time has come to begin its history, to see only that which is real and possible in the application of principles, and not that which is speculative and hypothetical. To follow any other path today would be to philosophize and not to govern”[6]. But he favored religion as social control for his nation, over the ideologues who lowered its value in a hierarchy, which is possibly in-part why he waged such a vitriolic campaign against “ideology”.
French acolytes of conservatism also pulled no punches during the post-Napoleonic Restoration and Conservative Order as they wrote of “fantastic ideology”, the “school of Diderot and Holbach” as it “made both egoism and anarchy sacred…(and) lead us to materialism and atheism.”[7] Much later, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn also denigrated ideology, being quite convinced ideology – having ideas whatever in politics – motivated all the evils in the world. The only absurdity to note is that to be anti-ideological is ideological.
Ideology—that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors. That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills: by invoking Christianity; the conquerors of foreign lands, by extolling the grandeur of their Motherland; the colonizers, by civilization; the Nazis, by race; and the Jacobins (early and late), by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations.
Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions. This cannot be denied, nor passed over, nor suppressed. How, then, do we dare insist that evildoers do not exist?
– The Gulag Archipelago: 50th Anniversary Edition.
Obviously derivative of Solzhenitsyn today, Peterson attacks “ideologues” of the radical left from an ideological basis of liberal Enlightenment, though he’s completely ignorant of conservatism having done the exact same – against Enlightenment liberalism – from ideology’s very beginning. Peterson’s assumption is that ideology is a holdover only of the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century that must be abandoned. Yet Freedan explains in 2003 that “ideologies cannot come to an end, nor is there a winning ideology as announced by the 'end of history' prophets of the 1990s. For that to happen history would have to have a finishing post, and human imagination would have to grind to a halt”[8]. Politically, everyone has an agenda and ideology because everyone has a subjective perspective that sometimes requires a simplified understanding – each of our own systems of thought – as it corresponds to the world as it is and ought to be.
Taine threw his hat into the discussion by saying of France’s ideologues, “They are called ideologues and properly so because they operate on ideas and not on facts”[9]. Yet, contra Taine, Husserl worried that the aim of naturalists like Taine, yet also historicists, was to “transform all actuality, all life, into an incomprehensible idea-less jumble of facts. The superstitious belief in the fact is common to them all”[10]. This, negatively-speaking, results in individuals being completely devoid of ideas and minds, let alone of thoughtful, valued, meaningful existence. “All life is position-taking and all position-taking is subject to an ought”, said Husserl from the subjective and intersubjective view of phenomenology[11], which transcends the is/ought problem by our subjective choosing, our commitment, to exist, contra Epictetus’ moral sentiment that one ought not to pose any ought except regarding “the existing order of things” or “whatever comes to pass” as they comprise “nature” so-called.
Peterson’s Rule 18: “Abandon Ideology” is the most absurd contradiction of casuistic reasoning’s history to the degree that he won’t acknowledge the hypocrisy of patronizing the reader to abandon ideology while in the process of promoting his own, which is, to a certain degree, “conservative in orientation”, by his own admission in Beyond Order. It’s a Sleight-Of-Hand demand for objectivist acceptance of his non-objectivist mode, i.e., his ideological narrative, his partial interests, and his passions. It’s also in favour of a romanticized view of the Enlightenment, not its actual character. If one does their homework, one finds that he praises classical liberalism’s actually radical, egalitarian, and overthrowing orientation. Even more ironically, the so-praised US liberal era of Founding Fathers, which valued freedom of speech, actually stifled freedom of speech regarding the Loyalist ministers of the church. “The Revolutionaries relied on terror–acts of violence and the threat of violence–to crush dissent”, Holger Hook explained, and, according to Frazer,
The persecution (there is no other word for it) suffered by Loyalists ranged wide in severity and frequency. It might take the form of verbal insults; it might result in death. Some of it was ordered, some was approved and encouraged, some was just allowed, and some was simply ignored by Patriot authorities ranging from local committees to George Washington.
– God Against The Revolution, 26.
So it goes regarding our liberal ideals born of illiberal hypocrisy, while Frazer explains of the Loyalist arguments that “Perhaps the greatest testament to [the Loyalist ministers’] effectiveness is the tremendous campaign by the Patriots to silence them, to prevent publication of their materials, and to destroy all copies of any materials that managed to make it to publication.”[12] The same might be said of radical socialist critics having to bear so much flack, misrepresentation, and resentment from others today.
If the campaign against the left’s so-called “power obsession” is non-ideological, then we’d see a more concerted campaign against Robert Greene’s best-selling self-help book The 48 Laws Of Power, which sports terrible casuistic rules such as “Law 6 – Court Attention at all Cost”, “Law 7 – Get others to do the Work for you, but Always Take the Credit”, “Law 10 – Infection: Avoid the Unhappy and Unlucky”, “Law 11 – Learn to Keep People Dependent on You”, “Law 12 – Use Selective Honesty and Generosity to Disarm your Victim”, “Law 14 – Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy”, “Law 20 – Do Not Commit to Anyone”, “Law 27 – Play on People’s Need to believe to Create a Cult-like Following”, and “Law 38 – Think as you like but Behave like others”. But the anti-ideologues of our time, the alleged champions in the fight against the left’s power-obsession, are regrettably silent on Greene’s amoral power-mongering. They’re particularly combative – particularly repressive – of the radical left only as the reactionary right. Patronizing about “power” is just a means to that end.
