The Oxford Dictionary defines an abstraction as “a general idea not based on any particular real person, thing or situation.” It is “the quality of dealing with ideas rather than events,” as “something which exists only as an idea.”
We live in a world of abstraction. Modernity, effectively begun with the Enlightenment, took thoughts and ideas distilled over vast periods of time – that is, traditions, social norms, cultural institutions, philosophy, literature, law, and religion – and abstracted them into free-floating, standalone concepts torn from the real-life communities that birthed them. They became orphans.
Concepts such as progress, freedom, autonomy, emancipation, pluralism, tolerance, openness, equality, and human rights, to name but a few, were cut off from their roots, i.e. Western tradition and its associated virtues and duties. These newly abstracted concepts then took on a preeminent role as sacred aims, alone capable of paving the way to a new, felicitous future.
But it was Karl Marx who really kicked things into high gear. He and his sidekick, Friedrich Engels, promoted the word “ideology” which was meant as a direct counter to the thoughts, beliefs, and mores of the past.
Marx believed that the past had polluted society right down to our innermost thoughts, feelings, moral priorities, and aspirations. In general, the capitalist system had created a world where people were entirely captive, in thought, word, and deed, to their economic circumstances.
This meant reason, as opposed to ideology, became suspect, since its purpose was to serve the interests of the ruling class. Later this was expanded to include any belief or idea that betrays “bourgeois ideology,” that presumably lacks objective merit and represents only the biases of the powerful.
This “neo-Marxist” approach, also known as “critical theory,” is rampant in today’s academic quarters, and elsewhere. The idea is that any group perceived as wielding power, not just those owning the “means of production,” necessarily distorts reality and creates injustice and inequality premised on selfish interest.
This “privilege” may be rooted in race, class, sexual orientation, age, religion, creed, disability, or gender. No matter, it’s responsible for creating an artificial, arbitrary social “construct” that benefits the privileged alone.
It follows that there also must be a class of “victims,” those absent such privilege. They are, in effect, the new proletariat (Marx), innocent casualties of an unfair power structure. Somewhat ironically, though, given the enforced pieties of political correctness today, these “victims” constitute a new, politically “protected” class or power group.
Along with this we’ve seen a new social identifier emerge and, be it noted, a new means of political action. It’s called “intersectionality,” a diverse, self-identifying grouping of those “marginalized” by society banding together to confront all perceived oppression (which is never-ending given the imperfections of this world).
And action is the right word. Marx pioneered the belief that debate with those in power is pointless. Since their logic is distorted, based as it is on pure self-interest, only power can effect the desired outcome. For the privileged will not willingly let go of their advantage. Might is the only effective means of change.
That and ideology. Ideology, or, in this case, the economic and political directives of a future-oriented progressive cadre, must be marshalled to “raise the consciousness” of a benighted world, to force it out of its recidivistic stupor and toward the sunny uplands of enlightened thinking and being.
Ideology, it’s essential to note, is not intended to be descriptive but aspirational. For what is or has been, what some of us call “reality,” is biased and unreliable. It betrays a false consciousness. Only the aspirational ideas of the future transformation of human nature and society shall escape undue sanction.
Changing people’s thinking, of course, is not easy, since the lumpen proletariat is habituated to regressive social customs and the status quo. They simply have no vision. But the enlightened “vanguard” knows what’s best indeed and will see to it that everyone else does too, for our own good, of course.
Contemporary critical theory insists we adopt “the hermeneutics of suspicion,” a highly skeptical mindset that scrutinizes all history, ideas, and beliefs to suss out their often-hidden biases. Fortunately, if a bit miraculously, progressive ideology itself seems mercifully free from all such prejudice or preference – and thus any need for scrutiny.
And who better to find these hidden sins of the mind than the intellectual? He or she is, after all, the most knowledgeable and enlightened, in a perfect position, as Ryszard Legutko puts it, “to identify [errant] thought and then to warn against the slippery slope that leads from this thought to political domination. Sometimes this path is not perceptible to a simple mind.”
“An intellectual’s sharp eye and perceptiveness,” he continues, “will always recognize what is politically dangerous: a sentence, a metaphor, a proverb, an incorrect text on the bulletin board, a work of fiction – a seemingly little thing and yet shamelessly undermining the liberal-democratic rules.”
While I’m at it, speaking of the enforced abstractions of modernity, there’s another problem that’s very, very serious, even tragic: the loss of old communal bonds, of human connectedness. While people were liberated from old social constraints, they soon found themselves alone and without a genuine sense of community, be it family, church, even nation.
And because the latter are incomprehensible and threatening to the ideologue, they must be replaced by new modern ones.
Shorn of membership in any unified, sustaining community, the modern man or woman instead is granted, from above, a new political identity, and placed into a community that is all but abstract in nature. For example, one might be assigned the role of “feminist.”
And yet, as Legutko writes, “A non-feminist is not a woman at all, just as a noncommunist worker was not really a proletarian.”
In essence, he concludes: “Multiculturalism, an idea that has become extremely popular in recent decades, is nothing more than a program to build a society in which there exists not many cultures, but many political identities attached to many real or, more often, imagined collectives.” Identity politics, anyone?
In the end, human beings are not naturally drawn to an abstract idea. It cannot elicit our love or loyalty. It does not address our most basic need for the succor of hearth and home. Nor can it ever satisfy the human heart’s yearning for the things of the Spirit, for the God of all that is – the God who was, is, and ever shall be.