Thought for the Day

[bcholmes]

Seen on my friends list:

Ideology is why you fall in love, naturally and sincerely and honestly, with someone of similar race and class and educational background. Ideology makes it so that millions of American women make individual decisions about their own personal happiness and take their husband's name. Ideology does not lie to you, it does not oppress you, it does not stifle you. It makes you want the Right Thing, and then you want it. It's not fake. It's not submission. You want it, you choose it, you feel good about it. Ideology is what makes it so that when you really sit down and consult your heart and do what feels right to you, it supports the system.

- Jessie

Comments

[rosefox]

So... there's no honest way to happen to want things that people tell you to want without being a pawn of the system?

And there I went and married a man. Damn!

[indefatigable42.livejournal.com]

That's what I was wondering. I guess there's no such thing as coincidence that I could love someone who happened to be the same race and opposite sex as myself.

The flip side of this is that if you actively resist the status quo, you're just bowing to a different ideology. Why is it any more forward-thinking to be contrary for the sake of contrariness? A sheep that automatically runs in the opposite direction to the rest of the herd is still a sheep.

I think Jessie's theory supposes that there is no such thing as free will, and that our desires are only shaped by societal expectations. But if that were true, there'd never be such a thing as 'forbidden love', i.e. relationships that are disapproved of by society. Everyone would be genuinely happy just doing what society wants, and we know that isn't the way it works.

[bcholmes.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. That's a bit of a binary way of looking at it, no? I mean, what if it's an honest want, but it's also influenced by the system around you?

[rosefox]

Then that's rather different from what the quote is saying! I think that very few things are binary and this isn't one of them. When I decided to marry sinboy, it certainly wasn't because I felt more comfortable in a societally approved role. I actually don't at all. "Wife" has a lot of baggage on it. Abstractly speaking, I'd probably be more comfortable in a same-sex marriage where we would have more freedom to define our roles and there would be fewer societal expectations in that particular way. I don't like having ideology seem so firmly on my side, because it's just that much harder to explain the ways that I buck the system simply by existing.

[cigfrain.livejournal.com]

i also think that, as interesting and usefully provocative as the quote is, it's just plain wrong.

i wrote (elsewhere) recently about watching the dvd extras of a Planet of the Apes box set. in all the little backlot stories, the one that caught my attention was about the actors naturally congregating according to their makeup. no matter who they were outside that context, orangs drifted together to have lunch and hang out, as did the chimps, etc. there's something really hardwired about knowing-yourself-and-the-other. the mask *means* something, even when it's your own skin, and whatever it means goes way beyond whatever hyper-extended idea of "ideology" this person is working toward.

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

Some of this strikes me as undecidable to a degree, which the author does touch on to some extent. (Also, she focuses only on things which you want, whereas I suspect that things you don't want are as culturally mediated, and to a similar degree. For example, everyone knows that drinking horse milk is weird and gross, but drinking cow's milk is okay, and most-but-not-all people think that drinking human breast milk as an adult is creepy. Those are really weird distinctions to just "come from inside," although many people will argue that they're not culturally influenced on those. I'm digressing a lot here. Still, that she focuses only on things you want is kind of significant in that she gives as the unacceptable alternative that one would cease doing everything one wants to do, whereas I would posit that one would also have to cease not doing everything one doesn't want to do. And of course, you're still then possibly making a culturally mediated decision based on a locally-scoped ideology you've encountered, just the way that it wouldn't be fair to say that goths are really expressing their individuality.)

It feels to a degree like the argument about unselfish deeds: It can be posited that there's no unselfish deed because if you do something selfless it makes you feel good, so really you did it for that good feeling. That might be true, but if you keep following the motivational trail, you eventually begin positing theories about the unknowable actions of the subconscious and suddenly anything you can't be sure of anything. And part of that is what the author was getting at, I imagine, although I don't think they go far enough, and they seem to imply that these are indulgences we make but there might be some way to act such that it doesn't come from this sort of cultural mediation, which I'm skeptical about. Suppose being in a heterosexual relationship is caused by ideological imprinting. Does that mean that being in a same-sex relationship isn't? If one can be, can you be sure that the other isn't? What about people who find themselves falling for opposite-sex people but stifle it because they can't stand the thought of appearing to be be straight if they were seen out together? (I've seen people I know make this argument more than once, so that's not a theoretical positing.) While it may not be a decision that 'supports the system', is it an action that comes from the heart as an unmediated and totally free decision, or is it that within the culture the person normally exposes themselves, an ideological viewpoint has made them decide that they don't want heterosexual relationships, and then they find themselves not wanting them?

[abostick59.livejournal.com]

I think that, while there is some truth in the quote, there is also a fair bit of misprision.

First of all, it seems to me that "ideology" is too narrow a concept to be responsible for what Jessie describes. Jessie is talking about properties in the psychological analog to the kernel, whereas I see ideology as representing which window manager or desktop one uses. (Mac OS X comes bundled with X11, so I could run GNOME if I really wanted to instead of Aqua. At the same time, the OS X kernel is essentially different in key ways to the Linux kernel.)

Racism can be explicitly part of an ideology, such as that of the Christian Identity movement, or it can be explicitly rejected by an ideology, such as liberalism. But while liberalism is antithetical to the idea of racism, racism actually lives deeper in the psyche, and thus it is that so many liberals perpetrate and propagate racism, all the while vigorously denying that they are racist.

Secondly, there is a tautology in what Jessie says. Ideology is what makes it so that when you really sit down and consult your heart and do what feels right to you, it supports the system. Often when I consult my heart, what it tells me to do is in opposition to the system. By definition, what makes this so must therefore not be "ideology". This weakens the power of "ideology" -- if ideology is what makes the dictates of one's heart congruent with the external system, then if the external system were to change and one's heart did not, then one's ideology has changed, even though the heart's message has remained constant.

It is certainly true that the people I invite to my parties tend to be affluent, college-educated native English speakers of European ancestry, and that changing this is rather difficult for reasons both internal to me and external. I would say that those reasons are not in themselves ideological, and that my motivation for doing so is.

[abostick59.livejournal.com]

"My motivation for doing so" = "my motivation for changing," not "my motivation for inviting affluent, college-educated etc."

[(Anonymous)]

Hmmm. I don't see how ideology is by definition in opposition to the system. I can (and in fact I do) have an ideology which is deeply in opposition to the system under which I live.

I think the person who wrote the quotation is short-handing a number of things which may be better off unfolded. The quotation seems to use "ideology" as shorthand for "the ideology of the dominant culture," which is one ideology (or a cluster of ideologies) among many. In addition, this person seems to be blurring a distinction which I see between an examined and an unexamined life.

If I consult my heart and it tells me that I should be thin, my lovers should be thin, monogamy is the best path for me, it's okay that all my friends are white, affluent and educated, and I deserve every bit of material wealth that comes my way, my heart is very likely speaking in ideological concert with the dominant culture. If I consult my heart and it tells me some of those things, but not others, it's of value to me to examine the ones that fall in line with the dominant culture and see what I can glean from that examination. If I consult my heart and it tells me that size is irrelevant, polyamory is the best path for me, all of my friends should be as different from me and from the dominant culture's view of success as is possible, and I should give everything I have to the poor in the next ten minutes, my heart is very likely speaking in ideological opposition to the dominant culture.

I appreciate the original quotation because I believe it's always useful to remember that our decisions, even the ones that feel the most sincere, do not always come from our hearts alone. I also appreciate your distinctions above, particularly the distinction between ideological factors and motivations.