Investigations of a Dog

A couple of weeks ago George Simmers at Great War Fiction posted about some problems with applying the Marxist concept of ideological hegemony to the outbreak of the First World War. He criticized some vaguely Marxist influenced historians and literary critics who said that people were tricked by propaganda into supporting the war and then became disillusioned. I wanted to reply to his post, but every time I drafted a comment in my head it just ended up saying “I don’t really know”. I do know that George is right to say “These are words to be used with care.” Like many things, the concept of ideology can be useful if used well but can also be counterproductive if used badly. So in this post I’m going to try and explain what ideology means to me, and how it’s useful in my own work. Bear that in mind while reading, as when you see the words “ideology is”, that’s shorthand for “I think ideology is”, and not the definite assertion that it looks like.

Ideology is assumptions people take for granted without question. These assumptions might be a certain way of thinking about things which excludes different but equally valid possibilities; they might be factually wrong; they might be harmful. At its narrowest ideology means almost the same thing as prejudice, but at its widest it means almost the same thing as culture. Therefore some might say it’s not a very useful concept, but I still feel that I need it. Prejudice implies an individual failing which individuals can be blamed for. Culture implies something unthreatening, and even benign. Ideology is a widespread system of beliefs which can be potentially dangerous, and which often is dangerous in practice. If an ideology is widespread enough (and I define this very vaguely) it can be described as a dominant ideology, or ideological hegemony. For me the best example of ideological hegemony is gender. Why do people assume so many things about men and women? Why are people classed as men and women at all? Gender often claims to be supported by biology, but it isn’t. Biologists can classify organisms according to their reproductive organs, but this taxonomy is only relevant to the biological process of reproduction and not to anything else. If we’re talking about reproduction then we necessarily have to bring fertility into consideration, and that completely undermines a simple binary opposition between male and female. Is a woman only a woman when she’s fertile? If so, what is she when she isn’t fertile? Does her gender change with her menstrual cycle? Most of what we “know” about differences between men and women is ideology.

Ideology is in minds and in culture, but this poses a problem. No-one really knows enough about how minds and culture work to make any strong and convincing claims for or against the existence of ideology or its influence on historical causation. These days I usually work from the premise that other minds are unknowable. I got this idea from postmodern historian Keith Jenkins, but I’m, also convinced that it’s supported by empirical science. The cognitive and neuro-sciences have given us bits and pieces of evidence but they’re still a long way off from being able to tell us exactly what people think and why. In any case, we’ll never have direct access to minds/brains that existed in the past but which don’t exist now, no matter how far brain scanning advances in the future. So how can I make any claims about ideology or think that it’s any use to me? The key is that it’s in culture as well as in minds, and that culture manifests itself outside minds as well as within them, and these manifestations have real consequences (eg who gets power and wealth, and who doesn’t). Without knowing the insides of minds we can still see traces of ideology in words, actions, and physical objects. If the same assumption crops up in lots of different texts, then we have to suspect ideology, especially if that assumption is empirically wrong (eg women are too small and weak to fight in wars; for more details see this post). This Nietzschean suspicion is necessary regardless of what we do or don’t know about how culture works. Suspicion is not the same as proof or conclusions, but it’s always useful. If you’re not suspicious then you’re not trying. But I don’t buy the idea of false consciousness. Even if you don’t see other minds as unknowable, how can you tell an authentic idea from a false one? If a belief is in someone’s mind and they sincerely believe it (or think they do), what makes it any less sincere than anything else they might believe? If the belief has the same effects on reality, does it matter if it’s authentic or false? (I have some similar reservations about the hidden transcript, but that’s another story.)

Ideology often denies that it is ideology. The most ideological things are often the things which appear most normal. We should be suspicious when anyone says that there is no ideology to see. For example, the revisionist historians who dominated the study of the English Civil War in the 1970s and 1980s were generally hostile to Marxism and feminism. There seemed to be an assumption that these approaches were politically biased and therefore illegitimate, but this ignored the fact that the revisionists had their own conservative or liberal ideological assumptions which inevitably influenced their work. Ideology is not just overt political manifestos, and it isn’t just something that “extremists” have. The revisionist influence on the study of the English Civil War has left us with a dangerously narrow definition of ideology.

Ideology is not easily controlled. This is at least partly because no-one really understands how it works. It can’t be quickly turned on and off by propaganda in response to an emergency. Ideology often serves the interests of governments, and they can influence it in some ways, but what they try to do might not work, or might have unintended consequences. Anti-Catholicism was encouraged by Elizabeth I in England in order to secure her position as monarch. It’s debatable whether it actually became a dominant ideology during her reign, but it certainly was by the reign of Charles I (despite him being more sympathetic towards Catholics than Elizabeth had been). In the early 1640s parliament tried to manipulate anti-Catholicism for its own ends. This was partly successful, because it encouraged the Colchester mob to disarm Sir John Lucas in August 1642, something which was definitely in the interests of parliament. But this sparked off a wave of anti-Catholic and anti-royalist rioting across Essex and Suffolk which alarmed parliament’s supporters among the gentry, threatened property rights, and allowed the royalists to claim that they were the party of order. Because ideology is about what is ostensibly normal, it can be hard to trace the ideology and its effects in abnormal situations (although people’s perceptions of whether a situation is normal or abnormal are likely to be influenced by their own ideological assumptions). Ideology is likely to be one of the things that influence complex events (such as wars and revolutions) but it can’t be a single simple cause. Ideology as I define it is often a better explanation of what doesn’t happen than what does. Why wasn’t there a women’s revolution, or a civil war between men and women? That’ll be the dominant ideology.

Ideology is not easy to spot, because it masquerades as the normal and the unremarkable. We have to work hard to overcome our own ideological assumptions and question what is there by default. Cultural changes can sometimes make it easier to identify ideology in the past. For example, white British people are now more likely to recognize that golliwogs and minstrel shows are horribly racist, and be shocked that they were mainstream family entertainment until quite recently. This does not make us superior to people in the past. Many of our ideological assumptions which we have failed to question will look awful in the future, as George pointed out when he caught the Guardian being homophobic in 1918. But this is not progress (and progress itself is a dubious ideology – see this discussion at Historiann). Ideology does not necessarily improve over time. I’m not being a complete moral relativist here. I think some ideologies are better than others, but things can get worse or stay the same as well as getting better. Liberalism has its problems, but it’s better than fascism despite being older.

Ideology is built into language. The grammar and vocabulary we have access to make it difficult to avoid perpetuating ideology. In English there are many insulting words for a promiscuous woman (eg slut, slag, slapper, tart, whore) but not for a promiscuous man. The double standard is right there in that ostensibly most neutral of books, the dictionary. Use of the word “raped” as a passive verb is common and grammatically correct, but puts us on a slippery slope towards victim blaming. Compare “someone raped her” with “she was raped”. Both technically correct, both technically saying the same thing, but with a significantly different emphasis. The common colloquial habit of using “got” instead of “was” to indicate the perfect passive makes it even worse. “She got raped” makes it sound like something that the victim brought on herself through her own failings, or even wanted!

So that’s what I mean when I write about ideology. I like to think that I use the concept carefully, but I’m not about to defend people who don’t use it carefully (and I think Julian Putkowski is someone who does use it carefully and gets good results from it). I’ll probably write some more about seeing ideology soon. In the meantime, be suspicious and trust no-one.