Absolute faith in science is another kind of ideology

Interview with Alejandro Pérez Polo

The word ideology It usually refers to the way in which ideas are articulated in our minds and in collective imaginations, the way we see the world, relationships personal, the functioning of things, and so on until listing an infinite list of elements: as many as mental representations a human being can have in each moment.

We recommend a reading of our article "What is the ideology"for an approach to the concept.

Precisely because of the general and abstract nature of the term "ideology", this concept lends itself to a lively and continuous debate. All we can say about it is a totally debatable and disputed position, a characterization of the realm of ideas that is in continuous evolution both in its most abstract and earthly aspects, both in our individual minds and in currents of thought collective. It is even debatable that there is a mental framework that defines our way of perceiving things and acting. So is there something that defines our way of thinking? Do we have our own way of establishing relationships between ideas?

Ideology, a disputed concept

Today we want to delve a bit into the mysterious concept of ideology. For this we have Alejandro Pérez Polo, next candidate for the citizen council of Podem Catalunya. Pérez Polo is Graduated in Political Science and Administration from UPF, Master in Political Philosophy from the University Paris VIII Saint Denis-Vincennes and currently studying a postgraduate degree in economic and philosophical analysis of capitalism contemporary.

Alejandro, thank you for answering our questions.

Nice to meet you one more time.

How would you define ideology in a sentence?

Ideology, in a sentence, is the lens through which you observe, perceive, and constitute your own everyday reality; individual and collective, and if you intend to remove your glasses, as when you suffer from advanced myopia, the landscape that it would draw and extend in front of you it would blur and you would not be able to distinguish the different figures and references of your around.

Would you say that it is a word used to define collective ways of thinking, or can it also refer to our individual way of thinking?

Ideology is a political concept that has served and serves at first to build collective stories and meta-stories. Capitalism, liberalism, communism, nationalism, are meta-stories in the sense that they claim to justify a know for himself that he is moving towards a certain unified, uniform, unique and finalist direction, with a end. To simplify a bit, the meta-story is that which goes beyond the story pursuing a totalizing goal, both of the knowledge itself and the large-scale theories and practices (progress towards the better in history or the idea that science will be able to solve all our problems through technique).

Ideologies are closely related to meta-stories because they transcend us as individuals and all of them They are usually generated through an idea that serves as the hard core of the rest of the chain of concepts and practices that is derive. This idea always seeks a specific purpose and is always collective at first. In the same way, it is shaped by the material relations of existence. That is, there is a double level: the performative level of the ideology itself, which with its enunciation generates reality and social fictions and the own juxtaposition of that level with the relations of production and reproduction of a socioeconomic system, with its resistances, powers. That is, with its material anchor that serves as sustenance.

In addition, ideology is a system that claims the truth, it is not a lie that pretends to be taken seriously but a whole system that is going to claim and proclaim itself as the bearer of truth, unique and absolute. Let us think that even an ideology of a relativistic type - relativism, very fashionable in our times, ensures that there is room for a multitude of interpretations of the same fact, all of them valid and equal to each other, none of them can prevail over the rest nor can any of them be claimed as 100% true - a first truth is claimed: the truth that everything is relative.

Yes, the typical paradox for which they are criticized (laughs). Relativism causes discomfort.

It is a certainly curious ideological paradox, since a single universal truth is being affirmed, no matter how much this same truth ensures that there are many truths. For example, if I tell a relativist that there is only one truth - my own for example - and that the rest are false, the relativist will surely get angry and say that my attitude is authoritarian or whatever be. In any case, he is reaffirming his own ideological framework, which would be the acceptance that there are multiple truths.

Sorry to deviate a bit from the initial question, but I think it is important to couple the collective and individual dimensions of the ideology, as it operates at two levels. First as a collective construct, reproduced and nurtured through the ideological apparatuses of the state (family, culture, school ...) and then reverts to the individual since it constitutes your own field of knowledge and the way through which you face your own life and your own reality, since ideology is a system that demands the truth.

So it is a concept that breaks with the idea of ​​the autonomous and rational individual who creates his own interpretation framework. Break with the figure of the "freethinker" or something similar.

The hackneyed idea and repeated to the core of "Homo economicus" or of man separated from the world, as if of an alien landing from the exterior to the interior of the earth and society, it seems extremely questionable and pursues an ideological purpose determined. There is no such thing as a pre-social or pre-political existence of the human being. He is born with and in society. We use a language that is unitary at the base and that precedes us and that is through which we build our own world, always collectively. He said Wittgenstein what the limit of the world is the limit of my language, and you're probably right. The atomized individual is an effect of the capitalist social structure, but not the origin of it.

