Back in 2016 Amia Srinivasan published a paper tilted 'Philosophy and Ideology' focusing on a book by Jason Stanley
ABSTRACT: What is it for an analytic philosopher to do ideology critique?
It is to clarify the use of terms used by that ideology and to show how this may lead to circular arguments of other types of fallacious reasoning.
Just how useful are the proprietary tools of analytic philosophy when it comes to thinking about ideology, and in what sense ‘useful’, and to whom?
Not very useful. An alethic account of the consequences of implementing an ideology may have more persuasive force.
And to what end might analytic philosophers pursue ideology critique?
Any end they like.
Here I attempt to say something about these questions by commenting on a recent contribution to analytic ideology critique, Jason Stanley’s How Propaganda Works.
Sadly that book is stupid shit.
It is now twelve years since Charles Mills published “Ideal Theory as Ideology”, his powerful condemnation of mainstream political philosophy (Mills 2004).Mills attacks 'a distortional complex of ideas, values, norms, and beliefs that reflects the nonrepresentative interests and experiences of a small minority of the national population.' Since academics teaching useless shite are a very very small minority, his distortionary complex of ideas gained no traction anywhere.
In that paper Mills accuses analytic political philosophers of neglecting our non-ideal political realities – especially the workings of race, gender and class-based ideology – and moreover doing so for ideological reasons. Such neglect, Mills suggests, is not simply a matter of disciplinary emphasis or style, but a means of entrenching the political status quo.
Very true. If some guys teaching stupid shite to morons teach a different type of shite, the status quo will be overturned. A Black Lesbian disabled woman would become President. She will ban dicks because dicks cause RAPE!
By asking what political arrangement would be best, without asking how and why our current arrangements fall so short of that ideal, political philosophers (overwhelmingly white, middle class men) ensure that we are deprived of the tools to secure justice,
Political philosophers have super-powers. They have frequently defeated alien invasions of our planet. If only they would abandon 'ideal theory', the world would become very nice. Dicks will disappear- save when used for homosexual purposes as the Goddess intended.
all the while presenting themselves as squarely concerned with justice. Analytic feminist philosophers, most notably Sally Haslanger, have spent the last few decades issuing a similar critique, and trying to bend the energies of analytic philosophy towards non-ideal concerns.
Like curing cancer? That would be cool.
For Haslanger this is a matter of turning the tools of analytic metaphysics towards the construction of social reality, both in the familiar descriptive sense of grappling with the ontological mechanisms that produce the social world, but also in the less familiar prescriptive sense of using metaphysics to reconstruct the non-ideal into something better – something more ethical and more just.
We must send Haslanger to Gaza whose social reality badly needs reconstruction. Her metaphysical skills have given her super-powers.
Thus Mills, in his comments on Haslanger’s Resisting Reality (2012), writes that: “Haslanger is carrying out a task that should in principle be completely recognizable to her predecessors: Ideologiekritik” (Mills 2014).
But the Germans seem to have given up that type of stupidity. They prefer material prosperity to metaphysical moonshine.
The work of both Mills and Haslanger are object lessons in the value of analytic methods for thinking about questions that have been the main province of critical theorists and Continental philosophers. (Later in his comments on Haslanger’s book, Mills writes: “If this book needs to be given as a…present for those (the majority) in mainstream M&E dubious that race and gender have any relevance for their research, it also needs to be given as a…present for those (the majority) in mainstream critical and race and gender theory dubious that analytic M&E has any relevance for their research” (Mills 2014).)
I too think my books should be given as presents- to people you hate.
Their work also provides object lessons in the importance of calling oneself back, as politically engaged theorists, to the material realities of those one hopes to serve.
Not one's students then. They are welcome to eat their own shit.
But as the topic of ideology comes in from the margins into the analytic mainstream, many questions remain. Just how much can and should analytic philosophers engage with the great critics of ideology outside the analytic tradition – Marx, Althusser, Lukács, Gramsci, Adorno and Horkheimer; Beauvoir, MacKinnon, Butler, hooks and Lorde; Fanon, Du Bois, Saïd and Baldwin?
We know what can be learned from them- viz. stupidity and wholesale political nullity. On the other hand, Reagan and Thatcher taught the Soviets and the Chinese a thing or two.
The plain fact is, an ideology is only persuasive if you can point to a country with that ideology which is thriving.
What can be learned from them, and what (if anything) do they leave for us to say? Just how useful are our proprietary tools as analytic philosophers for thinking about ideology, and in what sense ‘useful’, and to whom?
Either an ideology hopes to change the world, in which case it can be evaluated on the basis of its performance, or else it can be evaluated according to aesthetic or purely logical criteria. But, in the latter case, it would make more sense to speak of it as a 'philosophy of life' rather than an ideology.
How much we can assimilate ideology to phenomena with which we as analytic philosophers are well acquainted, namely the phenomena studied by epistemology and the philosophy of mind?
This is easily done even if it requires some arbitrary judgments- e.g. differentiating 'core' axioms from heuristic devices.
Is ideology to be thought of in the familiar terms of belief, evidence, and bias, or does the existence of ideology reveal the limits of these ways of conceptualising the mind and its workings?
The former, not the latter. There are no limits to the ways of conceptualising the mind.
