Political Visions & Illusions

A Survey & Christian Critique of Contemporary Ideologies

David T. Koyzis

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780830872060
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion, Politics & State

What you believe about politics matters. The decades since the Cold War, with new alignments of post–9/11 global politics and the chaos of the late 2010s, are swirling with alternative visions of political life, ranging from ethnic nationalism to individualistic liberalism. Political ideologies are not merely a matter of governmental efficacy, but are intrinsically and inescapably religious: each carries certain assumptions about the nature of reality, individuals and society, as well as a particular vision for the common good. These fundamental beliefs transcend the political sphere, and the astute Christian observer can discern the ways—sometimes subtle, sometimes not—in which ideologies are rooted in idolatrous worldviews. In this freshly updated, comprehensive study, political scientist David Koyzis surveys the key political ideologies of our era, including liberalism, conservatism, nationalism, democracy, and socialism. Koyzis gives each philosophy careful analysis and fair critique, unpacking the worldview issues inherent to each and pointing out essential strengths and weaknesses, as well as revealing the "narrative structure" of each—the stories they tell to make sense of public life and the direction of history. Koyzis concludes by proposing alternative models that flow out of Christianity's historic engagement with the public square, retrieving approaches for both individuals and the global, institutional church that hold promise for the complex political realities of the twenty-first century. Writing with broad international perspective and keen analytical insight, Koyzis is a sane and sensible guide for Christians working in the public square, culture watchers, political pundits, and all students of modern political thought.

INTRODUCTION

Ideology, Religion, and Idolatry

WE LIVE IN EXTRAORDINARY TIMES. Not long ago it seemed as if the world was locked in an eschatological standoff between two superpowers and their ideologies. During the forty years of the Cold War, both sides expended much energy in an attempt to win the hearts and minds of the world’s peoples for either communism or liberal democracy. Although old-fashioned considerations of national interest were certainly involved in this protracted struggle, especially in its later years, the Cold War was unique in that it was based primarily on a clash of opposing ideas. If during this time people such as Kim Philby or Arkady Shevchenko defected to the other side, they were not so much betraying the home country as demonstrating a belief in the ideas underpinning the other country’s political and economic system. In this context loyalty to country took on a rather different color than it had in previous conflicts. To be sure, the Cold War was not the first ideological conflict, but it was probably the longest lasting.

Yet in the post–Cold War era we are experiencing an unprecedented shakeup in long-standing loyalties to such ideas that we may properly label ideologies. One of the more dramatic of these developments was the collapse of communism, which occurred with astonishing rapidity in late 1989 in Eastern Europe and finally led to the dismemberment of the Soviet Union itself in late 1991. Although most of us on the outside were startled at this, those on the inside, especially Christians, seemed to understand that the Marxist-Leninist system would not last. Indeed, by the end it is fair to say that the ideology had been dead for some time, at least within the hearts of the people. Scarcely less dramatic was the unexpectedly quick end to apartheid in South Africa orchestrated by F. W. de Klerk and Nelson Mandela a few years later. But possibly the most unexpected development—for Westerners at least—was that of radical jihadism bursting onto the scene, especially after the Arab nationalism of the late twentieth century had appeared to be the wave of the future. The tragic 9/11 attacks brought this home to Americans in spectacular fashion, but the movement was already gathering strength for some time beforehand. The Iranian Revolution of 1979 had caught Americans off guard, as it defied easy classification in terms familiar to Westerners and undercut the common assumption that history always moves in a progressive, secularizing direction.

Somewhat less dramatically perhaps, we in the West are experiencing nagging doubts about our own ideologies, especially liberalism and democracy. Liberalism, as we shall see, is based on a belief in the primacy of the individual, and we seem now to be suffering the consequences of an untrammeled individualism in the form of a variety of intractable social ills. An emphasis on rights without the counteremphasis on responsibilities leaves us with precious little basis for genuine community, as we North Americans are learning to our great regret. Even democracy, which values community more highly than liberalism does, has degenerated into something approaching a pure majoritarianism allowing little genuine space for potentially dissenting communities and distrusting anything that might detract from loyalty to the democratic people. Democracy has become popular again, especially in the former communist countries. But there it is synonymous with the consumer-driven prosperity of such countries as Germany and the United States, and not with the public virtues needed to make a participatory political system work. Moreover, as Ryszard Legutko has argued, liberal democracy, especially in the European Union, has totalitarian propensities decreasingly tolerant of genuine pluralism.1

In Canada national unity is sporadically threatened by the clash of two mutually incompatible ideologies, liberalism and nationalism. In English-speaking Canada the dominant ideology, as in its southern neighbor, is liberalism, with its abstract notion of the equality of all individual citizens. In French-speaking Canada, especially in the province of Quebec, liberalism is no less dominant but with more than a measure of nationalism thrown into the mix. Under nationalist influence most Québécois believe in the equality of the two founding nations, French and English, while frequently overlooking the contributions of aboriginal Canadians, generally styled as First Nations.

