Tgk1946's Blog

From Alien Powers (Kenneth Minogue, 1985) pp172-4

This type of complex situation [shared consciousness] may be understood (as it was by Hegel) in terms of the epistemological metaphor of universal and particular. Just as a tree may be recognized for what it is only because it ‘participates’ in such universals as greenness and leafiness, so individuals are human beings by virtue of their capacity to participate in (ie. understand themselves as a part of) forms of shared and reciprocal consciousness such as families, states, churches and the rest. It is through this capacity, no less than by calculating and theorizing, that they exhibit rationality and may be distinguished from mindless and insensate things. This universal element thus defines human beings, and part of it can be codified in rules of behaviour: etiquette, rules of games, law, the regular procedures of activities like science or rockclimbing, etc. Learning these rules amounts to an education in the universal element of life. We live within a complex set of concentric universals, which ‘govern’ our behaviour. Some of these are grand and permanent institutions like states and families, others are small and relatively transient, like parties, festivals and friendships. Large or small, they may all be understood as assemblages of individual consciousness, which intersect, with luck, but never coincide. For two or more, gathered together, to be of one mind is mere hyperbole, but hyperbole none the less significant of our intermittent lust for union with the universal. The human predicament, from the ideological point of view, is that we must participate in these universals, at whatever level, but that we can only grasp them within the limitations, sometimes fatal, of an individual or group point of view. Ideology offers itself to us as the dissolution of such a predicament.

This analysis highlights certain evident problems of political life. For how is a state, the largest and most comprehensive of institutions, a veritable universal of universals, to be generated? It comprehends points of view at every level. And in this world of practice, a point of view is not merely a form of understanding, but also a propensity towards wilfulness, demanding satisfactions whose conditions may be incompatible with the satisfactions of others. How is it that the chaotic propensity of the parts does not constantly prevent the emergence of the whole?

In human history, this problem has generally been solved by the forceful imposition of a universal on the parts, initially by way of conquest, subsequently in the form of custom. Self-conscious subjectivity was inevitably relatively feeble in most parts of the world until late historical times; hence the ‘parts’ would have been families, clans and tribes. If we may, crudely, identify universal and particular with the rulers and the ruled of the state, then change generally came from the top, and it was the business of the bottom to fit into a form of life which was vividly pictured before the eyes of each generation in the practices of its parents. The universality of the pharaohs was such that each ruler was in principle a god, and indeed always the same god. For the Chinese, government was largely a ritual sustaining an unchanging perfection. In the European tradition, the idea of nature is particularly associated with a universal to which it was the duty of all to conform, and individuality was recognized as eccentric, idiosyncratic, egoistic and a threat that might unravel the precarious fabric of civilization.

It has, however, been particularly in Europe that an alternative understanding of the relations between part and whole has developed. In essence, it means that the universal constantly changes according to the inclinations of the individuals below, as those inclinations are argued out in the ceaseless talk of politics. Whereas the value of harmony was affirmed in all traditional, and to some extent in modern societies, this new form of social cohesion has embraced the ideas of competition and criticism in every walk of life: in law courts, in productive activities, in parliaments and universities, and above all, perhaps, in political talk. This new and dynamic universal requires for its actualization a special instrument, called a sovereign power, which can clarify and declare the changing universal forms of social life by amending the law; and these are then imposed upon the parts. But the universal which is actually imposed is evidently different in kind from the harmonies of traditional societies. It consists merely in a subscription to abstract rules and laws, leaving many concrete details to the judgment of individuals. This practice of generating a constantly changing universal out of the constantly changing inclinations of the members of society is what we describe as freedom in morals, democracy in government and capitalism in economic life. And it seems to me that the ideologist is right in thinking that these practices are inextricably bound up with one another. Further, whether or not they respond to some kind of natural propensity in human nature (sometimes identified with a natural desire for freedom) , they have certainly been found highly attractive by many people in a variety of cultures other than the West, where they first developed. Any development of one of these practices therefore, soon tends to elicit others.

A modern liberal civilization, which we have been describing in different terms, might thus be seen as a new and peculiarly flexible way of creating and sustaining the universal element of life which human beings require; but it might also be judged as essentially deficient. Modern societies, like all things human, contain many evils, many of them no doubt attributable to the many permitted freedoms in which human propensities to folly and vulgarity find an outlet. It is not difficult to construct, for polemical purposes, an assemblage of such evils, as an indictment not of human nature but of the very system of modernity itself. So comprehensive a rejection would seem to rest upon the same presuppositions as the traditional societies of the past: namely, that the essential goods are harmony and stability, that individual judgment threatens these goods, and that conflict, including competition, is the measure of imperfection.

There is, we have noted, some recognition that the presuppositions of ideology derive from the past: we often find the ideological future understood as a higher stage of some past model of social life, such as primitive communism, or ‘the mediaeval synthesis’. The modern world appears in these terms as an Orphic descent into individualistic negativity necessary to create the future version of a past anticipatory perfection. Ideology tends always towards such historical speculation. What is at stake here, however, can be detached from such historical speculation and posed as follows: Is a modern liberal society, as we have characterized it, a society out of control, lurching from one makeshift solution to the next in the ever vain hope of reaching the stability assumed in such expressions as ‘a better society’? Or is it, rather, a new kind of society, which has succeeded in translating conflict into a competitive game, and in which what we often decry as instability or even a crisis is better understood as the dynamism of released individual energies? There is no doubt that the activity of politics presupposes its own continuance as a necessary part of any community in which freedom will necessarily throw up conflicts and require public decisions to be made. But in ideological terms, the activity of politics is no more than a domestication of the ferocity of the struggle, and once that struggle has been resolved, it will disappear.

There is thus a considerable gulf between the ideological and the political actor. The ideologist makes a philosophical claim to understand reality, and thus demotes the thoughts and feelings of others to a level of appearance and illusion. What is at issue here is whether political activity may be judged in terms of philosophical criteria. In a modern liberal society, many varied and conflicting preferences will be found, along with many related and competing views about what is currently happening. In political terms, such judgments are the data of politics, from which will emerge, by familiar liberal democratic processes, a succession of responsive public decisions. Ideologically, however, such preferences and judgments are mere appearances to be judged in terms of the light they throw on an unfolding and independently understood reality. Without the underlying reality revealed to the ideologist, we would be lost as most people in the past have been lost – amid an endless succession of confusing appearances. But once we have understood reality, then the actual thoughts and feelings of the members of a modern society – their consciousness by contrast with their being – are valueless, for the proper source of guidance about what to do comes from elsewhere: from, in fact, knowledge of being.