I knew a professor in graduate school who would criticize his students who had some kind of coherent political or ideological stance. “Do you want to be tarred with that brush?”, he’d say to us when we used a word that he thought to be unseemly in its political reference. (Describing the process of people becoming industrial laborers as “proletarianizing” would especially set him off for some reason.) He’d cross his arms during seminar discussions and say, “I don’t have an ideology, after all. I just go with the facts.”
Reader, he did have an ideology.
As did many men in academia of his generation who thought that way. I’ve always loved Garry Wills’ skewering of this kind of “I have no ideology” intellectual in his book Nixon Agonistes—he mentions Arthur Schlesinger as a particular example. Everybody has some basic operating assumption about how society works and ought to work, and every intellectual aligns the work they do with that assumption. Even saying that knowledge should be disinterested, non-instrumental, purely empirical, is an ideology—you have a belief that such work is possible and you have a belief that it is productive or necessary or beautiful.
In practice, I think a lot of liberal-left intellectuals in the early 21st Century have a hodgepodge set of ideological presuppositions. Ideologies or political convictions don’t have to be philosophically consistent, and the period from the end of the Cold War until now has left most people who are not self-labeled conservatives with a set of baseline orientations and inherited worldviews that don’t really mesh propositionally, especially when they’re extended out to end-state positions on particular events or policies.
I certainly think that describes me well enough: my reactions to events, to formal politics, to the world around me are only occasionally conditioned by a certain degree of consistency that extends from a deep foundation to a formed opinion about what ought to be done in a particular circumstance.
The men who believed they were above or outside ideology tended to think that made them better at deciding what to do or think because they felt they had no priors hanging over their situational evaluation of a particular problem. I don’t think that about myself even when I know I don’t have a strong soup-to-nuts conviction to fall back on. I’m really rather envious at times of people who come into a very vexed situation always already certain of how they’re going to read the newest news in that case, even if that leads to arguments or interpretations that seem to me to be intellectually dishonest or outright delusional.
As in several other entries in the last few weeks, the specific case that’s on my mind is Israel-Palestine and the war in Gaza. There are a lot of disciplined ideologies that come into that situation where there is literally no news that will shake their understanding of what is going on. A strong Zionist perspective that is tied to Netanyahu and his coalition cannot be shaken by any news out of the West Bank or Gaza. A critique of settler colonialism that sees it as a distinctively Western mode of domination and sees the achievement of national sovereignty as the only viable moral response will likely not be troubled much by the continued dissemination of the details of the Hamas attack on Israelis, though some intellectual choreography is required to step around the more Wilsonian question of why Zionists did not also deserve sovereignty somewhere. A profoundly committed pacifist comes to the news knowing already that all violence is not an answer.
The problem for someone like me who is both somewhat mutable on some of the foundational positions surrounding self-determination, sovereignty, and nationalism and who is not a pacifist but who also hates militarists, hates harming or dispossessing people who are living a good and basic life where they are and how they are, hates governments and parties and institutions lying about what they’re doing, hates brutality, who believes that people can live in freedom and justice in a world that is within our grasp? The problem is that every day brings a new news story that enrages and disgusts me.
And so I become, in political terms, a captive of the last story. An NPR story about how the IDF is aiding and abetting settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, and collaborating in the theft of land from people who are just trying to go about their lives? Infuriates me. For a while it’s all I can think about. A story detailed the obscene details of what Hamas did to people when they broke through the defenses around Gaza, or about the hostages now? Devastates me, and I curse their names. A news story about Netanyahu’s allies talking about a nuclear attack or seeking the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza? Feels as if I have known all along that is what they want and yet I’m revolted that the subtext is becoming fully textual. The awareness that many Israelis are aware of Netanyahu’s failures and his complicity in what is happening, and that they intend to exact a price once the crisis is over? Buoys me up.
The problem is that this makes me precisely the kind of person that the combatants are seeking to influence by slanting the news in various ways, including by trying to get people in hospitals and children in buildings killed for the propaganda value (Hamas) but also by lying about the scale and type of military operations against the population of Gaza as well as an operational indifference to civilian casualties (the IDF). The sides in this conflict know that there’s some group of onlookers who have no fixed position, not even the desperately calculated inevitability of both major American political parties figuring that backing Israel more or less uncritically is the right play in terms of electoral outcomes in US politics.
I know on self-reflection that there have been conflicts in the past where my opinion had some meaning where I could see merit—or the lack thereof—in both sides of an issue, and where I ended up backing the side that offended my intelligence the least. The side that annoyed me less. That I made decisions about which side I came down on based on who seemed the grossest in their abuse of the truth, the most unprincipled in their flooding of the zone with multiple and contradictory bad arguments. Read into any location in public culture where people with strong convictions on this issue are laying into each other, and you will quickly compile a huge index of truly mendacious representations of history, horribly bad faith misrepresentations of news, calculated lies about the other side, and bullying and intimidation galore. But behind that you’ve got people who are standing pat on something they really believe in, come hell or high water. All of that noise is not about what they really think or what they really do, it’s about the mostly silent audience of the uncertain and unsteady, about trying to make sure the other guys are the last worst, most worst, in their eyes.
I’m not a meaningful vote on this issue as I may have been in some local struggles and debates. But there are people in the middle of the situation whose voices and choices are being crushed by the alternation of cruel extremism and pernicious lies, as David Remnick and many other reporters have indicated. Perhaps they (and I) do have an ideology after all: in a war between killers, kidnappers, tyrants and zealots, we are, or support, a third side. Not just because the third side are none of those things, but because they stand for—and speak to—the complex truths that attend upon and sustain human life in the world, the necessary fragility of uncertainty.
I think and worry about this constantly. I try to support those feeling anguish for people they actually know, whether in Gaza or Israel, who have been killed, maimed or traumatized since early October. At the same time, I am outraged at the violence being perpetrated by Hamas and by the IDF—and how both use people’s genuine pain and horror to forward their cause. And then there is the deployment of the words and the images, discursive performances built on honest, historically specific realities—meant for ideological conditioning in the strictest sense. So, yeah, I have an ideological position: warfare is ugly and wrong in almost every case, even when it “feels right.” Good post, Tim, for those of us who usually see more sides than two and probably aren’t very effective in real world conflict because of it.
Thanks Tim. Donald Hall, poet, made a case for The Third Thing. Indeed, and some day, there could be a Polish Roundtable model, in which there are multiple negotiating participants. It’s so easy to get complexity to two sides. And I can’t imagine who that grad school professor was!