Ideologies, in short, are not about to come to an end in this post–Cold War world, despite occasional predictions to the contrary. After the struggle between communism and liberal democracy faded into history, other ideologies have moved in to fill the vacuum left by the collapse of communism, most notably ethnic nationalism and radical jihadism. Non-Leninist Marxism itself is often said to be in decline, except possibly in Western academia and in Latin America, where it has taken the form of liberation theology. But a cluster of postmodern ideologies have come into being and are based on similar premises—namely, that one’s concrete position in life, whether economic class, gender, sexual orientation, or race, determines one’s overall worldview. This has encouraged what has come to be variously labeled the politics of difference, the politics of recognition, or identity politics.2

So what is an ideology? At this point I shall tip my hand and indicate that I view ideologies as modern manifestations of that ancient phenomenon called idolatry, complete with their own stories of sin and redemption. From the beginning of its narrative, Scripture inveighs against the worship of idols, false gods that human beings have created. Like these biblical idolatries, every ideology is based on taking something out of creation’s totality, raising it above that creation, and making the latter revolve around and serve it. It is further based on the assumption that this idol has the capacity to save us from some real or perceived evil in the world. This is a book about political ideologies; the ideologies we shall discuss here have to do with politics and its place in human life. Thus we shall largely limit our discussion to assessing their impact within the state or political community, which is that community binding together citizens and their government for purposes of doing and maintaining justice.

POLITICS AND IDEAS

At one time it was fashionable to claim that ideology is a thing of the past with no continuing relevance for the contemporary political scene. In 1960 Daniel Bell argued that, after the Second World War, ideology had come to an end and had been replaced by a widespread consensus that the principal issues of the day were primarily technical in nature.3 In a growing postwar economy, issues of distribution that had once fueled socialist movements and had polarized labor and management were being supplanted by the purely administrative concerns of a society increasingly seeing itself as wholly middle class. This supposed consensus was shattered in the United States a few years later by the failure of President Lyndon Johnson’s domestic and foreign policies and by the emergence of the New Left.

Nevertheless, a generation later, with the Cold War fading into the past, Francis Fukuyama argued that history itself was ending. The temporal succession of days and years would continue, of course, but history in the Hegelian sense of an ongoing conflict of ideas was drawing to a close. In 1989 liberal democracy had scored an apparently final victory over the forces of Marxism-Leninism, which had once seemed so impregnable but finally collapsed with such remarkable speed and so little violence. With the nearly universal acceptance of liberal democracy in the wake of communism’s demise, all that was left for humanity was to settle into a bland bourgeois existence in which sameness would replace diversity and thereby supplant the conflicts engendered by the latter.4

Much of this premature heralding of the death of ideology may stem from a measure of wishful thinking. It may also, as Sir Bernard Crick correctly points out, flow from hostility to the continuing give-and-take of politics, which in this present life knows no end.5 There is some irony in this. The followers of ideologies often wish to impose their own simplistic conception of a monolithic social order on the complexities of a real society. But those ringing the death knell for ideology are themselves in the grip of a worldview through which they filter their perception of the political realm, though they are typically reluctant to label it an ideology as such. Bell and Fukuyama are not really harbingers of a new social order lacking ideological commitments; they are simply forecasting the triumph of their own pet ideology, which for both is some combination of liberalism and democracy, augmented by the technocratic guidance of social scientists. In this twenty-first century, however, it should be obvious that, although specific ideologies may have lost their attractiveness for the moment, ideology per se is not on its way out.

This underscores the need to define ideology before we can proceed to explore its particular manifestations. Like politics itself, reflection about politics has an ancient pedigree, going back to at least Plato and Aristotle. Often this reflection has taken the form of describing empirically the actual arrangement of political institutions or the activities of rulers and ruled. But just as often political theorists have gone beyond the empirical and set forth what they believe to be the ideal or best political system. The most famous example of this is, of course, Plato’s Republic. What we have come to call ideologies can perhaps be said to follow in this tradition.