One can also see political economists speak for themselves in Perelman’s Invention of Capitalism and Rothschild’s Economic Sentiments. Both these books demystify impartial modesty and emotionless reasoning in our economics, yet our economics pay lip-service to having no ideology, no mind (subjectivity), as it exerts minds upon other minds and things in the world. So it is with ideology and conservatism. Russell Kirk’s 7th edition introduction to The Conservative Mind claims it “distinctly does not supply its readers with a ‘conservative ideology’: for the conservative abhors all forms of ideology”. But how does conservatism account for its own ideals, failures, and inaccuracies, as in Kirk’s own claim that Napoleon coined the term “ideology” and not de Tracy? Kirk disavows ideology repeatedly in The Conservative Mind but only so that “the conservative idea” he defines can still be promoted – his ideology regarding how the world ought to be organized.
An anti-ideology ideology coerces and controls without acknowledging that it does. And many self-satisfied writers in conservative defense of capitalism claim objectivity very easily, as if arriving at philosophy’s footrace means one has won that footrace. Progress is slow enough for the conservative today yet it is too stagnant, even regressive, for many others. But the mob can be discredited as mob even though it also comprises individuals. Kierkegaard on his liberal yet objective age in the 19th century, which might as well be our own:
If one posits only the development of the generation or the race or at least posits it as the highest, how does one explain the divine squandering that uses the endless host of individuals of one generation after the other in order to set the world-historical development in motion? The world-historical drama proceeds extremely slowly. Why does God not make haste if that is all he wants? What undramatic forbearance or, more correctly, what a prosaic and boring spinning-out process! And if that is all he wants, how horrible, tyrannically to squander myriads of human lives. But what does the observer care about that? The observer world-historically catches a glimpse of the play of colors in the generations, just like a shoal of herring in the sea—the individual herring is not worth much. The observer stares numbly into the immense forest of the generations, and like someone who cannot see the forest for the trees, he sees only the forest, not a single tree. He hangs up curtains systematically and uses people and nations for that purpose—individual human beings are nothing to him; even eternity itself is draped with systematic surveys and ethical meaninglessness.
– Concluding Unscientific Postscript.
Gilder, who himself appealed to faith and possibility over and against the left’s “ideology”, ended up himself losing faith and his argument in the assumed necessity, the natural, the material, and in the stock phrases of sophistry (“work, family, and faith”), as the objective observer does. And an objective observer does this to get the nation’s human meatgrinder going (as in Gilder romanticizing frontier expansion) for ascetic productivity’s sake, not for actual faith or freedom. This is why ascetic Christian staff were so necessary for US Industrial Schools and Canada’s Residential Schools, according to the Davin Report. The whole ideological point of these death prisons was to change natures, police language, and police the individual into the herd, into the productive march of “civilization” and wealth. Human life and freedom are a mere means to that end as rhetoric. This was justified not by freedom but by capitalistic regulation: penitentiary discipline, i.e., Howard’s ascetic morality, and by the materialist psychology of Locke and Bentham, all originating in Britain yet corresponding as well with Pinel’s asylum. As Ignatieff explains regarding the disciplining not only of the criminal but the psychologically or economically insubordinate:
Materialist psychology, by collapsing the mind-body distinction, seemed to offer a scientific explanation for Howard's claim that men's moral behavior could be altered by disciplining their bodies. Materialist psychology implied that a regimen applied to the body by the external force of authority would first become a habit and then gradually be transformed into a moral preference. Through routinization and repetition, the regimens of discipline would be internalized as moral duties.
The materialist conception of reformation also assumed that such programming could be aided by systematic moral re-education directed at the mind. If all ideas, including moral ones, were derived from external sensation, it followed that people could be socialized by taking control over their sources of sensation. The attraction of the "total institution" then was that it afforded such a complete measure of control over the criminal's "associations." Materialist optimism of this sort also pervaded the Whig call for parliamentary and administrative reform in the 1770s. As James Burgh said, "An able statesman can change the manners of the people at pleasure." “Is it not evident”, he asserted, "that by management the human species may be moulded into any conceivable shape"?
- A Just Measure Of Pain, 67.
Phenomenologically speaking, the collapse of the mind-body distinction here means the individual’s reduction to the mere body as directed by the mind of the “able statesman” or else a jailer, manager, supervisor, parent, teacher, priest, investing retiree, psychiatrist, psychologist, or economist.
Kierkegaard wrote of what the sophists taught as deceptively positive in its universality. Rather, the sophists ultimately slump back into the worldly, particularly into money.
this universal culture manifests itself as the science that in public life can excel all other sciences, so that he who possesses it possesses the master key whereby he can open all doors. This universal culture reminds us of what is offered for sale in our time by scholarly vendors of indulgences under the name of enlightenment. Inasmuch as the Sophists' main interest, next to earning money, was to gain influence in political affairs, their wanderings bring to mind the holy pilgrimages and pious pageantry that now are the order of the day in the political world and by which the political traveling salesmen try to impart to people in the shortest possible time the requisite political background to enable them to talk….
- On The Concept of Irony, 203-4.
