Reading Byung-Chul Han last month inspired me to try listening to some philosophy podcasts. Most of the podcasts I listen to I treat like white noise, something to occupy half of my brain while I do dishes or try to fall asleep, but for once I feel like I’m actually retaining some information. I started off with What’s Left of Philosophy, a show where four academics discuss various modern and historical philosophers through the lens of leftist/communist politics.
I was surprised to discover that, according to this podcast, the problem of “the price system”—that is, how we could efficiently allocate resources without resorting to some kind of money-like substance—is still thoroughly unsolved by present-day Marxists. For all the discourse you see about how money is fake and markets are bad, I sort of assumed that someone had already come up with a few banger options for how to get rid of those things, and that we were all just waiting for The Revolution™ so we could implement them. But so far it seems like no one’s come up with any serious alternatives besides the old fully-planned economy thing (which hasn’t gone super well, historically speaking).
Speaking of leftists, I’ve been having a lovely time hanging out at Woodbine lately. In case I haven’t yapped your ear off about it already, Woodbine is a volunteer-run, anarchist-inclined community hub, which hosts weekly dinners on Sunday at 7pm, and provides a few other services for the community (a food pantry, a small library, makerspace, etc). [If you want to come check it out, I’ll be there next on July 28!] I was talking to another irregular attendee about why secular community spaces like this tend to become, in their words, “so political”. A lot of us emerging adults are desperate to find some kind of community structure to ground ourselves in, or at least for a third space [def] that doesn’t make you to pay money just to be there. For millennia, we satisfied our spiritual need for in-it-togetherness with faith groups, local traditions, and perhaps most critically, with the spontaneous material interdependence sparked between people living on the edge of subsistence. Alas, most of us modern middle-class urbanites abhor the trappings of organized religion, and we get our material needs satisfied by Amazon & GrubHub rather than neighbors or friends. We look to athletic clubs, meetup groups, and intentional community spaces like Woodbine as a potential oasis of fellow-feeling. Why, then, do these ostensibly-secular community organizations often end up getting so politicized? Well, because they’re not actually secular.
“Wait, it’s all ideology?” 🌎👨🚀 “Always has been.” 🔫👨🚀
No matter what kind of organization you’re talking about, some kind of ideology was undoubtedly baked into it from the start. By ideology, I mean a set of contingent, illusory beliefs, and the rituals or practices that reinforce them.
For example, on the American left we generally say that all human lives are equally valuable, and that all people deserve equal opportunities to succeed. Call this “egalitarianism”. Our rituals are things like political correctness, affirmative action, demonstrations/protests, and more recently, social media activism. On the right, there is the contrary belief, sometimes explicit and sometimes implied, that certain people—“real Americans”—are better or more deserving than others. Call this nationalism, racism, whatever you like.
Egalitarianism and nationalism are both ideologies based on supernatural presuppositions: for the former, that all human lives are equally important, and for the latter, that [white] American lives are especially important. There is nothing essential to the nature of the universe that makes either of these assumptions objectively true. As far as I can tell, no human lives are important to anything in the universe except for other humans (and maybe our pets). The rocks and trees don’t care, and the whales would probably prefer that we all fuck off and die, thanks.
Ideology is baked into everything people do, we just use different words for its various manifestations. We call traditional faith-based ideologies “religions” (Christianity, Hinduism, Islam), while new-fangled ideas are branded “politics” (anarchism, communism, plus the aforementioned egalitarianism and nationalism).
Meanwhile, the predominant ideologies of our time are so enmeshed in the social fabric that they’re all but invisible to us—things like consumerism, individualism, and meritocracy. Working in service of these concepts isn’t perceived as political or religious, when in fact I think it’s both. We put faith in the notion that accumulating wealth and objects will make us happier, despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary. What is that if not dogmatic belief in the supernatural? We make a political choice when we pursue personal meritocratic success, usually by ignoring the plight of those less lucky than we are. No one bats an eyelash or calls you “political” for prioritizing your career, though.
My own ideological journey started as a religious one. I was raised in a Muslim community, and for pretty much believed whatever my elders told me about the nature of reality. I dutifully recited prayers, grumpily fasted during Ramadan, and feared God’s wrath if I refused to comply with His will (I cried for a whole day when I learned about hell, and that I might go there if I didn’t stop lying about eating cake icing straight from the can).
As I got older I started reading more science and philosophy, and it got progressively harder to square Islamic metaphysics—heaven, hell, angels, objective morality—with the portrait of reality these books painted. Between the ages of 12 and 14 I gradually lost faith in God, the afterlife, all of it. I became a materialist: someone who thinks that the universe is made entirely of physical stuff, matter and energy. I wasn’t a hard-core atheist, I just I saw no evidence of anything that wasn’t potentially explainable by the interactions of particles and waves. Souls and deities were at best useful abstractions, guideposts for meaning-making, and at worst harmful delusions.