And finally there is the question of ends. Ideology critique – as opposed to the merely descriptive study of ideology – seeks at once to describe and change the world. To what extent is such an ambition compatible with the homelier, truth-seeking ambitions of traditional analytic philosophy?
Establishing the truth does change the world. Finding out the world wasn't flat changed the goals of Western European navigators.
And to what extent must analytic philosophy itself change through its confrontation with ideology?
It should become a type of pole-dancing- right?
Here I attempt to say something about these questions. I do so by commenting specifically on a recent contribution to analytic ideology critique, Jason Stanley’s How Propaganda Works (2015). Despite the focus of my comments, I hope that what I have to say applies more broadly to the general question of how analytic philosophers can and should talk about ideology, and to what end.
They should babble stupid shit.
As its title suggests, Stanley’s book offers an account of how propaganda works
nope. It offers an account of stuff Stanley mistakes for propaganda and his crazy theory of why and how it arises. This is why you don't see P.R mavens or the representatives of repressive regimes queuing up to buy his book.
– in particular, how propaganda works in a putatively liberal, democratic society such as exists in the United States.
The Catholic Church coined the term 'propaganda'. Sadly, it hasn't been able to use it to get out of paying a lot of money to victims of child abuse perpetrated by its priests.
But alongside his account of propaganda, Stanley aims to provide a novel (and importantly non-moral) argument for the badness of material inequality,
based on the badness of his own reasoning
and moreover to make the case that the tools of analytic philosophy – most notably of philosophy of language and epistemology – are vital for thinking carefully about ideology,
sadly, he has not mastered those tools.
power, injustice, and oppression. These two more implicit projects are, I take it, as important to Stanley as the explicit project of explaining exactly how propaganda works.
In which case his book is misleadingly titled.
In any case these two projects are the focus of my comments here. To anticipate: after I raise an objection to Stanley’s non-moral argument for the badness of material inequality, I will press what I take to be a deeper worry – that Stanley’s non-moral argument against inequality reveals his desire to produce an internal critique of American democracy, a critique that will be rationally compelling to the privileged elite. But why, I want to ask, should we care about winning over the hearts and minds of the elite?
Why not win over the hearts and minds of senile cats and cute little puppy dogs? Is it because the elite have more power to change things?
Why shouldn’t our goal rather be an external critique, or rather, an external revolution, of the kind, at least on a traditional Marxian view, that the oppressed are uniquely positioned to perform?
Very true. Oppressed people- e.g. a guy who is being beaten and sodomized- are in a unique position to gain super-powers and reconstruct social reality at the atomic level.
And, once we abandon the project of trying to win over the hearts and minds of the elite, how confident should we really be that what we need most urgently is careful analytic philosophy, rather than revolutionary politics?
People teaching this stupid shite should become Maoists and chop off the heads of kulaks. But, why not become pole dancers instead?
In brief, Stanley’s argument for the incompatibility of substantial material inequality and democracy goes like this: (1) substantial material inequality, whether unjust or just, predictably leads to the emergence of bad ideology,
not to mention bad breath. But bad breath is worth curing. Bad ideology doesn't matter anymore than bad handwriting matters. This is because ideology makes little difference to the goods or services the vast majority of people produce.
(2) the existence of bad ideology makes us susceptible to demagoguery, a pernicious form of propaganda,
What makes us susceptible to demagoguery is also what makes us fall for charismatic swindlers. This has nothing to do with ideology. We like being flattered and being told the swindler or the demagogue can make us much better off.
(3) demagoguery undermines democracy by creating epistemological inequalities.
Education and Research Institutes create 'epistemological inequality'. Different people may specialize in different types of study in accordance with the principle of comparative advantage. This creates 'gains from trade'. Democracy works better when such gains are being shared and thus voters are better off.
Thus substantial material inequality, whether just or unjust, undermines democracy.
This is clearly not the case. All extant democracies have high material inequality. All hunter-gatherer tribes have little. But they are not democracies and, over time, they tend to get slaughtered.
If successful, Stanley’s argument gives us a non-moral reason to dislike substantial material inequality, at least insofar as we are independently committed to a democratic society.
Stanley hasn't given us an argument. He'd need to be an economist to do so. All he has given us is an arbitrary ipse dixit assertion which is patently false.
There are questions to be asked about each stage of Stanley’s argument. For example, how does Stanley’s explanation of propaganda in terms of the distinction between at-issue content and not-at-issue content sit with his claim that it is bad ideology that makes us susceptible to demagoguery?
Stanley's distinction is specious. There is no way of knowing how issues relate to each other. At best one can offer a Structural Causal Model. But how is one to show that it is wholly shielded or 'air gapped' from every other System? One may say 'the posited link is conspiratorial or paranoid'. Yet conspiracies do occur. Sometimes, it really is true that everybody is out to get you. Mummy may really be poisoning your coffee.
Here we have seemingly two different explanations of how propaganda works – even two different notions of what it is for propaganda to ‘work’: one that appeals to an intrinsic pragmatic feature of natural language (the at-issue/not-at-issue distinction),
which we know can't be determined in an a priori manner. The prosecutor says to me 'your wife cheated on you. You were angry with her. That is why you stabbed her.' I reply 'I don't have a wife because I iz totes gay. Also, I don't have arms or legs. I didn't kill anybody.' The prosecutor may say 'you are ducking the question! What is at issue is your stabbing your wife. We are not concerned with your sexuality'. Still, the Jury is likely to acquit me. The fact that I never married a woman and don't have a hand with which I could stab a person is highly germane. The prosecutor's ipse dixit assertions are foolish and must be dismissed.
and another that presupposes the existence of a contingent social and political structure (bad ideology).