Nothing is at all different today with Shapiro, Hicks, Haidt/Lukianoff, Murray, Saad, and obviously Peterson, but the bloody ramifications of Enlightenment’s “universal culture” are actually evidenced in Canada’s Residential Schools, since the Final Report Summary from the Truth And Reconciliation Commission says:
There was no moral imperative to impose Christianity on the Indigenous peoples of the world. They did not need to be ‘civilized’; indeed, there is no hierarchy of societies…. Taken as a whole, the colonial process relied for its justification on the sheer presumption of taking a specific set of European beliefs and values and proclaiming them to be universal values that could be imposed upon the peoples of the world. This universalizing of European values—so central to the colonial project—that was extended to North America served as the prime justification and rationale for the imposition of a residential school system…. (49-50)
Still, the negative caveat of the UN’s affirmation of First Nations human rights is precisely that human rights have their own root in sophistic natural law abstraction as well. They’re still virtue-signalling rhetoric – they aren’t guaranteed. Residential Schools weren’t a regrettable once-off either, just as Europe’s Penitentiaries for the working class weren’t. Canadian commercial society today chugs on, benefitting tremendously from their First Nations subjects knowing colonial language, having greatly lost their own language, being greatly dispossessed of their knowledge and land, being coerced and conditioned for market labour, and having their sacred culture commodified as “useful” products. Residential Schools were closed down, not so much because they were ethically repulsive. Regrettably, in the context of their goals, as in the goals of European Penitentiaries, they were a great success.
According to A Just Measure Of Pain, penitentiary prisoners in Britain were castigated with the following Biblical passage until they were reduced to tears and submission, i.e., passions and passivity:
For there is no power but of God and the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God; and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation. For rulers are not a terror to good works but to the evil.
– Epistle To The Romans 13:1-7.
Such could be the worldly utility of Christian moral imperatives, of Romans 13 in the Bible, upon the individual (even of the Christian Solzhenitzyn under an atheistic Soviet regime). This carries implications for the unquestioning preservation of “the powers that be”, i.e., the political and ideological “order of things” as Epictetus calls it in Discourses. That is, when taken out of its context, just as US royalists, US slaveowners, and then the Trump administration took it out of context[13] for ruler sophistry’s sake. That is, for “law and order” and against conservative and elitist anxieties of “mobocracy”, which still happens to be rule by the people. Placing the quote in its context, however, and we find out that Paul the Apostle, the writer of Epistle To The Romans, was indebted to stoic ideology.
Paul was deeply influenced by Stoic philosophy, if not directly by Seneca. He borrowed the notions of indifferent things, of what is properly one’s own (oikeiosis), the ideal of freedom from passion, and the paradoxical notion of freedom through slavery, fairly directly from the Stoics. The affinities between Stoicism and Christianity thus ran fairly deep and were ripe for further exploitation by later Christian thinkers.
- Emily Wilson, The Greatest Empire[14], 217.
Ironically, if US Christians in US government ever cite Romans 13 in favor of political obedience, it is to self-refuting effects because the US wouldn’t exist if it had been abided. Analogous to the French right-wing citing the Divine Right Of Kings, US Loyalists also had the pretensions to cite the Bible dogmatically (Romans 13 and Peter 2:17) as the will and writings of God, and against the philosopher pretensions of Lockean revolution, civil equality, individual liberty, and collective liberty. Regarding Paul’s Christian moral edict applied as anti-revolutionary submission to all government, Thomas Chandler, writing as a US Loyalist, said that “No tyrant was ever more despotic and cruel, than Nero, and no court ever more corrupted than his; and yet to the government of this cruel and despotic tyrant, and his corrupt tyranny, peaceable submission was enjoined by an Apostle, who had due regard for the rights and liberties for mankind.”[15] It didn’t seem as though Paul respected those rights and liberties for mankind, then, since they were too worldly compared to absolute obedience to God, therefore all worldly tyrants, all worldly governments, and so forth….
Yet being a US Christian today implies that one is attempting an absurd synthesis between US civil disobedience and individual liberty and Christian obedience to God and government, since all government is the alleged will of the divine, even tyrannical or incompetent government. Frazer explains of the Loyalists: “Forced to choose between the teachings of philosophers and what they saw as the clear teaching of the apostles and the Holy Spirit, they chose the Bible. Consequently, they could not embrace notions of social contract, popular sovereignty, and resistance to authority”[16]. And yet Romans 13 was written by the stoically inspired Paul the Apostle. Therefore, the Bible was stoically-written in-part, and has philosophical contributors and significance, just as the US and French revolutions were stoically-written in-part and have philosophical contributors and significance.
The Loyalist clergy also decried the politicization of the Patriots’ pulpits where pro-revolutionary sentiment was being propagated among Christians to overturn the existing government[17]. But Loyalist reactions to it, especially in citing Romans 13 in their reactionary propaganda, was political also. Of course, we know that US Republicans of the right-wing obnoxiously appeal to liberal values, individuality, and freedom outside of government, only to appeal to “law and order”, a police state, and Bible dogmatics in government. Freedom for us but not for you. So it actually was with “the passions” or “feelings”. The US Loyalists also denigrated the excess of “passion” and “feeling” that arose from the revolutionary pulpits[18]. So they were, of course, tone-policing stoically, just as Rush did from his US asylum post-revolution, as did Pinel in the French Salpêtrière Hospital, and the likes of Shapiro in the US, Murray in Britain, and Saad in Canada do today, not in the service of freedom. It’s in the service of social control: a distinctly conservative kind that has now appropriated liberal and worldly capitalism.
