I happened to read this last night, apropos:
"While the totalitarian regimes are thus resolutely and cynically emptying the world of the only thing that makes sense to the utilitarian expectations of common sense, they impose upon it at the same time a kind of supersense which the ideologies actually always meant when they pretended to have found the key to history or the solution to the riddles of the universe. Over and above the senselessness of totalitarian society is enthroned the ridiculous supersense of its ideological superstition. Ideologies are harmless, uncritical, and arbitrary opinions only as long as they are not believed in seriously. Once their claim to total validity is taken literally they become the nuclei of logical systems in which, as in the systems of paranoiacs, everything follows comprehensively and even compulsorily once the first premise is accepted. The insanity of such systems lies not only in their first premise but in the very logicality with which they are constructed. The curious logicality of all isms, their simple-minded trust in the salvation value of stubborn devotion without regard for specific, varying factors, already harbors the first germs of totalitarian contempt for reality and factuality."
-- Harrah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
Arendt has in mind of course the most extreme mid-century political instances, Nazism & Soviet Communism, but "totalitarian" is a good descriptor for ideology in general. It wants to assimilate reality to its own construction, & anything unassimilable is, on the one hand, unreal, and, on the other hand, a dangerous enemy.
But it's not always obvious where legitimate intellectual passion ends and illegitimate ideology begins.
Mark, your notorious rants against the ideologies you oppose are themselves arguably ideological, in view of the undiscriminatingly sweeping, polarizing, positions you espouse. Not a lot of reality-hungry, polarization-defusing nuance in your discourse. Rather, a seemingly consuming desire to identify the enemy.
One rather harmless but notable ideological conflict, in the context of Eratosphere, is that between Formalism and Free Verse. I have yet to encounter an argument for either of these two ideologies that does not seem embarassingly naive. It's like, in taking an ideological position, you give up your intelligence. Meanwhile, poetry gets written, one way or the other.
The idea that Environmentalism is an ideology is problematic. Undoubtedly true, in certain respects, but in this case what Arendt refers to as "the first premise" is peculiarly weighty, being a matter of scientific evidence & potential global consequences. One counter-narrative current these days is the sunspot narrative: the sunspot cycle in the sun is moving into a nadir (there ain't no sunspots) & this has always, in the past, coincided with cooling trends on earth. Do sunspots trump anthropogenerated carbon dioxide? Stay tuned....
"If you live at the Left Pole, everyone around you is on the Right." Good one. It is good work to struggle against one's own idiocy.
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