Bad in the opinion of a stupid shithead.
The first explanation roughly cashes out in terms of individualistic psychology,
No. It is merely a crazy assertion like 'you stabbed your non-existent wife with your non-existent hand'.
mediated through language, while the latter is a structural explanation that accounts for individual behaviour in terms of a broader (and non-necessary) social reality.
It is a false assertion that democracies have material equality when this has never been the case.
One might wonder whether these explanations are mutually sustaining, and if so how – or whether Stanley’s inclusion of the first is an instance where philosophical preoccupations come up against the phenomenon of ideology. But what I’d like to focus on for the moment is the first move of the argument, namely Stanley’s claim that the existence of substantial material inequality, whether just or unjust, leads to bad ideology.
It is like the claim that if everybody had the same sized dick then there would be no envy or jealousy and women wouldn't run away when I try to talk to them. We understand that the guy making this claim is dissatisfied with his lot in life. Other dudes who went to College with him are now billionaires. He is stuck teaching rubbish to retards.
Imagine for a moment that we live in a Nozickian society – by which I mean a society in which there is substantial but just material inequality. A minority of people have the majority of the resources, but these resources are distributed through a series of just transfers; no one has anything they are not entitled to, and everyone has everything to which they are entitled. Of course if you think that Nozick is simply wrong about the demands of justice, then you will deny that such a Nozickian world is possible – for if Nozick is wrong, he is (presumably) necessarily wrong.
No. There may be a possible world where he is right- e.g. one where everybody is a cabbage.
But such a world, even if metaphysically impossible,
nothing is metaphysically impossible
is presumably conceivable – certainly many Americans think it is not only possible but actual. So let us imagine we live in such a society. My question is this: would elites in a Nozickian world develop bad ideology?
People in a Nozickian world are likely to have a Nozickian ideology or view of the world. But they are welcome to wish everybody was a cabbage or that guys with needle-dicks gained the super-power of levitation through farting.
It’s hard for me to see why we should think they would. They would correctly believe, after all, that they were entitled to a disproportionate share of society’s resources.
which they themselves generate. If there is Public Good provision there is also likely to be a tax system. The canons of taxation require taxing immobile factors at a higher rate so as to minimize dead weight loss. Sadly, this might mean smart peeps who can move to a different country at the drop of a hat end up paying less one way or another.
Stanley might be right that the elites in such a society would be strongly attached to this true story, that it would be part of what made them feel content with the status quo, but that’s not the same as saying that such elites would be attached to a legitimation myth about themselves.
She just said it wasn't a myth. If you are attached to a true story beneficial to yourself, that is what you are attached to.
Now, on Stanley’s notion of ideological belief, any belief that is resistant to counter-evidence – any belief that lies near the centre of one’s doxastic web – counts as ideology.
Stanley forgets the Moscow show trials. It turned out that people would readily believe that the guy wo was praised as a hero of Soviet Labour yesterday had in fact been a Capitalist saboteur all along.
But that rules in too many items of knowledge as ideology: my belief that I have hands, that 2+2=4, that my mother loves me, all count as ideology on Stanley’s schema.
Not really. We don't refer to these things as knowledge.
To avoid the implication that much mundane knowledge is politically harmful, Stanley argues that it is only bad ideology that makes us susceptible to propaganda and undermines democracy. So the question is: is the true belief of the Nozickian elites that they are entitled to their resources an item of bad ideology? What could make it bad? Perhaps we might say: if an unjust inequality arises in our Nozickian society, the elites will likely not realise it, since they are attached to the view that the current distribution of resources is just. But then we are back where we started: elites are bad at recognising unjust inequalities, and this undermines democracy. But what we were after is an argument that shows us that even just inequalities undermine democracy.
We can easily get to such an argument by invoking 'information asymmetry'. Poor people may know more about what keeps them poor than the median voter. Thus democratic Social Choice is 'throwing away information' because of high inequality. This is like the Chichilnisky theorem re. a 'Goldilocks condition' for preference and endowment heterogeneity for both markets and collective choice. Sadly these two cretins don't know mathematical econ.
In other words, I’m worried that Stanley’s non-moral argument against inequality doesn’t work.
Because the man is stupid and ignorant. Economists have long known Chichilnisky's result. Politics is about Social Choice which in turn is about information aggregation and incentive compatibility. It isn't about stupid faux Marxian shite.
If there is substantial unjust inequality – and I take it there’s plenty – then it’s plausible to think this will predictably lead to bad ideology, in turn undermining the epistemological preconditions of democracy.
The precondition is being able to identify voters and ensure there's a ballot box near where they live or work. If you can conduct a census, you can have democratic voting.
That argument might very well still stand. But I don’t quite see how Stanley can make the stronger argument that even just substantial inequality – were it possible – undermines democracy. For if the inequality is not unjust, it is not clear why elites require a legitimation myth to sustain it, rather than just a clear-eyed appreciation of how things really are.