The commercial utility of religion is possibly also why Pinel maintained it in his asylum, why Robespierre also did, and why Napoleon himself maintained established religion. Napoleon wrote that “A man dying of starvation alongside of one who is surfeited would not yield to this difference unless he had some authority which assured him that God so orders it, that there must be both poor and rich in the world” and, regarding religion, “One cannot govern without it”[19]. Thus, he maintained it for the sake of his worldly, social order – not because of genuine faith nor because of spirit. Indeed, Pinel’s commercial and worldly ideology also predisposed him to mediate inmates back to worldliness when they took spirited religion too far as, in Pinel’s words, “fanatics who believe themselves inspired and seek to make converts, and who take a perfidious pleasure in inciting the other madmen to disobedience on the pretext that it is better to obey God than man”. Foucault explained regarding Pinel here:
Disobedience by religious fanaticism, resistance to work, and theft, the three great transgressions against bourgeois society, the three major offenses against its essential values, are not excusable, even by madness; they deserve imprisonment pure and simple, since they all manifest the same resistance to the moral and social uniformity that form the raison d’être of Pinel’s asylum.
– Madness And Civilization, 268.
Not only was this so with Pinel’s asylum in France but, following the rationale of commerce in Ignatieff’s A Just Measure Of Pain, it was seen in British Industrial Schools, and then US Industrial Schools for Native Americans and Canadian Residential Schools for First Nations. A Just Measure Of Pain (as it ends with the legacy of Industrial Schools for children) is the tie that binds Anne-Josephe’s own asylum confinement in France with many Indigenous children’s confinement in the US and Canada, so John S. Milloy’s A National Crimegoes. Not only did Industrial and Residential Schools manifest dehumanization on the basis of race, or become hotbeds for sexual coercion and mass murder; it was the disciplinary process of an illiberal system and ideology perfectly in line with capitalistic manufacturing more broadly, which nevertheless rhetorically claims it is liberal and values the individual. As such, it might not be a once-off but an ongoing threat to nonconformity to the market. Milloy’s A National Crime provides a girl’s account of the disciplinary regime of the Kamloops School in the 1930s. After strict morning routine for the children,
they “marched from there down to the chapel” where the ideology of the system that imbued every activity not only in the chapel but in classroom, shop, field and barn, was laid out by the priest yet again. “There they interrogated us on what it was all about being an Indian…. He would just get so carried away; he was punching away at that old altar rail...to hammer into our heads that we were not to think or act or speak like an Indian. And that we would go to hell and burn for eternity if we did not listen to their way of teaching.”
– A National Crime, 138.
Yet Milloy further writes that “The consequence of not listening, of deviance, of ‘insubordination,’ as it was normally termed, was more immediate than some future hell. It was earthly punishment.”
Discipline, regimentation, and punishment in the service of cultural change, was the context of the children’s lives. It was pervasive in the system…. Another critic, who saw the same negative implication of this tyranny of routinization, charged that at Mt. Elgin “their whole life day in and day out is planned for them”; the children learned “to work under direction which doesn’t require, and indeed discourages, any individual acting or thinking on their part. Punishment goes to those who don’t keep in line.” To keep the children in line, the staff could deprive them of food, or strap them, or confine them, or lecture them.
– A National Crime, 138.
Such was the aforementioned worldly, materialistic, negative asceticism (so critiqued by Nietzsche and Scheler) but as it concretely existed in Residential Schools in Canada yet still exists in many who are ignorantly promoting capitalism: the totalitarianism you find in the workplace. You will find no such critique of this ideology from Peterson, since it is his own, and it’s more expedient to fixate on the totalitarianism of Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Cambodia, and China. You’d get the initial impression that Peterson was dissuading you from being resentful or ideological, yet it’s possibly altogether dehumanizing of the individual to find him writing that radical leftists are the proverbial “Cain” in his Cain & Abel dichotomy but as a resentful “us vs. them”. The left have allegedly “festered and plotted” “unforgivably” and unreasonably over the last forty years to give him so much resentment to chew on:
it was Solzhenitsyn who truly shamed the radical leftists, forcing them underground (where they have festered and plotted for the last forty years, failing unforgivably to have learned what all reasonable people should have learned from the cataclysm of the twentieth century and its egalitarian utopianism).
– Forward to the Gulag Archipelago: 50th Anniversary Edition.
And yet radical leftists variously know of historical materialism and party communism’s problems, as they both became anti-radical and dogmatizing necessity. Radical opposition can be traced to as early as Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) and Sartre’s Critique Of Dialectical Reason, vol. 1 (1960) where leftist Existentialism is concerned, let alone Wright’s The Outsider (1953), Orwell’s own Homage To Catalonia (1938), Goldman’s My Disillusionment In Russia (1923), and Bakunin’s criticism of Marx as living rivals[20]. All of this predates Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago as printed only in 1970 and translated in English and French in 1971. But Solzhenitsyn still referred to Sartre resentfully,
while you occupied yourself to your heart’s content studying the safe secrets of the atomic nucleus, researching the influence of Heidegger on Sartre, or collecting Picasso reproductions; while you rode off in your railroad sleeping compartment to vacation resorts, or finished building your country house near Moscow—the Black Marias rolled incessantly through the streets and the gaybisty—the State Security men—knocked at doors and rang doorbells.
– Gulag Archipelago: 50th Anniversary Edition.