There is no exteriority with the world, Spinoza, arguing against Discards, affirmed that man not only thinks but that his body is "affected" in many ways. Both the affection of the body and the thought were already for Spinoza an effect of nature as well as a natural characteristic of this naturally social being as the human being. For Spinoza, for example, the spirit and the body is one and the same individual that we conceive under the attribute of thought or on the attribute of extension. The theory of rational man has never questioned this kind of thing and always falls into the illusion that there is a independence of the body with the thought as well as of the individual thought with the collective that constitutes and builds it how to be.

Is ideology a different concept from "worldview"?

Quite different although they have a relationship. In other words, ideology constitutes a worldview of the world as it tends to be unifying, systemic and totalizing. Now, ideology also pursues an end and struggles to be hegemonic in a society, at a political level. The worldview is more of a global way of thinking about what exists without pursuing an end or claiming the truth for oneself.

When we talk about ideology, many people understand it as a kind of hermetic mental scheme that protects itself from dynamics that can alter it. We speak many times of "ideological closure" or of people with a very closed mind. Would you highlight this aspect of resistance to change, or on the contrary, do you think that ideology is something that constantly flows?

The ideology is dynamic although it tends to maintain more stable hard nuclei over time. It is reconfigured and rearticulated in its modalities and expressions, following the material changes of a society, but it is true that it usually maintains a point first, a hard core, quite unalterable. For example, between a liberal and a neoliberal there are numerous ideological differences, but there are two points that have remained stable for more than a year. of 2 centuries: the staunch defense of private property as well as the truth of the free market in its different dimensions, also in the morals.

Anyway, I wouldn't pose the question that way. I do not believe that ideology is a resistance to change but a constant struggle for that change, for the struggle to be the dominant and hegemonic ideology in a given society and systems. At this point I would differentiate ideology from religious faith tout-court, although there may be many points of coincidence and encounter.

It is also common for a pejorative use of the word "ideology" to be made, as if it were an element that can and should be left out in certain contexts. Do you think it is possible to get rid of it?

The pejorative use of the word ideology is an ideological and political act. For there to be an "end of ideologies" there should be an end of politics and maybe even an end of history. We are a long way from anything like it. Whoever affirms that there are no ideologies is because he wants his own ideology, not made explicit in words as such by whatever force he may have, to prevail over all the others.

You mean Francis Fukuyama, for example.

Among others (laughs). The success of an ideology lies in two crucial aspects: one: that it should not be stated, nor made explicit, nor pronounce itself as such, thus increasing its power of dominant ideology that is transformed in this way into a common. Two: An ideology triumphs when even the facts that at first glance contradict it begin to function as arguments in its favor. In this sense, when I affirm that there is no ideology, or that I have no ideology, although all the facts point to Indeed I do have it and reproduce it, but this works in my favor, it means that my ideology has triumphed.

It is impossible to get rid of ideology because, as I stated in the first question, ideology constitutes as being in the world and produces the glasses through which I look and observe my own reality.

Is there a certain ideology that prevails in society, or just an amalgam of ideologies with little force?

In the post-industrial society in which we live it seems as if there is no longer a struggle of tough, solid ideologies, as there was in the 19th and 20th centuries. Many neoliberal ideologues have hailed and celebrated a supposed end to ideologies after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. But the truth is that ideology is still everywhere, since the reaction to the recent attacks in Paris against Charlie hebdo even in the toilet in which I fulfill my needs. The simple fact that utilitarianism and technique are imposed as ways of relating to the world is an ideological act of great force. That is, to simplify, the fact that I have to lead an efficient life in which I can not waste a minute of the day because I stop being productive or the simple fact that I have to sort the different objects in my apartment are acts of ideology: the ideology of technique and efficiency as carriers of truth and happiness.

It is curious that in the times we live in, it is not only important to lead a life that is useful but I must appear to lead a useful life myself. We feel bad when we have wasted a little time chatting with a friend or looking at the posts on the facebook wall. There is a kind of dictatorship of what is correct that is identified with what is useful and what is effective. Those unproductive, ineffective lives, always under capitalist utility criteria and axioms, are publicly condemned as well as being stigmatized and ridiculed. The indigenous people of Latin America, who only work 2 or 3 hours a day and no more than 3 days a week and who dedicate themselves to life idle would condemn and be scandalized - in fact, they already do - with our modus vivendi, so glorifying of work and hyperactivity

Sadly, the neoliberal ideology is hegemonic in our societies.

Do you think that political ideology defines ideology in general, or is it a sub-section of our way of thinking in which other logics are followed?