Why not admit that 'ideology' doesn't matter? Maybe, during the Great Depression, people needed the thing but Keynesian demand-management showed there was an easy enough fix for 'underconsumption' crises (which were actually triggered by bad monetary and fiscal policy).
I want to say something more general about the ambition to provide a non-moral argument against inequality.
Study Economics. You will find such arguments there.
Novel arguments against inequality are of course politically most welcome, and there is a pragmatic benefit in identifying arguments that do not target the intrinsic moral badness of inequality. In the US for example, the argument that inequality undermines economic growth will certainly be more compelling to some ears than the claim that inequality is in itself unjust, or predictably leads to injustice. So I am sympathetic to the thought that there is something politically worthwhile in making the case that inequality undermines democracy through a purely epistemic mechanism.
Not epistemic but 'information aggregation mechanism'. People who study philosophy, not Econ, end up stupider than shit. On the other hand, Econ Professors are as thick as Philosophy Professors. But this is because a good economist can get rich and do much more good than even the best philosopher- unless the dude is a mathematical genius.
But how far will such an argumentative strategy take us, and what it is its place in politics more generally? It seems to me that Stanley’s motivation for offering such an argument is that he wants to be able to offer an internal critique of American society – that is, he wants to show those who are putatively committed to democracy, but sanguine about massive inequality, that they are on unstable ground.
Because the oppressed will rise up and cut off the heads of the rich- right?
Stanley wants to expose the internal contradictions within putatively democratic but highly unequal societies. It is for this reason, I suspect, that Stanley wants to articulate an argument against inequality that doesn’t rest on any substantive moral premise. But I wonder, and this is a genuine question about politics – what it is and how to do it well – whether what we really need is such an internal critique.
Nobody needs any of the shit these shitheads pull out of their arses.
I wonder, in other words, whether Stanley’s project isn’t constrained by its implicit desire to appeal to elites.
No to mention people who have dicks. Dicks cause RAPE! Ban them immediately!
If Stanley’s argument against inequality does turn out to assume that substantive inequality is unjust – if it turns out to rest on moral premises after all – is that such a bad thing?
Not if you are up front about your Religious or Ethical beliefs. Still the claim is arbitrary though, no doubt, a good writer could make it persuasive. Stanley and Srinivasan, sadly, write like shit.
The argument won’t get a grip on many elites, yes, but is that the litmus test of our political theorising, of our ideology critique? I will return to this general question shortly: that is, the question of whether Stanley’s project is too closely focussed on the possibilities of the elite position, and too little focussed on the political possibility to be found in the position of the oppressed.
Don't talk to people with the power to change things. Talk to the guy being beaten and sodomized. He may gain super-powers and reconfigure social reality at the molecular level.
To get there I want first to turn to what Stanley has to say specifically about the epistemological situation of both the elite and the oppressed. To explain why the elite develop and sustain bad ideology, Stanley draws on the resources of social psychology – the elite, he says, exhibit the kind of motivated reasoning known as ‘identity protective legitimation’.
Which is what these psilosophers are doing. They pretend that they can have a big political impact with their warmed up sick from the Seventies.
Again I’m curious about Stanley’s motivation here. Why do we need such a psychological account –
because we are dealing with people not cabbages. Peeps have psychology. Deal with it.
that is, the sort of account that is useful for explaining the maintenance of belief in the face of overwhelming counterevidence? The presupposition seems to be that the elite are constantly having to do battle with counterevidence to their bad ideology;
we all have to do battle with counterevidence to our conviction that the world revolves around us
that the world as it presents itself to the elite consistently threatens their self-conception; that there is something not only deeply but superficially precarious about the elite worldview.
Which is true. The elite wonder why bad stuff is going down in Ukraine and Gaza when they recall having said at Davos that no bad stuff should go down anywhere at all. Also, Biden wants to raise my fucking taxes! Maybe the Donald wasn't so bad, all things considered though my maid servants may have to go out of State to get their abortions.
I make the distinction between superficial and deep precarity of the elite worldview because I share with Stanley (and Marx and Beauvoir) the view that most oppressive ideology, whether anti-democratic or capitalist or patriarchal, masks deep contradictions, not least because capitalism itself, as Nancy Fraser reminds us, requires the anti-capitalist space of the patriarchal home to function (Fraser 2014).
Amia noticed that her daddy didn't sell off her maidenhood to the highest bidder. But it is unlikely any such thing would have occurred if she'd been brought up by her widowed grandmother instead. On the other hand, she'd probably have been forced to become a Doctor or an IT maven or something useful of that sort.
But for thinkers like Marx and Beauvoir, these contradictions do not make capitalist or patriarchal ideology superficially vulnerable. Capitalist ideology – the view that everything, labour included, is to be understood in terms of exchange value rather than use value – is not subject to an onslaught of counterevidence.
This is nonsense. Capitalism has a Utilitarian ideology. There was such a thing as a 'Marginal Revolution'. Exchange value is about the equalizing of Marginal Utility and Marginal Cost on open markets. Marx didn't have a theory of services- including those spouses provide but it is easy enough to give an economic account of the domestic sphere. My memory is that Galbraith made a stab in that direction some six decades ago.