Strange how much of this is true of CIA-sponsored oppression worldwide as leftists have documented and been persecuted by it. I suppose Solzhenitsyn and Peterson want us to be eternally grateful in the Christian sense, but that is also in the way the Soviets themselves wanted Goldman to be grateful.
The conventional conception of gratitude is that one must not be critical of those who have shown him kindness. Thanks to this notion parents enslave their children more effectively than by brutal treatment; and by it friends tyrannize over one another. In fact, all human relationships are to-day vitiated by this noxious idea.
Some people have upbraided me for my critical attitude toward the Bolsheviki. “How ungrateful to attack the Communist Government after the hospitality and kindness she enjoyed in Russia!” they indignantly exclaim. I do not mean to gainsay that I have received advantages while I was in Russia. I could have received many more had I been willing to serve the powers that be. It is that very circumstance which has made it bitterly hard for me to speak out against the evils as I saw them day by day. But finally I realized that silence is indeed a sign of consent.
– My Disillusionment In Russia, xii.
Peterson’s 24th rule is to be grateful in spite of your suffering. Little does Peterson know that the radical left is trying to explore – in their own freedom and responsibility – alternatives to liberal capitalism as it was originally fostered by the radical left itself in the 18thcentury French Revolution. And the radical left can certainly do so by reading Burke’s criticism of the bourgeoisie as much as they can read Solzhenitsyn. They’ll find that Solzhenitsyn wrote: “let the reader who expects this book to be a political exposé slam its covers shut right now”. But that could be Solzhenitsyn’s lack of hindsight to not account for the Gulag Archipelago being useful exactly for that purpose. So it was with Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984, since they were not intended by Orwell to be political exposes against leftism as a whole, so weaponized by the right today. “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it,” wrote Orwell[21].
Contrary to Orwell, Solzhenitsyn wrote of those who “always insist on regarding me in political terms...completely missing the point that this is not my framework, not my task, and not my dimension.” Yet certain of Solzhenitsyn scholars take it to be political, and usually in absurd aggrandizement of him rather than fact, saying, “…you have to credit the literary works of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn with helping to bring down the last empire on earth”[22]. As if the British Commonwealth’s neo-colonialism, the US (its Operation Condor and all its Shock Doctrine experiments), post-Soviet regimes, or else private empires and other imperialistic nations don’t also exist?
Making matters worse is Solzhenitsyn’s own fundamentally abstract appeals to universality as his moral and religious values, which might not make him existentialist even though Peterson lectures on him as such. Regarding Solzhenitsyn’s transcendence of political ideology into “universality”, Edward E. Ericson, jr., wrote for the introduction to the Gulag Archipelago: 50th Anniversary Editionin 2001: “Far from limiting himself to politics, he attends primarily to ‘the timeless essence of humanity,’ to those ‘fixed universal concepts called good and justice.’” But in that mode, Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago only falls under Nietzsche’s critique of decadent, other-world values — a metaphysics of abstractly “universal” good, which is just as idealistic and ideological as it is political, as middle-class values.
On the psychology of metaphysics. This world is apparent—consequently there is a true world. This world is conditioned—consequently there is an unconditioned world. This world is full of contradiction—consequently there is a world free from contradiction. This world is becoming—consequently there is an existing world. All false inferences (blind trust in reason: if A is, there must be its opposing concept B). It is suffering that inspires these inferences: at bottom there are wishes that such a world might be; similarly hatred of a world that causes suffering expresses itself through the imagination of another world, one full of value: the ressentiment of the metaphysicians against the actual world is here creative.
– As quoted in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on “Idealism”.
It goes without saying that for all this idolatry of Solzhenitsyn, good, and justice, the Shock Doctrine ushered in far more hunger, depression, and suicide in the post-Soviet Bloc than was accounted for — capitalistically as a matter of course. “Everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious”, the English agriculturalist Arthur Young proclaimed in 1771. Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago was needed to topple a broken and genocidal system on the left but this was undeniably a political and ideological effort of its own, and pretensions to the contrary are objectivistic kinds that refuse to admit one’s own mind and self in a concrete situation involving others and ideologies.
Abstracting oneself in a religious direction towards universal good happens to color Solzhenitsyn’s account with ascetic priestliness.Yet, following Solzhenitsyn’s own claim in the Gulag Archipelago that it isn’t a political expose, his “the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being” is mere triviality presumed to be mediating universality. It’s the kind you shallowly think up to convince yourself of being philosophical, not where you’ve really delved into the human soul very far. It happens to also contradict Solzhenitsyn himself since, as we saw earlier regarding ideology, he wrote “How, then, do we dare insist that evildoers do not exist? And who was it that destroyed these millions? Without evildoers there would have been no Archipelago.” If that is true of evildoers, then “the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being”, as triviality, collapses into its meaninglessness – its nihilistic mediation of good and evil in every human being. Worse is thinking it’s profound at Haidt and Lukianoff’s age, and precisely so it can still act as political exposé for The Coddling Of The American Mind’s use.
The French Revolution has been compared to the Russian Revolution in Goldman’s My Disillusionment in Russia, Solzhenitzen’s Gulag Archipelago, and now Popkin’s A New World Begins. Indeed, Vladimir Lenin could be analogous to Siéyès in that Siéyès fomented the class struggle to free the oppressed 3rd Estate only to contribute to the subjugation of a propertyless working class, i.e., proletariat, subordinated to the middle-class. Through a vanguard hierarchy/specialization of party that was supposed to free the same proletariat, Lenin rationalized capitalism (and state capitalism) for Russia’s economy in his own 1921 pamphlet The Tax In Kind four years after the start of the Russian Revolution, slighting co-operative ownership.