HISTORY AND DEFINITIONS

Despite ideology’s roots in Plato’s and Aristotle’s philosophies, most accounts trace the origins of the concept itself to Antoine Destutt de Tracy (1754–1836), who coined the term at the beginning of the nineteenth century. For Destutt de Tracy idéologie is intended to be a comprehensive science of ideas whereby the scientific method can be applied to gain an understanding of the process of forming ideas. Following John Locke and Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, he believes that a scientific idéologie must be based on an analysis of the sensory elements of which ideas are composed. Any knowledge that cannot be immediately grounded in sensory experience must be rejected as having no scientific basis. Destutt de Tracy’s idéologie is, therefore, intended to be rigorously empirical and excludes such phenomena as religious and mystical experiences, which are not strictly experiences at all because they are not rooted in sensation. Obviously idéologie is quite different from our contemporary ideology. But it should perhaps be noted that for Destutt de Tracy scientific knowledge can be used to improve the conditions in which human beings live. Thus even this early form of ideology can already be said to imply action of some sort.

Others have defined ideology to imply inaction, or perhaps counteraction. Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) define ideology negatively, though some of their successors, notably Lenin, would recover a more positive use of the term. For Marx and Engels the animating force behind the historical process is class struggle. At any particular historical stage, whether this be feudalism or capitalism, one class rules over another and uses its power to maintain control over the lower class. Its ability to do so depends on keeping the latter quiet. In a capitalist society the continued rule of the bourgeoisie hinges on convincing the proletariat that its oppressive conditions are something other than what they are. If industrial workers are denied the vote (as they generally were up to the end of the nineteenth century) and forced to work long hours under harsh conditions, it is because this is the natural order of things. Perhaps it is even the will of God. In other words, the bourgeoisie must create and reinforce a “false consciousness” in the proletariat to prevent in them a true consciousness of the real reasons behind their oppression.

Marx and Engels label this false consciousness ideology, a phenomenon including politics, law, morality, religion, and metaphysics.6 Everyone is by now familiar with Marx’s oft-quoted dictum that religion is the “opium of the people.”7 Like a narcotic, religion deadens pain and makes people passive in the face of oppression. It keeps them from taking action to change these conditions, and it even prevents them from recognizing them for what they are. Ideology includes virtually everything that exists in people’s consciousness and has come into being as a byproduct of class struggle. What began as a positive, scientific enterprise in Destutt de Tracy has thus become in Marx and Engels a negative phenomenon based on a false view of the real world. Since their time, then, it is not surprising that ideology has more often than not had a derogatory connotation, even for non-Marxists.

A variation of this concept of ideology has been advanced by the German sociologist Karl Mannheim (1893–1947). Deeply influenced by Marx, Max Weber, and German historicism, Mannheim distinguishes between ideology, a conserving force, and utopia, a force for social change. Working out of what he calls a “sociology of knowledge,” he argues that ideology consciously or unconsciously masks the concrete realities of a culture or era, or of an individual’s life. In its particular form, ideology consists of “opinions, statements, propositions, and systems of ideas” that cannot be taken at face value but must instead be “interpreted in the light of the life-situation of the one who expresses them.”8 In its total form, ideology describes the Weltanschauung of a “concrete historico-social group” or of a particular historical epoch. Ideology is fundamentally psychological in nature and must be analyzed as such. It is usually not simply a pack of deliberate lies but a function of the social situation in which people find themselves.9 Utopia, by contrast, describes a state of mind that transcends the real world and causes people to break the bonds of a prevailing order. Like ideologies, utopias, too, are ways of thinking incongruent with a current status quo. But while ideologies do not strive to replace the latter with a new social order, utopias do just that. Ideologies are therefore conservative, while utopias are revolutionary, if only in a relative sense.10

For both Marx and Mannheim, then, ideologies are types of false consciousness that are used to justify an existing social order and that their proponents may or may not believe. They are nevertheless put forward as true accounts of reality, while they in fact function to hide that reality from the vast majority of people. By preventing them from seeing the world as it is, ideologies are thus deeply conservative and bulwarks against change. If we accept this account of ideology, then perhaps the “Myth of the Metals” in Plato’s Republic falls into this category since it is a kind of “noble...