But losing my religion hardly made me non-ideological. Materialism is just as much a matter of faith as Islam. The assertion that everything is made of matter is just as unfalsifiable as the claim that there’s an invisible angel on your shoulder keeping tabs on you for the Big Guy In the Sky. [Equally unfalsifiable is my earlier claim that the rocks and the trees and the whales don’t care about us. For all we know the rocks are alive and love us dearly. Why I chose to believe in a frigid, unsympathetic universe is anyone’s guess.] When I stopped praying, fasting, and stressing about my immortal soul, I refocused on my worldly exploits, working to become a better artist, student, employee, instead of a better Muslim. This is ideology too: the belief that any of those things—beauty, intelligence, material or social success—matter in the first place. Besides materialism, I was seduced by the ideology of meritocracy (or put another way, the “achievement society”, which Byung-Chul Han loves to loathe).
This isn’t to say that all ideologies are equally valid or useful (useful as in “good for human flourishing”). I do think nationalism is largely garbage, at least in the modern context. (It blew my mind when I learned that, in the latter days of European feudalism & empire, nationalism was this sexy new thing that all the Progressive Intellectuals were into. Like, what if we self-organized based on our local language & cultural identity, instead of just letting the Holy Roman Emperor tell us what to do? So progressive, wow!)
Meanwhile, I think materialism is pretty legit—a lot of useful stuff has been discovered and invented as a result of the rise of materialism (and its sexier cousin, positivism [ty JM for teaching me about positivism]). Religions have accomplished some useful things too, of course. Universities started out as monastic schools, and giving people a framework for meaning making and community building surely must be at least as important as inventing the refrigerator. But however useful or destructive, we should acknowledge that every ideology requires at least a grain of belief, some irreducible core of faith to function, whether that’s faith in the inherent meaningfulness of human life and activity, or a nihilistic faith in its absence.
It takes weird people to do hard things
So wait, what did that 900-word screed on ideology have to do with people at Woodbine being “so political”? [Probably not much—I’ve just been reading Žižek so I got ideology on the brain.] Well, I think it’s practically a given that the people who start & sustain experimental communities like Woodbine do so because they have strong beliefs about how the world might be changed for the better. They’re trying to build something that doesn’t have a clear blueprint, which doesn’t fall within the scope of our leading ideological forms, and thus isn’t well supported by our economic system.
This all leads to them being perceived as highly ideological—“so political”—but all it actually means is they’re not centrists. Their politics are abnormal; weird. Compare this with someone founding a new church or business, the two most common types of community you’ll find in American society. It’s still hard to do, but churches and businesses are thoroughly subsidized & sanctioned by our laws and tax code. If you’re determined enough to eschew those ready-made blueprints when starting your community/commune/compound, you’re almost some kind of left-wing weirdo or outlier who takes their “politics” extremely seriously. (Right-wing weirdos and outliers are of course also a thing. What do you call a right wing commune? Settler-colonialism? Homesteading?)
[In case you’re confused about why I keep putting quotes around the word “political”, I’m doing this to distinguish between the perception of certain people as political (“political”) and my assertion that literally everything we do (or don’t do) is a political (political) choice. Most of the time our implicit politics are perfectly compatible with the status quo, so they don’t register as “political” to other people. (I’m getting to that point where you say a word too much and it stops meaning anything. POLITICAL POLITICAL POLITICAL POLI)]
In case it isn’t obvious, I am not disparaging these so-called “political” people. I actually think they are, pound for pound, the coolest people on earth, and I aspire to be a bit more like them every year. On July 4th I had a conversation with some friends about whether or not vegans are cool or cringe (it was actually more of a shouting match, as our best conversations invariably are). I was solidly on team “vegans are cool” (despite being nowhere near vegan myself), because I take vegans at their word that they actually care about animal welfare and/or the environment, and they aren’t just abstaining from eating the most brain-meltingly delicious foods on earth for social clout (this was the claim of the person I was arguing with [you know who you are (also I love you)]). Being a vegan for clout seems counterproductive when almost everyone in the world finds them annoying. If and when they are annoying, it might be because 1. they’re surrounded by people who feel ideologically threatened by them, and 2. they’re committed to a societal transformation that’s almost certainly impossible to achieve in their lifetime.
We feel threatened by vegans and other “political” people because their existence exposes the dissonance between our words/beliefs and our desires/actions. We say that we like animals and say we care about the environment, but vegans are the only ones walking the walk—and that’s pretty sick, IMO. [Why am I not vegan, then? I am simply not a good person.] At the end of the day, I think disparaging others for being “political” is usually just a way of complaining that they refuse to shut up and accept the status quo, and a way of forgiving ourselves—better, more objective, more “normal” people—for actually being mostly fine with the status quo. (This isn’t to say that the behavior of “political” people is never performative, status-seeking, or outright counterproductive. Those are absolutely real things… but let’s save that for another essay.)
OK, so what do we do with this?
Ideology is inescapable. There’s no point pretending that you can be perfectly objective about everything (as I did for many years). You’re still going to end up taking for granted, as demonstrated by your innermost desires and gut-level intuitions, a lot of the values that you were force-fed in your developmental years. Even if you rebelled against your parents and everything they stood for (as I did for many years), I guarantee that whatever alternative belief system you adopted was just that: adopted. You didn’t derive your secular humanism from first principles. You got it from movies and books and friends and mentors who collectively incepted you with the idea that secular humanism is pretty cool.
Instead of trying to scrub ourselves clean from the stink of ideology, I think the best we can do is to just be as intentional & wide eyed as possible about choosing which beliefs we cling to, and which we discard. Whatever we choose will be just as illusory and supernatural as anyone else’s—but at least they’ll be ours.