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From Alien Powers: the pure theory of ideology (Kenneth Minogue, 1985) p118-22

6. The Ideological Revelation

1 The Character of Revelation

We have argued the ideologies neither fit, nor aspire to fit, the academic world. By a ‘revelation’, I mean a restricted body of knowledge without which we are adrift in the world. A revelation cannot be judged in terms of anything else, because it is itself the criterion of what is and what is not worthy of being known. It thus judges the world, but tries to protect itself against judgments being made upon it. Religions clearly belong to the class of revelations, but they are far from exhausting it. It is the mistake of identifying revelations with religions which so often tempts us to wonder whether ideologies, with their evidently liturgical feeling for language and their addiction to shrines, are not merely rather peculiar types of religion. The mistake is further compounded if religions are identified with ideologies. Such an identification entangles us hopelessly in unresolvable questions of similarity and difference. Religions and ideologies, then, may suitably be regarded as different species of the same genus, but they differ in very important respects and ought not to be confused. For some purposes, the appropriate genus would be that of the ‘belief system’, but from a rhetorical point of view, the revelation is the most suitable universal from which to take our bearings.

One of its advantages in this role is that ‘revelation’ covers a wide range of beliefs both systematic and casual. For example, one of the many roots from which ideology has grown is the idea that human beings are but stunted fragments of what is potential in them. Ideologies envisage a social transformation but it is also possible to canalize the same energies by way of mystical technologies, usually cultivated in small elite groups, which go by the collective name of occultism. Among the great recent practitioners of this form of revelation were Gurdejieff and his systematizing disciple Ouspensky, but over the last two centuries there has been an enormous efflorescence of such beliefs and practices, ranging from Zen and other forms of Buddhism, to Sufism, to Subud and the enormous spiritual export trade conducted by the Indian subcontinent. Sometimes these beliefs are lumped together as ‘cults’ and this is one way of understanding many of their common practices, but it rather obscures the important differences between fringe religions which are heretical developments of established orthodoxies, such as Bahha’i or the Unification Church of Sun Myung Moon, on the one hand, and occultist beliefs whose main drive is towards the power of self-development. An exploration of this theme would take us far from our argument.

We normally think of revelations as large life-directing beliefs, but there is good reason for recognizing small-scale revelations in the form of, for example, fringe medicine or dieting régimes from which some element of personal transformation is expected. The decline of a religious concern with the soul has led some people towards revelations promising bodily salvation. We may thus recognize different scales of revelation. The grander revelations, like ideology and religion, are not only extensive and complicated beliefs in themselves, but also engines for the discovery of smaller revelations in everyday life, as the dialectic of doubt and confirmation is played out in the spiritual life of the believer. Many communities are constituted in their details by the revelation they believe themselves to possess, especially on the question of man’s relations with invisible powers. In this area, all beliefs take the form of revelations. But in modern societies, revelations are supremely important because there is such a constant assertion and criticism of beliefs of all kinds that it is only by experiencing the kind of conviction appropriate to a revelation that many people can satisfactorily order their lives. It is perhaps necessary to add that in characterizing any particular set of beliefs as a revelation, we make no comment whatever on its rationality.

The most satisfactory form of revelation is presumably one that has its source in a god. This is why classical political philosophy was so preoccupied with the divine or semi-divine founders of states. The most important characteristic of what Max Weber called a charismatic personality is that it has the gift of imbuing utterances with revelatory power. To some extent this power is mysterious: it depends upon what an audience is prepared to recognize in a teacher or leader, but often there is a clear nobility or usefulness about the revelation which helps us to understand why some collection of assertions has been taken in this way. For the most basic kind of revelation is the ‘secret’ of how to perform some technical feat, and even the most sublime of revelations has a technical aspect. It enhances our feeling of power, whatever else it may do.

It is above all characteristic of revelations that they hatter those who accept them, as belonging to a superior class of person; and this feature of revelations is especially prominent in the modern world, which is, not to be too cynical about the matter, a buyers’ market for such things. This element of off-stage flattery in revelations may be described as their rhetoric of self-presentation, and it is one of their constitutive features. It helps to distinguish a revealed belief from the class of beliefs in general. It has been said of Adolf Hitler that his secret lay in persuading a whole nation that they were immensely superior merely by virtue of being what they were. Again, it is constitutive of most ideologies that their adherents believe themselves to have arrived at their revelation in the face of intense hostile conditioning by society to believe just the opposite. A feminist is someone who, against all the conditioning forces of patriarchy, has raised her consciousness to the point of recognizing the swindle for what it is, and who seeks to share her superiority with her sisters. There are clearly immense dangers to such a supplementary belief, and most revelations attempt to warn against this danger, even as they simultaneously exploit it with half-shut eyes. In the Augustinian version of Christianity, God has in his mercy chosen to save some few sinful human beings even though justice suggests the damnation of all. Augustine was insistent that human beings cannot know who are the saved and who are the damned, but he failed to prevent many in every generation of Christians from looking intently for signs of salvation. It is indeed by its rejection of the whole idea of techniques of salvation that Christianity may be distinguished as a religion from many of the cults which now compete with it.