For this ideology is shaped by and shapes the material world, such that, from the perspective of the bourgeoisie, everything just is exchange value. Thus Marx writes in Capital that from the bourgeois perspective, the sphere of capitalist exchange is “in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man,” where “alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property” .
The guy was being sarky.
He goes on: Freedom, because both buyer and seller of a commodity, say of labour power, are constrained only by their own free will. They contract as free agents, and the agreement they come to is but the form in which they give legal expression to their common will.
Marx didn't like Trade Unions. Also, he didn't get the Georgist argument for higher taxes on property income. Still, he firmly believed in 'to each according to his contribution' till scarcity disappears by techno-magic.
Equality, because each enters into relation with the other, as with a simple owner of commodities, and they exchange equivalent for equivalent. Property, because each disposes only of what is his own… Each looks to himself only, and no one troubles himself about the rest, and just because they do so, do they all, in accordance with the preestablished harmony of things, or under the auspices of an all-shrewd providence, work together to their mutual advantage, for the common weal and in the interest of all (ibid 492)
Marshall read Marx and Lasalle but lead the Marginalist Revolution in the UK. Pareto was a deeper thinker. His 'power laws' are what you need to focus on if you are interested in reducing inequality so as to have better information aggregation for social choice. This turns out to have a lot to do with targeting.
Similarly, while Beauvoir (1953) thinks there is a deep contradiction at the heart of patriarchy – namely, that men posit themselves as radically free subjects but are dependent on women-as-objects to achieve that subject-position – she does not think that men are constantly confronted by this contradiction.
Yes they are. My big contradiction is I like eating but don't like doing the washing up.
From the male perspective, women are objects, and not only because they see them as objects, but because women have been made into objects.
Many women have been made into ergonomic office chairs. I keep trying to liberate them but am arrested by the police.
In other words: once we confront the full force and power of oppressive ideology – its embeddedness in material and practical reality – do we really need to explain its sustenance in terms of individualistic psychology?
My lawyer explains that my psychology is seriously fucked up. I was 'off my meds'. I try to explain to the Magistrates that women are being used as office furniture. Strangely, they let me off with a fine and on condition that I attend a Psychiatric day centre.
No doubt psychological phenomena like confirmation bias, wishful thinking and motivated reasoning have some explanatory role to play. But isn’t the simpler, more structural explanation of why elites hold onto their elite ideology simply that their experience of the world, rather than resist their cherished selfconception, everywhere confirms it?
It is also an explanation to why men hang onto their dicks. Experience confirms that they are useful to pee out of. Still, if you are going to be sent to prison, pretend you are transgender. Seriously, getting ass raped is no fun at all.
This is not to deny that there is something contradictory or perverse in the ruling group’s worldview. Theirs is a limited perspective, one that does not get them onto the way things really are.
Men don't understand that it is perverse to hang on to your dick. Cut it off immediately.
But there is also a sense, for Marx and his followers at least, that the world of the ruling group is all too real
like the world of dicks. I used to get lots of dick pics when my handle was 'Honeytits Cumbucket'. What? I was trying to pass myself off as an Iyengar at that time. Honeytits is a traditional Iyengar name.
– the material reality of capitalist exchange, for example, constantly re-enforces the capitalist outlook that everything is fundamentally a matter of exchange rather than of use-value.
There is no such 'outlook'. Utility is 'use-value'.
Analogously, it is not that men must constantly do doxastic battle with the overwhelming evidence that women are their equals;
A guy may think this on his honeymoon. Then baby comes along and suddenly you realize women are superior in every respect. You are lucky if baby prefers you to the puppy dog but that luck will run out. The pecking order is, first Mummy, then the kids, then the cat, then the dog, and finally, poor old Dad.
rather, the material reality of the sex situation constantly speaks to and confirms male superiority. Similar things, of course, could be said about the ideology of racial superiority.
Not in my presence. Sadly, people think I am a drunken thug rather than a smart Iyengar.
. If for Marx and his followers like Althusser and Lukács the ideological position of the oppressor is not merely a matter of bad ideology – that is, bad ideas – but also a matter of matter, of material, then how is emancipation from bad ideology even possible?
By killing those who have it or who look like they might develop it or, more simply, Jews of any type.
Marx’s answer, famously, was that we shouldn’t look to the capitalist oppressors for emancipation. Rather, it is the proletariat who are uniquely positioned, epistemically speaking, to recognise the contradictions within capitalism.
Sadly, they were even more uniquely positioned to stop having babies like crazy and thus ceasing to be proles. The word means 'the class of people whose only service to the State is the bearing of children'.
And for a Marxist feminist like Hartsock, it is women who are uniquely positioned, epistemically speaking, to recognise the deep contradictions of patriarchy (Hartsock 1983).
Just as dying people are uniquely positioned to recognize the deep contradictions of living and dead people are even more uniquely positioned to get buried and eaten by worms.
In each case – that is, in the case of the proletariat and in the case of women – it is their special relationship to material reality that is affords them this ‘double vision’.
Similarly, a baby is more uniquely positioned to prove the Reimann Hypothesis because it has 'double vision'- probably because its gripe water has too high alcohol content.
The proletariat sells its labour to produce objects essential to human life, and so is able to see through the bourgeois illusions that labour is just another commodity and that all value is exchange value.