Those who achieve the best results in this sphere, even by means of private capitalism, even without the co-operatives, or without directly transforming this capitalism into state capitalism, will do more for the cause of socialist construction in Russia than those who “ponder over” the purity of communism, draw up regulations, rules and instructions for state capitalism and the co-operatives, but do nothing practical to stimulate trade…. Isn ‘t it paradoxical that private capital should be helping socialism? ....Not at all. It is, indeed, an irrefutable economic fact.
– The Tax In Kind.
Actually, a casual keyword search of “ideology” in Lenin’s writings proves that he used it often, but only pejoratively as the “practical” fellow that he was. Same goes for Napoleon and Peterson. Yet many radical leftists were actually purged by the Bolsheviks for protesting this New Economic Policy’s betrayal of their various goals of actual worker ownership, equality, and freedom. As Goldman described of Lenin’s NEP,
They ordered the clearing of the Party ranks of all “doubtful" elements. Everybody suspected of an independent attitude and those who did not accept the new economic policy as the last word in revolutionary wisdom were expelled. Among them were Communists who for years had rendered most devoted service. Some of them, hurt to the quick by the unjust and brutal procedure, and shaken to their depths by the collapse of what they held most high, even resorted to suicide. But the smooth sailing of Lenin's new gospel had to be assured, the gospel of the sanctity of private property and the freedom of cutthroat competition erected upon the ruins of four years of revolution.
– My Disillusionment In Russia, 246.
Perhaps Marxist-Leninists and the Bolsheviks should have adhered more to ideology, then, not less, regarding the ideas of actual proletarian liberation and common ownership. Instead, the idea favored was the economic “fact”-fullness, necessity, or practicality of sublating/mediating a world-historical process to justify capitalism in the “feudalism–capitalism–state capitalism–socialism–communism” dialectic for Russia, which was still ideology. This might also be what Post-Modernists call a “metanarrative”.
Hegelian historical idealism was inverted by Marx as historical materialism, to be sure. Analogous to Kierkegaard’s criticism of Hegel as discussed in “3 Either/Or”, then, sublating/mediating in the Marxist-Leninist view so inverted the aim of working-class liberation that it fashioned slavery for the working-class. Of course, taking a glance at Stalin’s own 1938 Dialectical and Historical Materialism, one only recognizes oneself if they are a dogmatizing naturalist, psychical determinist, or an objective observer over the lives of others. “Nature is sophistical”, as Kierkegaard said, so “natural science is sophistical”.
Peterson and innumerable naturalists today who don’t politically align left would hate to be compared to Marx and Lenin. Yet they all maliciously claim non-ideology when they are ideological. Marx himself wrote of the ruling middle-class in reference to his materialistic determinism, “It is to be noted here, as in general with ideologists, that they inevitably put a thing upside-down and regard their ideology both as the creative force and as the aim of all social relations, whereas it is only an expression and symptom of these relations.”[23] At least Marx knew the concrete history of ideologists. So ideality, or ideology, is opposed to Marx’s own materialism as “scientific socialism”, not utopic socialism. Yet Marx and Engels fostered more “scientistic” rather than “scientific” socialism in the way of being performative and rhetorical champions of the working-class – against the historically liberal Enlightenment ideologues. But liberal Enlightenment ideologues actually are putting things upside-down today by claiming to be non-ideologues as they attack ideologues. An early example is the absurd and contested book published in 2000, A Natural History Of Rape: A Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion, which contemptibly slanders the social sciences and women academics as too “ideological” and “political” to really give “scientific” solutions to ending rape. Leave it up to “objective” and “scientific” men who namedrop Darwin as a front for having no constructive argument whatever against rape, only nihilism and resentment against the humanities.
Robert Owen, the utopian socialist industrialist, constructed humane industrial towns for worker families to thrive in. But, to give credit to critics of socialism, these towns were nevertheless troubled by his paternal micromanagement of the lives of workers. One wrote that “We view it a grievance of considerable magnitude to be compelled by Mr. Owen to adopt what measures so ever he may be pleased to suggest to us on matters that entirely belong to us. Such a course of procedure is most repugnant to our minds as men, and degrading to our characters.”[24] So it is, especially, regarding scientism in the political field, which implicates “scientific” socialism. In the more extreme case of brainwashing centres in the People’s Republic of China, criminal ideologies are micromanaged in a manner that is destructive to the individual as well as working-class liberation. In the book, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism by the US psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, not only do “thought-terminating cliches” contribute to the coercive reformation of the political criminal’s thinking in China, so does the ideal of a “sacred science”.
The totalist milieu maintains an aura of sacredness around its basic dogma, holding it out as an ultimate moral vision for the ordering of human existence. This sacredness is evident in the prohibition (whether or not explicit) against the questioning of basic assumptions, and in the reverence which is demanded for the originators of the Word, the present bearers of the Word, and the Word itself. While thus transcending ordinary concerns of logic, however, the milieu at the same time makes an exaggerated claim of airtight logic, of absolute "scientific" precision. Thus the ultimate moral vision becomes an ultimate science; and the man who dares to criticize it, or to harbor even unspoken alternative ideas, becomes not only immoral and irreverent, but also "unscientific." In this way, the philosopher kings of modern ideological totalism reinforce their authority by claiming to share in the rich and respected heritage of natural science.
– Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, 427-8.
Yet Lifton should admit that his insights on brainwashing, derived from Chinese thought reform processes, could be found and applied in other instances in mass education, mass media, and the free west, so-called, as well – especially where empirical naturalism is held up as the apolitical “sacred science”. Lifton traces China’s thought reform, its immense stress on sin, evil, and guilt, to Soviet Russia but even further back to “the Judeo-Christian religious tradition, the Utopian secular ideologies of the eighteenth century, mystical elements of German romanticism, and the authoritarian excesses of traditional Russian and Byzantine culture, including the heritage of the Russian Orthodox church” (389). Lifton further concedes that the Chinese studied the psychologies of Freud, Kurt Lewin, and Ivan Pavlov (388). But Lifton doesn’t implicate Materialist Psychology more broadly, as has been well-documented in Ignatieff’s A Just Measure Of Pain and contextualized, along with stoicism and sophistry, in this intro and the stageplay. “Nowhere else has there been such a mass output of energy directed toward changing people”, Lifton claims of Chinese thought reform (390), but this might be an error where capitalism also factors in by imposing ideology, changing people through discipline, regimentation, and claims to individuality that countersensically result in collectivist, mechanical submission.
It subsequently may follow that the ongoing campaign against “politicization” and “ideology” is precisely a “sacred science”, i.e., a dogmatic moral ordering or thought reformation, from the naturalists of our day: We value “science”, so they value “mere opinion”. We value “empirical data” and “practicality” so they value ivory tower philosophical or political “theory”. We value “impartiality”, so they must value “partiality” or “bias”. We value “facts”, so they value “feelings”. We value “objectivity”, so they value “subjectivism”. We value “reality” so they value “ideology”. But as Degérando said, ideas could be what’s most real for us, even the idea of having no ideas, only so-called “nature” or “facts”. Then ideology is so all-encompassing, even by Solzhenitsyn’s standard, it doesn’t actually make sense to “abandon” it, as Peterson insists. The supreme irony for him is that the people who deny being ideologues in history are more pernicious than ideologues, and that implicates Marx and Peterson both. Whether Abrahamic religion, capitalistic and “apolitical” naturalism, Hegel’s historical idealism, Marx’s historical materialism, or Existentialism, all could still be mere ideas, i.e., ideologies, not realities.
More true than Solzhenitsyn’s saying that a “line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being” is the tendency for good intentions to reach their contradictory opposite intentions. Indeed, Marxist-Leninism loses its way. For Marxist-Leninism, class consciousness as class subjectivity, knowledge, empowerment, and freedom isn’t an end in itself. Material conditions and hierarchical elitism of party mediate possibility into “practical” necessity. As a consequence, the proletariat became Marxist-Leninism’s mere means for industrializing ends, just as Monsieur Roland noted that the free-trade “Eden Treaty” would secure a prosperous future for France’s great-grandchildren but also the immiseration of immediate generations. So it was with Stalin promoting and praising Frenkel for capitalistic inputs on the Gulag Prison system, by Solzhenitsyn’s own account.
the black star of the ideologist of that new era, Naftaly Frenkel, rose in the heavens while his formula became the supreme law of the Archipelago: “We have to squeeze everything out of a prisoner in the first three months—after that we don’t need him any more.”
– Gulag Archipelago: 50th Anniversary Edition.
Frenkel, the former private industrialist that he was, strayed little from Pinel or else from Bentham who wrote in the utilitarian capitalist mode of his panopticon prison:
What hold can another manufacturer have upon his workmen, equal to what my manufacturer would have upon his? What other master is there that can reduce his workmen, if idle, to a situation next to starving, without suffering them to go elsewhere? What other master is there whose men can never get drunk unless he chooses they should do so? And who, so far from being able to raise their wages by combination, are obliged to take whatever pittance he thinks it most his interest to allow?
– As quoted in The Invention Of Capitalism by Michael Perelman. 22.
Where Bentham’s panopticon was already contemptible in theory, the Industrial Revolution and Canada’s Residential Schools were mass murder in practice but of the same disciplinary enthusiasm.
The same immiseration of whole generations — as a mere means for industrial and modern progress — happens to be evident in China today in real-time. The Tiananmen Square massacre is questionably attributable to socialism or communism. Yet doing so with unquestionable certainty is typical of capitalism’s own, one can say, ideologically-intentional narrative. What matters to capitalistic intentionality is that it happens in a rhetorical, aesthetical, or surface-level appearance of a socialist or communist nation. Never mind that it is going through the historical-dialectical stages of economic progress, so-called and very quickly. Many student protestors in China actually viewed Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms, post-Mao, as a bleakly capitalistic future. As David Harvey points out in A Brief History Of Neoliberalism, China’s liberalization of the market started before, not after, the police oppression of student protests; the State-Owned Enterprises and guaranteed “iron rice bowl” were being disassembled for private ownership and capitalistic development’s sake at the expense of the Chinese people. Political liberalization can end up being inversely related to economic liberalization, as in the Time Magazine commentator saying of Venezuela’s military junta, once again, “You have the freedom here to do what you want to do with your money, and to me that is worth all the political freedom in the world”. So it was with the neo-liberalization of China:
A student movement, sympathetic to the workers but also expressive of its own demands for greater freedoms, climaxed in 1989. The tremendous tension in the political realm that paralleled economic neoliberalization culminated in the massacre of students in Tiananmen Square. Deng’s violent crackdown, carried out against the wishes of party reformers, clearly indicated that neoliberalization in the economy was not to be accompanied by any progress in the fields of human, civil, or democratic rights. While Deng’s faction repressed the political it had to initiate yet another wave of neoliberal reforms to survive.
