The Prism of Ideology

Says a reader:

Webster says a prism is “a medium that distorts, slants, or colors whatever is viewed through it”.

It appears to me that Marx was the first great thinker to have coined the word “ideology”. Ideology is a distinctive form of reasoning about the individual and about the individual in society. Ideology is a systematically biased mode of thinking. Ideologies vary extensively in so far as the idioms used, the extent of bias, the degree of sophistication, the manner in which bias permeates various aspects of theory, and so on.

While ideologies vary widely in certain aspects all ideologies share some common characteristics. An identifiable logical structure is shared by all. This structure includes: 1) a moral dimension, 2) it is biased toward a specific group and is biased against those out side this group, 3) an ideology cannot not directly defend it self because it rests on assumptions that have never been critically examined or even formulated, and 4) Marx believes these assumptions to be “nothing more than the intellectual ‘transcripts’ of the conditions of existence of the social group whose point of view it reflects”.

"Like viewing the world through a prism, the ideologue experiences the world in a distorted manner. “What a man does not transcend in reality, he cannot effectively transcend in thought either. The limits of his existence are the limits of his thoughts. His basic assumptions are therefore ultimately nothing but his conditions of existence ‘reproduced’ in thought.”

Quotes from Marx’s Theory of Ideology, Bhikhu Parekh

My response:

Marx is correct in so far as he is attaching a world view ("ology") to an idea ("ide-"), and that can blind us to other possibly more correct or important ideas. Better metaphors are "looking at life through rose-colored glasses" or "wearing blinders". But prisms do not distort but refract. The angle of light refraction depends on its wavelength. White light is split up into the spectrum. The spectral composition of ight can be measured by spectrometers. But there is nothing distorting about either the white light or its analysis into its spectrum of red, yellow, green, and purple. To the contrary, prismatic thinking suggests analytical and honest thinking-- an effort to accurately reflect reality by decomposing it accurately. There is nothing intrisically dishonest or harmful about animating your life with an overaching ideology, for example, the "ideology of truth" or "the ideology of safety". Nor does an ideology necesserily need a moral component or need to be directed against another group.

I don't know who this Webster is but my dictionary gives a definition closer to Philip's and even Pesla's. And this is one case where I would definitely differ with Marx. First, from my perspective we all have ideologies. Its just that some people don't like to think that because they like to think they are biased free and objective. To use the prism metaphor, I would actually say that the prism in this case can break an ideological system into its constituent parts. The ideology, in fact, produces the white light by blending the seemingly disparate parts into an artificial whole. Of course the problem with a lot of this is that the metaphor falls apart in some ways. Should the light be the blended white or broken down into the constituent parts. In fact the metaphor here could well be that the ideology of Newton was to indeed break it down into parts for study and analysis. The ideology of reductionism. However, in many ways, as I have argued elsewhere, it is the blended white light, not the constituent parts, that may actually provide the better illumination.

Another post.

Prisms distort. Curved prisms distort. Straight sided prisms distort. See Jenkins and White, for example. The ordinary physics experiment simply doesn't show that distortion.

Well, I suppose you are coming down to the meaning of words. If by distortion you mean dispersal, I agree. I also agree that on a case specific basis, there may be distortions in the prism itself. But the refracting of light per se is not a distortion of that light.

To invoke another metaphor, it is akin to a bunch of blind people with hands on different parts of the elephant, each stating dogmatically that "this tail/tusk/ear is an elephant." Or, if I can invoke yet one more metaphor, it is akin to a frog on a lilly pad, the frog saying that this lily pad and no other is the lilypad of all truth.

But knowledge is as you suggested undifferentiated to some degree, and the challenge is to analyze to understand but to recombine again to get meaning. Endless discussions over mind/body or science/religion or religion/state are a consequence of our inability to rise above allowing ourself to be as it were immersed in one color of the spectrum.