The farmer sells his produce which is essential to human life. He sees through the Communist illusion that killing kulaks will raise agricultural output. Then, because he is a kulak, he is killed. Famine follows. Suddenly, the proletariat realizes it has been fucked in the ass.
By analogy, women have a special material relationship to the means of reproduction – through their traditional role in childcare and the domestic sphere – and are thus uniquely situated to see through patriarchal ideology to the genuine conditions of human flourishing.
But babies have an even more special material relationship- indeed, they will try to eat anything they get their grabby little hands on. For this reason, the revolution will be led by militant babies- unless Mummies catch them and change their nappies and give them to Daddy to cuddle. This proves that Mummies are the biggest counter-revolutionary force on the planet.
Thus the proletariat and women see doubly: first, the world as given within oppressive ideology, and second, the world as it really is.
Babies see the world triply. First as the world as given where Mummies oppressively prevent them putting anything they can grab into their mouths. Secondly, the world as it really is- i.e. one where Daddy is the low man on the totem pole. Thirdly, the correct way to prove the Reimann hypothesis is to try to eat Daddy's textbook.
Stanley reserves the last two chapters of his book to explore the ideology of the oppressed as opposed to the oppressors, with particular attention to the question of false consciousness. He wants to address Michael Rosen’s challenge to offer a mechanism whereby the oppressed continue to believe a false ideology that goes against their interests (Rosen 1996).
The answer was that they only pretended to believe whatever shite kept them out of the torture chambers of the secret police.
But Stanley tells us far less about what he thinks about the Marxian view that the oppressed, while no doubt suffering from false consciousness, are also uniquely positioned to detect the contradictions within the status quo.
Small children detect contradictions all the time. Fuck all, they can do about it.
This classic Marxian view stands in tension with Stanley’s claim that those who command fewest resources are most epistemically oppressed, that is, least in a position to know things that are vital for political emancipation.
It is true that a poor man does not know which lobbyist to hire to get Parliament to pass a law proclaiming him King Dong. Also he doesn't have the money to pay the lobbyist. I'm not saying this is what happened to me. It's the sort of thing which could happen to anybody.
Elsewhere Stanley has argued for an interest-relative view of knowledge, according to which whether one knows some proposition turns on what’s at stake, practically speaking, in the context at hand (Stanley 2005).
But this may not be conscious knowledge. You may not know how you do what you do.
In short, the more it matters to you whether you’re getting onto the truth, the harder it is to know the truth.
Why? If you are getting onto the truth- e.g. getting on to the road which truly will take you to your desired destination- you will sooner or later be able to know you are on the true path because you can see your destination getting closer to you.
If there’s relatively little downside to your getting the answer wrong, then it’s relatively easy to know the answer.
Nonsense! There is no downside to my being wrong about what sort of underwear you have on. But I don't know what it is. Indeed, it would be impossible for me to find out because I don't know who you are.
In How Propaganda Works Stanley doesn’t argue for interest-relativity. He thinks it’s enough to assume (as most epistemologists do) that something bad typically happens, epistemically speaking, when one is in a high stakes situation.
We are in a high stakes situation each time we cross the road. But nothing bad happens, epistemically speaking, to almost all of us almost all the time.
On the other hand, in New Delhi, I had to hire an auto to get across the highway which separates my parent's house from the metro station. You had traffic in both directions on every lane of that highway. I still have nightmares about it.
Perhaps, he says, one doesn’t lose justification when the stakes raise, but even so one might – as a purely psychological matter – lose confidence, thereby stripping away one’s knowledge. Or one might retain one’s knowledge, but still be thought not to know by others, precisely because it’s so important to one that one is right. I want to suggest that Stanley is mistaken here: that it really does matter whether knowledge is sensitive to stakes or not in the kind of cases we’re discussing.
My elderly parents had no difficulty crossing that highway. Why? Long years of living in Delhi, meant they had expert knowledge of crossing the very broad highways in that City. There is nothing similar in the part of London where I live. It wasn't the 'high stakes' but my lack of local knowledge which caused me to shell out money for an auto to cross the road.
We might all admit that as a psychological matter people are wont to lose confidence (and thus knowledge) in high-stakes situations, or that people are wont to be treated by others as not knowing in high-stakes situation. But still, it matters crucially, I want to suggest, whether the oppressed can retain their knowledge even when the stakes go up.
The oppressed don't have the knowledge of how to stop being oppressed.
Suppose a woman knows she has been sexually harassed by her boss.
But she doesn't know stuff she can use to blackmail him into turning over a new leaf and promoting her to the management cadre.
She is encouraged by a friend to take legal action. Suddenly the stakes are up.
No. The stakes have altered in her favour. Her lawyer might get her a big pay-out.
It really matters to this woman that she’s right: not just for the legal outcome, but for her sense of self, her sense of the righteousness of her protest.
Maybe the lawyer can win a class action suit or otherwise secure a 'pattern and practice' investigation followed by 'consent decree' based reform. Julia Roberts might play this lady in a movie based on her life.
According to the interest-relative account that Stanley supports, this woman no longer knows that she has been sexually harassed once the stakes are sufficiently high. By contrast, according to the sort of hard-nosed epistemic externalism I’m inclined to favour, so long as the woman is reliably tracking the situation – so long as she really is sensitive to the sexual harassment that she experienced – then, assuming she doesn’t lose her nerve, she continues to know that she has been sexually harassed, no matter how much scepticism or gaslighting she encounters.