– David Harvey, “Neoliberalism ‘with Chinese Characteristics’”, A Brief History Of Neoliberalism, 123.
The bitter irony today is watching capitalists, especially in the US, fidget and catastrophize as the Marxist-Leninist nation of China outcompetes other capitalist nations at their own game: capitalism. Yet mass urbanization and super-exploitation, especially of women[25], along with the mass suicides of workers happen to also accompany these drastic changes. Harvey regarding China again:
While there are several aspects of Communist Party policy that were designed to frustrate capitalist class formation, the party has also acceded to the massive proletarianization of China’s workforce, the breaking of the ‘iron rice bowl’, the evisceration of social protections, the imposition of user fees, the creation of a flexible labour market regime, and the privatization of assets formerly held in common. It has created a social system where capitalist enterprises can both form and function freely. In so doing it has achieved rapid growth and alleviated the poverty of many, but it has also embraced great concentrations of wealth in the upper echelons of society. Moreover, business membership within the party has been growing (up from 13.1 per cent in 1993 to 19.8 per cent by 2000). It is, however, hard to tell whether this reflects an influx of capitalist entrepreneurs or the fact that many party members have used their privileges to become capitalists by dubious means. In any case what this signals is the growing integration of party and business elites in ways that are all too common in the US. The links between workers and the party organization have, on the other hand, become strained.
– Neoliberalism ‘with Chinese Characteristics’, A Brief History Of Neoliberalism, 150.
That is certainly a sense of a radically-intended project or aim reaching its inverse conclusion in reactionary tyranny and despair, just as it became the case with Claire Lacombe viewing the Montagnards. Yet it also inverts the accepted narrative we know and take for granted in our day of how a Marxist-Leninist nation historically develops, as in the French Revolution developing in an analogous way from Anne-Josèphe’s perspective in the asylum. Just as it was in the Thermidorian Era, so it is with Deng Xiaoping’s capitalistic reforms.
Regarding the Soviet Union, Lenin didn’t want Stalin to succeed in Bolsheviki leadership, just as Siéyès probably never intended for Napoleon – and then the ancien regime – to prevail through his own resentment-laden systems. They were, after all, middle-class systems, as Scheler’s Ressentiment and William H. Sewell jr.’s A Rhetoric Of Bourgeois Revolution demonstrate if you pair them up in reading. But there might be no helping such a resentful ascetic priest, Peterson, as he fixates on leftist ideology while wearing his own ideologically right-wing blinders. He’s not actually learning from the terrible lessons of history – even as he patronizes the left to do so.
We have to consider, as Kierkegaard did, that religiosity could be merely performative with other persons rather than an actual, direct God-relation or an expression of spirit. So it is with knowing the truth and rhetorically/performatively claiming one knows it. One can certainly adopt Paul the Apostle’s own moral edict when he wrote, “Now I beseech you brethren, mark them diligently which cause division and offences, contrary to the doctrine which ye have learned, and avoid them. For they that are such, serve not the Lord Jesus Christ, but their own bellies, and with fair speech and flattering deceive the hearts of the simple” (Romans 16:17-8). As a final, anti-sophist qualifier here, Kierkegaard himself wrote that, “Qualified as spiritless, the human being has become a talking machine, and there is nothing to prevent him from learning to repeat by rote a philosophical rigmarole, a confession of faith, and a political recitative” (On The Concept Of Anxiety). This can apply precisely to anti-ideologues who happen to mouth off so ideologically these days.
[1] “Rule VI: Abandon Ideology”, Beyond Order.
[2] Kennedy, Emmet, “’Ideology’from Destutt De Tracy to Marx”, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 40, No. 4 (Jul. – Sep., 1979), 355.
[3] Ibid, 356.
[4] Ibid, 354.
[5] Ibid, 360.
[6] As quoted in Emma Rothschild’s Economic Sentiments, 247.
[7] Kennedy, Emmet, "Ideology" from Destutt De Tracy to Marx, 362.
[8] Ideology, 102.
[9] Ibid, 365.
[10] Husserl, Philosophy as Rigorous Science, 290.
[11] Ibid, 290.
[12] God Against The Revolution, 2.
[13] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/06/16/jeff-sessions-bible-romans-13-trump-immigration-policy/707749002/
[14] So quoted in St. Paul on Stoicism: From the Acts of the Apostles by Donald B. Robertson.
[15] Frazer, Gregg L, God Against The Revolution, 48.
[16] Ibid, 234.
[17] Ibid, 20.
[18] Ibid, 41 and 78.
[19] Taine, H. A., Napoleon’s Views of Religion, 569.
[20] Bakunin, Mikhail, “Chapter 4: Criticism Of Marxism”, The Political Philosophy Of Bakunin.
[21] Why I write, Gangrel, No. 4, Summer 1946, https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/why-i-write/
[22] Edward E. Ericson, jr., Introduction, Gulag Archipelago: 50th Anniversary Edition.
[23] The German Ideology, vol. 1, 444.
[24] Invention Of Capitalism, 282.
[25] A Brief History Of Neoliberalism, 127.