How Propaganda Works by Stanley Jason;

Author:Stanley, Jason;
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2015-10-10T16:00:00+00:00

5

IDEOLOGY

Undermining propaganda is a claim that is presented as embodying a political ideal, but that is in the service of the kind of goal that tends to undermine that ideal. What this means is that the success of undermining propaganda depends on two things. First, it depends on people having beliefs that are resistant to the available evidence, the evidence that reveals the tension between goal and ideal. Secondly, since undermining propaganda conceals a contradiction of sorts, the beliefs that are resistant to evidence must themselves be flawed in some way.

In this chapter, I will spell out a characteristic way in which beliefs are resistant to evidence. The philosophical puzzle of ideological belief has always been to explain how we could come to have beliefs that are resistant to evidence in this way. It is the philosophical puzzle at the heart of, for example, David Hume’s philosophy. For instance, the philosophical puzzle raised in “Of Skepticism with Regard to the Senses” is not, as is sometimes thought, external world skepticism. Hume does not view external world skepticism as a philosophical puzzle. The philosophical puzzle is rather that as soon as we reflect upon our belief in external things, we realize that it is inconsistent with the available evidence. But we nevertheless continue to believe that external objects exist. The philosophical puzzle Hume takes himself to be addressing is this: why is our belief in external things resistant to rational revision in light of available evidence? The purpose of “Of Skepticism with Regard to the Senses,” is to answer this question. Why we have a class of beliefs that are peculiarly resistant to evidence is one of philosophy’s traditional questions.

The cases that tend to interest philosophers are ones in which the source of our inability to rationally revise a belief is some kind of confusion or error. Thus, the most puzzling cases of ideological belief are what I will call flawed ideological belief. In the case of “Of Skepticism with Regard to the Senses” the flaws that explain our ideological belief in external things lie in individual psychology. But in the cases of central interest to us in this book, they lie in society, in the form of social injustice. Hume devotes “Of Skepticism with Regard to the Senses” to explaining the mechanisms by which a certain kind of flawed individual psychology inevitably gives rise to flawed ideological belief. I am engaged in a structurally similar project, except my concern is with flawed social structures, rather than flawed psychology. The goal of the next two chapters is to explain the mechanisms by which flawed social structures give rise to flawed ideological belief.

David Hume’s interest in “Of Skepticism with Regard to the Senses” was to explain flawed ideological beliefs, the source of which lies in flaws in our individual psychology. His explanation for why we cannot revise what he regarded as the flawed ideological belief that there are external things is that we cannot change the flaws in our psychology that necessitate possession of that belief.

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