Moreover, if sexual harassment has caused her to become an ergonomic office chair, then I will receive great praise and acclamation for liberating her. My conviction for trying to steal office furniture will be overturned. Julia Roberts will make a movie about my life. Actually, she already has. Pretty Woman was based on my experiences as an external auditor in Thatcher's Britain. Truly, it was a fate worse than death. It was then that I began to empathize with ergonomic office chairs. Also I have a bad back but can afford to buy one of those fancy leather and chrome ones you see on TV.
This seems to be to be the right thing to say, both in terms of my intuitive judgment about the case, but also in terms of what sort of epistemology we want for politics. It seems right to me, both theoretically and politically, to say that this woman continues to know that she has been sexually harassed, and that indeed she continues to act rationally when she pursues her protest.
More particularly if her name is actually Vivek Iyer and she has been unemployed for many decades and is off her meds. Did I mention that Mrs. Thatcher raped me with her eyes back in 1982? I did? Well that's all right then.
In other words, it seems right to me, both theoretically and politically, to say that oppressed people can have substantial epistemological advantages over their oppressors.
Why stop there? Why not say they have soteriological advantages- they will go to Heaven where they can watch their oppressors having red hot pitchforks shoved up their bums. Also, oppressed peeps gain super-powers and can fight off Galactic invaders.
This takes us to what I see as a serious question in political epistemology: how to strike the right balance between getting onto the genuine epistemic injustices that are wrought by oppression – of the kind that Miranda Fricker (2007) has most notably written about – and vindicating the thought that the oppressed are, in virtue of their oppression, positioned to see what others do not.
Joe Biden crawls into their beds at night and drains them of their vital bodily fluids.
Though both these impulses must be respected in an adequate political epistemology, my own instinct is to go far more Marxian than Stanley does.
Marx was an economist. A shit one- it is true- but an economist nonetheless. He didn't think oppressed peeps have super-powers.
Perhaps this is because of our different views of elite ideology. While Stanley seems to think that the elite are constantly battling counterevidence to their ideological worldviews, and thus are at least theoretically capable of ideological reform, I’m tempted to be far less optimistic.
Elites are shit. They don't know nuffin. All knowledge is available to oppressed babies.
On the other hand, I’m far more optimistic than Stanley about the epistemological resources available to the oppressed. Stanley sees the oppressed as epistemological victims, and the elite as epistemological miscreants who might still be reformed – whereas I see the elite position as one of near hopeless epistemological perversity,
Rich peeps will burn in Hell. The meek will inherit the Earth. Amen.
and the oppressed position as the only genuine site of epistemological hope.
Which is why we should appoint oppressed babies, like Amia, as Chichele Professors
Of course, Marxists and Marxist feminists never thought that the epistemic privilege of the proletariat or women amounted to automatic access to the truth about political and social reality. As both Marx and Hartsock respectively emphasise, the proletariat and feminist standpoints must be achieved. By this they do not mean simply that the proletariat and women must overcome false consciousness in order to achieve revolutionary consciousness. Of course they do mean this. But they also mean that the proletariat and women must achieve their enlightened standpoint through political revolution. And it’s to the question of revolution that I would like to now, finally, turn.
Amia failed to stir up a revolution in Amrika. So she moved to Youkay. If a Punjabi can be Prime Minister why should an Iyengar be this country's Lenin?
In the conclusion of his book, Stanley anticipates a possible misreading: namely, that he dismisses or ignores the “importance of social movements in articulating and acting against inequalities and injustices of various sorts” (2015, 292). Stanley wants to underscore the importance, as he sees it, of “human agency, carefully crafted appeals, consciousness-raising of various sorts and at differing levels….cultural and artistic innovations and aesthetic challenges, years of human labor, blood, death, suffering, dreams, direct collective action” (ibid 293). And yet Stanley rightly wants to remind us how often political efforts are coopted by and subsumed under the reigning ideology – how the supposed completion of a fight for justice often masks ongoing injustice. The constant invocation of Martin Luther King amongst defenders of white supremacy is an obvious case in point.
This is utterly mad. Does this nutter really think the Aryan Brotherhood invokes Dr. King?
In all this I think Stanley is right, and I want to be careful not to misrepresent him in just the way he anticipates. But still I want to ask: why not revolution? Why the lingering hope that the elites will come to their senses, will see the contradictions between democracy and inequality, and change their oppressive ways? As I’ve already suggested, I think part of the answer lies in Stanley’s fundamental optimism about elites, for all his serious criticism and evident contempt. This is what motivates, I earlier suggested, his desire to formulate an internal critique of American society – a critique that will reveal to elites the tension between their democratic aspirations and their embrace of inequality. But perhaps there is also Stanley’s optimism about philosophy at work here.
Why not simply come out and say the dude is white and, worse yet, has a white penis? It is obvious this is causing his 'bad ideology' such that he thinks elites have brains and can know stuff and that philosophy needn't be utterly shit.
It would be really nice for philosophers – at least those of us who care about injustice and oppression – if what was needed was better and more careful argumentation in order to rationally persuade ourselves out of bad ideology: if we as analytic philosophers had just the right hammer for the nail.
