How ‘Ideology’ Can Hold Us Stuck in Place (Part II)

“Rapid innovations in communications technology and new media have made it so that any individual can access more knowledge at their fingertips than prior generations could have by traveling to the world’s most esteemed centers of learning.”

Introduction

A short time ago, I published a brief article on classical theories of ideology ranging from Marx through Mark Fisher and others. In that piece, I observed that these classical theories have much to teach us in our increasingly complex age but are, nevertheless, subject to substantial limitations. In particular, they tend to frame ideology exclusively as a tyrannical and oppressive force, which operates purely from the socio-cultural level downwards. While this may occasionally be the case, it misses a key actor in the process of becoming an ideology—in particular: the individual who comes to accept an ideologically-determined vision of the world.  It is crucial to understand how and why it is easier and more satisfying to accept such a vision than to accept the complexities inherent to reality. This sequel article will put forward two reasons for this: one related to the influx of information we experience within post-modern culture and the second speaking to a more basic human desire for simplicity.

The Information Bomb and the Retreat from Complexity

“In contemporary society and culture—post-industrial society, postmodern culture—the question of the legitimation of knowledge is formulated in different terms. The grand narrative has lost its credibility, regardless of what mode of unification it uses, regardless of whether it is a speculative narrative or a narrative of emancipation.”

Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge

We live in an era where there is too much information available for anyone to handle (discussed here). Rapid innovations in communications technology and new media have made it so that any individual can access more knowledge at their fingertips than prior generations could have by traveling to the world’s most esteemed centers of learning. This is a remarkable development, which should be applauded given that it brings with it the possibility of mass learning and interdisciplinary understanding such that we have never seen. But at the same time, this brings with it specific challenges; we live in a postmodern era where the grand and unifying narratives under which we subsumed different kinds of information have broken apart. Once upon a time, it was possible to unify scientific, moral, and philosophical facts and concepts within a comprehensive framework such as religious scholasticism, Darwinian naturalism, or Orthodox Marxist utopianism. This is increasingly difficult as these grand narratives come under relentless intellectual assault while also facing a crisis of faith amongst many believers. The consequence of both of these developments is that we now inhabit a culture where information is readily available, but we have no unifying framework in which to incorporate it.