A Theory of Global Civilization: Rationality and the Irrational as the Driving Forces of History by Vietta Silvio

Author:Vietta, Silvio [Vietta, Silvio]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Unknown
Published: 2013-08-05T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8: Rationality and Ideology

If our hypothesis is right that the main agent behind European and global history and contemporary developments is the progress of rationality propelled by the irrational forces behind it – mainly, the greed for gold, for money, for power – then many of the idealistic motivations of history are ideologies. But what is an ideology ?

The term has several meanings. The French philosopher Antoine Louis Claude Destutt de Tracy (1754 -1836) coined the term in a sense of “science of ideas” (idéa-lógos) against obscurantism, but already Napoleon connected the term with the negative sense of a ‘wrong idea’ which Karl Marx deepened in the sense of a not necessary intentionally but inadequate or even false awareness of the real historical facts (Marx: Die deutsche Ideologie . In: Frühschriften , 339ff). Terry Eagleton in his lucid discussion of theories of ideology contradicts the Marxian notion. He believes that ideologies “cannot be assessed for their truth or falsehood. Much of what ideologies say is true, and would be ineffectual if it were not” (Eagleton: Ideology , 222). He rather regards ideology as a functional form of “discourse” which members of the ideology share and affirm themselves within it. But that is an illusion. Eagleton did not analyze ideologies, but only theories of ideology. Therefore he did not realize that the majority of ideologies are distorting reality to point that it is hard to find what ‘is true’ in them. When many Germans blamed the Jews for their misery after the lost First World War, their awareness was simply false. But the ideology of anti-Semitism helped them to shift the blame on others as ‘black sheep’ and to avoid self-criticism in relation to the historical situation. Besides, Eagleton’s argument for some truth in ideologies still clings to what he pretends to avoid, the measurement of truth and falseness of ideologies.

Ideologies are frequently used as crutches of understanding the world. But the majority of them are false instruments. They do not lead to a real understanding of reality, but only to a faked one. The more complicated reality became in the progress of rationality, the more people are looking for easy modes of understanding the complex reality which ideologies like racism, anti-Semitism, communism and sometimes even religious explanations for technical and rational processes seem to offer. The political scientist Frank R. Pfetsch defines ideology as a “set of beliefs, accepted by a larger number of people, containing values and facts, and fulfilling a political function to promote action. They contain, therefore, elements of activity oriented political thought. They thus guide and justify political action” (Pfetsch: Theoretiker der Politik, 16, transl. S.V.). Thus ideologies serve mainly three functions: Firstly , they offer a (frequently simplified) concept of understanding of a more and more difficult and intricate reality, secondly a perspective for the future and are therefore thirdly mental instruments to conduct and justify political actions.

Psychologically speaking, ideologies are frequently connected with the feeling of a moral superiority , they are therefore

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