Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

Similar if less extreme divisions can be found in psychology, economics, political science, and sociology. With Freudians and Marxists and Skinnerians and Gibsonians and Piagetians and Chomskians and Foucauldians—and structuralists and deconstructionists and computationalists and functionalists—waging their campaigns, it is undeniable that ideology plays a large role in how these putatively scientific investigations are carried out. Is it all just ideology? While the earthquakes of controversy rage on the jagged peaks, do valuable objective results accumulate down in the valleys that can be used by any school of thought? Yes, and it is quite obvious. Researchers in one school routinely avail themselves of the hard-won results of their opponents, since, if the science is done right, everybody has to accept the results—but not the interpretations put on them. A lot of the valuable work done in these fields consists in confirming the well-gathered data (and replicating the experiments), and then showing that a better interpretation of the results follows from a rival theoretical perspective.

3 Putting ideology in its place

Ideology is like halitosis—it is what the other fellow has.

—Terry Eagleton, Ideology

Â

That’s the practical answer, but I want to consider a deeper challenge as well. (A philosopher is someone who says, “We know it’s possible in practice; we’re trying to work out if it’s possible in principle!”) In 1998, the Yale legal scholar J. M. Balkin published Cultural Software: A Theory of Ideology, a fascinating book that looks at these controversies from a biologically informed perspective. In particular, he attempts to resolve what he calls Mannheim’s paradox: “If all discourse is ideological, how is it possible to have anything other than an ideological discourse on ideology?”(p. 125). Is there—could there be—any ideology-free, neutral standpoint from which to judge these issues objectively? Just what is ideology? Not just any mistaken thinking, but thinking that is pathological or bad for us in some way. After reviewing a variety of representative (and of course highly ideological!) definitions of ideology, Balkin proposes that ideology be identified with ways of thinking that help maintain unjust social conditions.

To understand what is ideological, we need a notion not only of what is true but also of what is just. False beliefs about other people, no matter how mistaken or unflattering, are not ideological until we can demonstrate that they have ideological effects in the social world. [p. 105]

This brings into the open a major difference between goals and methods in the social sciences and the hard sciences: social sciences are not just about people (so is the molecular biology of HIV and the chemistry of human nutrition) but about how people should live. There are moral judgments implicit in the very setting of the research agendas of these fields, and although these are like the value judgments implicit in such questions as “How can we interfere with HIV replication?” (why would we want to do this?) and “How can we improve human nutrition?” (what standard do we use to measure good nutrition?), the value judgments implicit in the social sciences are less obviously judgments that every sane person would agree on. To call somebody’s thinking ideological is thus to condemn it from a moral perspective that the target may not accept. Much of the controversy is fueled, Balkin observes, by the quite justifiable fear of what he calls imperialist universalism:

…the view that there are universal concrete standards of justice and human rights that apply to every society, whether pre-or postindustrial, whether secular or religious, and that it is the duty of right-minded people to change the positive norms and institutions of all societies so that they conform with these universal norms of justice and universal human rights. [p. 150]

Certainly many people in the United States are blithely confident that this is true, and hold that it is our duty to spread the American Way to all the peoples of the world. They think that any culture that finds our message repugnant is just deeply misinformed about how things are and how they ought to be. The only alternative they can see to this is truly shocking, a moral relativism that holds that whatever a particular culture approves of—polygamy, slavery, infanticide, cliteridectomy, you name it—is beyond rational criticism. Since such relativism is intolerable, in their eyes, imperialist universalism must be endorsed. Either we’re right and they’re wrong, or “right” and “wrong” have no meaning!