The distinction of ideologies is to have produced a sociological theory of this rhetoric of self-presentation. Those who accept the ideological revelation make the Mosaic decision to identify themselves with the oppressed as historical agents of social transformation, and although most ideological recruitment (with the notable exception, in this case, of Marxism) concentrates upon a pool of potential supporters who are by nature clearly distinct from the rest of the population, there is in principle no natural limit to such identifications, as male feminists or White supporters of Black nationalism may testify. It is striking that Marxism is an exception here. in that it has had a great success with people who might plausibly be called ‘middle-class’ while it has not, by the test of the franchise, had much success among the workers in many, though not in all, countries. No doubt this situation changes from time to time, and there are very significant variations between, for example, the Latin countries of Europe on the one hand and the Anglo-Saxons on the other. But the point seems sufficiently clear for us to suggest that it is precisely the loose conditions of historical agency found in Marxism which may be one reason for its superiority to other ideologies.

By virtue of this rhetoric of self-presentation, revelations are always élitist. The world is divided into those who know, and those who do not, and this allows ideologies rhetorically to exploit our constantly changing vocabulary of cognitive approval and disapproval. ‘Knowledge’ itself is perhaps the greatest of these words, but at different times science, vision, enlightenment, truth, the ideas, or some other generic term of approval may be used to mean, quite specifically when in context, the doctrines of the movement, while such terms as error, falsity, illusion, appearance, prejudice, superstition, conditioning, naiveté, propaganda and much else will be used to stigmatize the beliefs of the profane. The commonest metaphors are those of waking and sleeping, and (as we shall presently discuss) of what we may perceive when the barriers to clear seeing have been removed. This vision of the truth is, however, only vouchsafed to an elite having the moral virtues courage, steadfastness and discipline which make such under; standing possible. The revelation requires sacrifices, especially of time and effort, and sometimes also social isolation, discomfort and indeed positive danger. The history of the last two centuries is, to a remarkable extent, one of excited talk among enthusiasts, in drab and dusty halls. In exchange, revelations confer the benefits of belonging to an élite, and often (in the case of most ideologies), the distant prospect of exercising power over others. The nexus of this particular feature of revelations can often be seen in such simple devices as the use of ‘comfortable’ to stigmatize the beliefs of the profane. Thus from the eighteenth century onwards, religion (and Christianity particularly) has been commonly attacked as a comfortable and consoling belief dominated by wishful thinking about a beneficent father who will make everything satisfactory in the afterlife. Agnosticism and atheism have been presented as heroically facing up to the evident truth of the human condition. Having recently achieved the status of a minority, Christians have riposted by emphasizing the muscular requirements of a life devoted to actualizing the precepts of the New Testament. This is hardly a sophisticated form of argument because one man’s comfort is another man’s nightmare; but it is significant that even in these remote rhetorical details, ideology assumes that human beings respond in a standard way.

The élitist character of revelations is in no way qualified by the fact that many ideological revelations, and some religious ones, purport to reveal an ultimate egalitarianism. All believers are humble, if we may parody George Orwell, but some are more humble than others, and what is asserted in ideological revelations is an equality strictly on the ideologist’s terms. The inhabitants of a communist state are equal only in so far as they live the prescribed communal life of the new order; sometimes, not even then. There always remains a guiding elite of believers who determine the conditions in which the rest will live. Their relation to the rest of the population is pedagogic, and the fundamental equality is entirely dependent upon the pupils’ learning thoroughly what the movement has to teach. In this respect, once more, we encounter the ambivalent relationship between ideologies and the academic world. ldeologists are teachers, and they adopt large areas of academic practice, setting up their own special schools, lectures, seminars and the like, in which doctrine may be discussed and disseminated. But the borrowings come more from secondary than tertiary education, because the ideologist has passed far beyond those essential elements of scepticism on which the practice of open discussion and disinterested enquiry in universities is based. In religious schools, which teach a revelation purportedly based upon faith, there need be no conflict with the rational practices of secular schools and universities (though in fact, of course, there often has been). But ideological revelation claims its superiority on grounds very similar to those dominant in the academic world. Reason, so far as scientists are concerned, is a set of procedures (logical argument, testing by experiment and so on), whereas among ideologists, it must become the guarantor of the revelation and thus the test of everything else. The ambivalent attitude of ideology towards academic enquiry therefore stems from quite fundamental elements of the ideological claim to legitimacy.

The converse of the superiority of the believer is the inferiority of the non-believer, and in this too, the ideological and the academic worlds are distinct. For it does not follow from the fact that a person is wrong about, for example, the causes of inflation or the nature of quasars that he is in any other way defective, and although scientists and philosophers may well abuse in private those who reject their opinions as being pig-headed, stupid, envious, conventionally-minded and so on, academic theories in no way incorporate a theory of why those who reject them are in error, because to be wrong is the common destiny of men, and any particular academic opinion is quite likely to turn out to be defective in the end. It is in this sense that academic discussion is inherently egalitarian. Indeed, one might well advance the paradoxical thesis that those who talk most about egalitarianism have usually been the least egalitarian in practice; by contrast, in the academic world, where equality is hardly discussed at all, the practice of treating others as equal is paramount. And an important reason for this is that the academic world has no theory of the extraneous causes of error. By contrast, if we ask an ideologist why it is that others reject the knowledge he has to offer, then the answer is likely to be some defect of personality or some detail of class membership. Marxists start with the certainty that the bourgeoisie will reject their revelation, because of entrapment within the structure of bourgeois interests. Feminists recognize that they will have a hard battle to convince most women of the evils of patriarchy. because patriarchal conditioning has been working away for centuries.

In general, the particularities of patriotism, religion, family background are entrapments from which the believer must liberate himself by embracing the universality, the comprehensive understanding of the revelation. But in embracing the belief, he will ipso facto be welcomed into the company of the heroic.