I think that political ideology determines ideology in a broader term. Ultimately, power is being contested as well as how to exercise it. In our society there are privileged social groups (people with enormous incomes - rich -, whites Westerners, heterosexuals and men) who exercise power to try to maintain those privileges that are arbitrary. The oppressions that occur and cross our social body and those that may occur in other places and times are always arbitrary. Any type of justification of an inequality is already operating in the production of a determined ideology. This fact, which goes hand in hand with the material conditions of our existence, is the central nucleus of the construction, production and reproduction of the common sense of the time, ergo, of our way of think.

Does the left-right axis tell us about ideologies?

The left-right axis is an expression of an ideological divide at a certain historical moment. In fact, it seems that currently it will no longer continue to operate as the central political-ideological axis in the ideological struggle. Left and right are empty signifiers that became the French Revolution by totally anecdotal facts, in nodal points -capitation points- which ended up including and totaling a series of equivalences of scattered floating elements. Thus, fighting for social and civil liberties will be related to the left and the defense of security and traditional values ​​to the right.

Is it useful to classify the different ways of understanding the world? It could be said that our way of perceiving things is unique in itself and has its peculiarities. Why should we compare different ways of thinking according to certain criteria?

I don't quite understand the question (laughs). I think that academically it is useful to classify the different ways of understanding the world. I think that at the level of openness and collective inclusion it is positive to deliberate together and, therefore, argue and face two or three or four different ways of seeing the world.

It is interesting to compare the different ways of thinking because they always seek the construction, elaboration or expansion of an ideology, seeking a specific political end. It is important, at this point, to know what political ends are being sought with the different ideologies. For example, neoliberal ideology seeks to justify the benefits and perfections of the free market to justify a huge inequality in the distribution of the world's wealth. In the same way, it seeks to strengthen the powers already established. A communist ideology seeks the abolition of social classes, merchandise and wage labor so that there is a common distribution of wealth and equal access to power. Now there is something that I would classify into something like meta-ideology which would be the very instrumentalization of ideologies to perpetuate some system of power and oppression. There are many folds and many orbits around something as complex as ideology and ideological struggle.

The criteria can be diverse, identifying a specific ideology is always a complicated task, we ourselves are immersed in a determined, personal and collective ideology, and it is true that it makes it difficult to classify the rest of ideologies. In political science, an attempt is made to determine some elements that characterize one or another ideology, such as the defense of State intervention, the defense of greater freedoms or fewer freedoms, the prioritization of security over freedom or the tension between equality and freedom etc. They are criteria that are claimed scientific, although sometimes it can be doubtful. Absolute faith in science is another type of ideology.

What criteria do you consider useful to classify them? Authoritarianism, nationalism, attitude towards tradition ...

The most useful criteria are, in my opinion, the position in front of the intervention of the State in the economy, that is to say, if we are more or less agree that the state must intervene to ensure social rights, positioning in the security-freedom tension, three, the position in the material equality in front of the liberal freedom and, four, the position in the tension democracy-free market.

The values, if more progressive or more conservative, can also be a good criterion for ideological analysis. That is, if you are in favor of the civil rights of the gay communities, transsexuals, ethnic minorities, women, etc. or if a more skeptical position is maintained in relation to them.

Finally, to what extent can an ideology be induced in people in a controlled way? I am referring to the role of propaganda, the very way of life of post-industrial societies... Do you think they are tools to shape mentalities that do not deviate from a certain pattern?

Being the determining ideology for the legitimation of the established powers as well as the oppressive practices and that guarantee the privileges of certain social groups, in addition to being extremely important for theories of knowledge, since they tend to be highly induced in people. There are various State apparatuses that are in charge of this: in schools, through education, in culture, in the family or in schools. media massive there is an ideological indoctrination. Furthermore, one's own position in society and in the productive system also determines one's ideological position. Ideology is dynamic as we mentioned before and it molds and quilts in different contexts.

We live in a spectacular and ultra-mediatic society, currently the media and television screens, the computer, the camera, the smartphone - seem to be the gadgets that reveal the truths and teach us "what certain". This in itself is a tremendous ideological socialization that often guides and controls our way of thinking. Maintaining a critical attitude towards ideology forces us to criticize certain tools in which our way of knowing the truth is currently indexed. And, at present, educational, scientific-cultural devices and the media are those partial tools that teach us how to access and know the Truth. They are by no means neutral: the very distribution of the tables, chairs in the classrooms or the age separation of the different educational levels are not arbitrary, but rather ideological. This is at a very basic level because, as we all know, then there is the control of the syllabi, the way of teaching and so on. With this I do not mean that we have to discard everything and that all this would be "evil", I simply point out those ideological apparatuses that are widespread in our society. To dispute hegemonies, you have to dispute those spaces.