Theoria

3 Comments

1. Jared wrote:

   The word “ideology” is definitely in the air, so to speak. In fact, I can imagine Wolf Blitzer pronouncing the word right now. My guess is that students are picking it up from the media outlets. If you take a quick look at a Google news search for “ideology” you’ll see tons of uses of the word in an empty, benign and (sadly) phony-Marxist sense that basically means something like “worldview”, “faith”, or “web-of-belief”. One of the most interesting is a recent comment by the Pope summarized in a headline in “The Australian” that reads, “Pope rejects ideology for its own sake”. The really weird thing is that there seems to be a common, sleepwalking distinction between “good” and “bad” ideology, and most often used to point out a flaw in an opponents position–almost as if the correct way to think about things is without ideas!

   Sunday, December 30, 2007 at 11:40 pm | Permalink
2. mel wrote:

   I agree that mass media outlets and figures can and do throw the word “ideology” around too casually. But it is a word that one does encounter in academia a fair bit too. You may not use it in your lectures, but I can attest to other teachers using it. Granted, I don’t think teachers who use it misuse it, per se, but I think that some of them do drop it without properly defining it. I had a prof in one of my graduate seminars last semester ask us to define “ideology” – to which he got just as many different answers as there were students, both master’s and phd candidates. The prof didn’t seem particular pleased with any of the definitions either, but he did show some satisfaction with the ones around Marxist political economy.

   My feeling is that the average undergrad isn’t using for any particular or conscious reason, like impressing the prof or aligning with Marx, but because it is an elusive word hanging around on the fringes of their lexicon, waiting to be found and given a home.

   Monday, January 14, 2008 at 12:18 pm | Permalink
3. John wrote:

   Craig, You probably already know all of this.

   Everything that everyone says, writes, and does is governed by all sorts of uninspected ideas or ideologies–no exceptions.

   Even, or perhaps especially, language itself, which has and carries all kind of ideological assumptions re the structure and structuring of the world.
   People in different language groups have a completely different sense of self and thus see and act in the world in different ways.

   I have noticed that those on the “right” quite often accuse everyone on the left as being ideologically motivated and of wishing to engage in, and impose on everyone, various programs of ideologically motivated social engineering.
   Never mind that capitalism via the advertising industry has been the largest and most “successful” example of mass social engineering ever conducted on this planet.
   It now has a logic of its own.
   Any and everything that may appear to be slightly different is instantaneously enfolded by the system and made into another consumer product.

   The corollary of that is of course that those on the “right” are expressing some kind of eternal transcendental truth completely free of any kind of ideology—-the Pope for instance in his statement.
   Never mind that Christianity is a one hundred percent man made set of HALF-BAKED ideas—an ideology. It should rightly be called Christian-ISM.

   Thursday, January 17, 2008 at 4:51 am | Permalink

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