It doesn't occur to this cretin that only a person who was utterly fucked in the head would teach worthless shite- more particularly if she cared about injustice and oppression which are much more in evidence in her ancestral homeland than some posh university campus.
I’m not saying that philosophy has little or no effect on political reality. It’s a very difficult thing to say, after all, just how political change happens,
Not for me. I know how and why political change in India and the UK and the US occurred. This is because I'm an economist.
and without knowing that, it’s hard to know what role philosophy might and should play in that change.
Philosophers could concentrate on mathematical logic and then shift over to doing something useful along the lines of Voevodsky.
But I fear that the thought that what we need, politically speaking, is analytic philosophy – and in particular the tools of analytic epistemology and philosophy of language – is one more legitimation myth of which we should be suspicious.
So, Amia recognizes that she and Jason are part of the problem. Why aren't they running amok cutting off the heads of Capitalists? The answer is that they are cowards.
After all, it would be convenient for us as professional philosophers not only if our somewhat peculiar skills turned out to be essential for the pursuit of justice, but also if it turned out that the use of those skills could render political revolution, especially violent revolution, unnecessary. For, if the revolution did come, surely many of us would have much to lose.
There you have it. Philosophy is useless. Woke Philosophy is a useless fraud. Guys who go in for it are hypocritical bastards. Oppressed babies will conduct a Revolution any day now. Dicks- including invisible Capitalist Cocks- will be banned. Amia will move into Bucking Palace as the People's Commissar of Engyland.
In her footnotes, Amia writes-
Roughly I favour a view according to which epistemic justification is simply a matter of whether one’s belief is a product of a reliable or safe mechanism.
No such things can be known to exist a priori.
According to this sort of view, justification cannot be defeated by higher-order misleading evidence.
Only in the sense that nothing can defeat ipse dixit nonsense.
While I am inclined towards this judgment – namely, that knowledge in such a case is sufficient for rational action – there is a substantial and difficult question here. One might think for example that the woman in our case could very well continue to know (despite the high stakes) that she has been sexually harassed, but nonetheless think that these high stakes deprive her of the capacity to rationally deliberate on this knowledge.
The high stakes in question may be that she has to return to the lunatic asylum. It may indeed be the case that she knows the potted plant touched her bum but it may be difficult to prove the potted plant was her boss because she does not have a job.
When I say that it’s both theoretically and politically right to say this, I mean first that my straightforward epistemological intuition in the sexual harassment case is that the woman continues to know that she has been harassed, despite the high stakes, and second that there is something politically attractive in being able to say this.
Why stop there? Why not find it politically attractive to say everybody is being sodomized by evil capitalist dicks? What makes things worse is that those dicks are INVISIBLE. Marx would have been totes against such base buggery. Beauvoir may have been cool with it. Seriously, the French love suppositories. I wonder why.
Of course there is a substantial metaepistemological question here about the extent to which political considerations such as these ought to play a role in epistemological theorising.
Also, there is the question as to the advisability of running around the campus with a radish up your bum shouting 'Down with invisible Capitalist Cocks which are sodomizing everybody!' I mean, it's the sort of thing people are used to at Oxford, but it would be frowned on at the LSE.
I won’t try to settle that question here, but will simply note that at least on some metaepistemological views – I’m thinking in particular of the sort of metaepistemological pluralism according to which there are various concepts of justification appropriate to different contexts, as well as an ameliorative approach according to which we can favour a particular conception of justification on practical grounds – there might very well be room for such political considerations in one’s epistemological theorising.
More particularly if being 'woke' or 'politically correct' will get you promotion because you are a darkie without a dick.
For those who are wary of allowing political judgments to enter into their epistemological theorising, I simply invite them to consider their firstorder intuitive judgment about the sexual harassment case.
We have no 'intuitive judgment'. We want to hear the facts of the case.
That is to say, I think that epistemic externalism and Marxian standpoint epistemology are natural bedfellows.
Kantorovich did claim that he had solved the Marxian question of value. Then he was reminded that Marx said this can't be done under 'developed Socialism'- i.e. the guy was contradicting Brezhnev. Still, he got a Nobel.
thus are at least theoretically capable of ideological reform, I’m tempted to be far less optimistic. On the other hand, I’m far more optimistic than Stanley about the epistemological resources available to the oppressed. Stanley sees the oppressed as epistemological victims, and the elite as epistemological miscreants who might still be reformed – whereas I see the elite position as one of near hopeless epistemological perversity, and the oppressed position as the only genuine site of epistemological hope.
Why not simply say 'the rich are damned. The poor will rise to Heaven.' ?
Of course, Marxists and Marxist feminists never thought that the epistemic privilege of the proletariat or women amounted to automatic access to the truth about political and social reality. As both Marx and Hartsock respectively emphasise, the proletariat and feminist standpoints must be achieved.
After which things turn to shit very quickly. There may be a Paradise for the poor and virtuous after death. But Marxism created Hell on Earth. Third Wave Feminism tried to create chaos but it failed. Why? It turned out ordinary women can do kray kray better than some shithead with a PhD. Men may admire a bloke who tells grotesquely stupid lies. Women feel they can do a better job of it themselves than any of their sisters. They truly are the superior gender.
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