A letter on the page opposite on July 12th, from Prof Brendan Walsh, of the Department of Economics at UCD, caught my eye.
"My dictionary," he wrote, "defines 'ideology' as 'the set of beliefs by which a group or society orders reality so as to render it intelligible'. Why, then, has it become a term of abuse in Ireland?"
The letter was intriguing because it stated something generally unacknowledged, but also because its question is an old one in the academic circles within which Prof Walsh moves. There are libraries filled with deconstructions of ideology, and barely a significant philosopher, from Marx to Barthes, who has not contributed. Considering that the chief conduits of ideology into the stream of everyday life are media and academia, it strikes me that the question, asked by a leading academic in a leading newspaper, is either disingenuous or naïve.
The more ideological our environment becomes, the more we deny its nature. I remember, when little more than a teenager, a week-long Irish Times series by, I think, Olivia O'Leary, entitled "Ideology in Irish life", journalism to have you standing on the railway platform at 5 a.m., scanning the skyline for the paper train. Nowadays, "intellectuals" are invited to describe their favourite beaches, as though the major questions had been settled.
The word "ideology" has indeed become a term of abuse. I use it so myself - ideologically - to place opponents beyond the Pale of common sense, whenever I want to paint myself out of a corner and am too lazy to argue anymore.
As Terry Eagleton put it, ideology, like halitosis, is what someone else has. The word, of course, has multiple meanings. Prof Walsh proffered one, but my dictionary gives several others, including: "An idea that is false or held for the wrong reasons but is believed with such conviction as to be irrefutable". Usually, when we accuse someone of being ideological, we suggest that they are seeing the world though the screen of a fixed system of thought, whereas we, of course, deal in "reality".
In seeking to defend the innocence of ideology, Prof Walsh chose a definition that presents reality as a natural state of affairs, which ideology simply seeks to "order". He was not so much suggesting that his own world view is uncontaminated by ideology, as that ideology is a neutral tool in the description of "reality".
But this "reality" is the progeny, if not the accumulation, of the prevailing ideologies.
Prof Walsh is therefore arguing from within an "ideology of objectivity" - implying that the systems of thought he employs are simply aids to the comprehension of an objective actuality, whereas they are actually, so to speak, its very substance.
We all, similarly, believe that our arguments derive from a state of nature, uncontaminated by systemic thought, an impossibility in a world whose very essence resides in its colonisation by thought-forms trapped in prisms of language. Daily, our newspapers and broadcast news programmes repeat and affirm the dominant ideological themes that hold our society in its present shape. If you object to this being called "ideological", it's because you support these ideologies to the point of perceiving them as the natural order.
Most "news", for example, tells us nothing new: in the same way as a hotel offers the same breakfast every day, it simply repeats what we already know to be "true", renewing our sense of its "absolutivity".
Prof Walsh correctly implies that ideology is not necessarily pernicious. The problem is not that we adopt constructs with which to assist our apprehension or articulation, but that we "order" these into hermetically-sealed positions. The best answer to his question that I have come across is to be found on pages 190-192 of Vaclav Havel's Letters to Olga, the collection of letters he wrote to his late wife during the years he was imprisoned for refusing an ideological prescription.
Havel wrote that he had always rejected the idea of a "complete, unified, integrated and self-contained" belief system, because "I simply don't have the internal capacity for it". What he has is faith: "a state of persistent and productive openness, of persistent questioning, a need to 'experience the world' again and again".
He explained that what he called "the Order of Being" is multiform and elusive, and "simply cannot be grasped and described by a consistent system of knowledge".
His solution? "\ kind of 'parallelism' or 'pluralism' in knowledge . . . Of eclecticism I have no fear whatever; such fears can only bother someone who is unsure of himself, who does not believe in the steadfastness of his standards of plausibility or precision, in his own reason and its natural continuity, quite simply, in his own identity.
"The more slavishly and dogmatically a person falls for a ready-made ideological system or 'world view', the more certainly he will bury all chances of thinking, of freedom, of being clear about what he knows, the more certainly he will deaden the adventure of the mind and the more certainly - in practice - he will begin to serve the 'order of death'."