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LETTERS FROM THE EDITOR, Ideology: As Infantalization and Resentment
Walter A. Davis  I want today to offer the first installment in a series of short essays that will attempt to analyze the condition of the United States today. The first topic on that agenda is necessarily a consideration of ideology. For ideology is as pervasive as the air we breathe and is taken in with the same apparent lack of conscious effort. Becoming aware of how deeply one has been ideologically programmed and how that programming structures the most intimate details of one’s experience is the first step toward liberation. (Also the first step in a long overdue leftist critique of the left, a topic I leave implicit for now.) To understand ideology the best way to begin is with the experience we have of it every day, experience that often goes undetected and derives much of its accumulating power from that fact.
Let me offer two examples. My yoga instructor began class yesterday with a little speech about the purpose of this practice. “To help us prosper,” she said. And then because she is a reflective person she immediately went on to qualify her remark by telling the class she didn’t mean “prosper” in the accepted way, as if yoga would help everyone become better capitalists and make more money, etc. “I mean prosper in another sense,” she added, half apologetically, indicating the great ideological transformation that defines our historical situation: the need to apologize to capitalism for attempting to restore to a word the older, deeper meaning that capitalism has degraded in forcing all words to bow before the vulgar meaning they take on within capitalism. At the end of the class the instructor made a similar mistake and the flash of eye contact between us told me she knew it. “As we do final relaxation,” she said, “try to banish all negative thoughts from your mind.” She knew what this collective mantra now means. Anything that causes one the slightest emotional pain is bad, a negative thought that must be expunged from consciousness. The environmental crisis—a negative thought. The debacle in Iraq—a negative thought. The suicides in Guantanamo—a negative thought. As Barbara Bush put it in telling Diane Sawyer why she doesn’t watch the News: “Why should we hear about body bags, and deaths, and how many…it’s not relevant. So, why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?” My second example comes from a visit later that day to the doctor’s office. He asks what book I’ve got under my arm. Berlitz’s Spanish: Step by Step. “ My summer project,” I tell him. “I figure that if immigrants have to learn English in order to become members of our domestic third world (a rung below Wal-Mart employees) the least we can do is learn Spanish.” “They all must learn English,” he replies, “I’m a strong supporter of that.” “I’ve got no objection to it,” I reply. “Yes, but you don’t understand,” he says, “It’s easy for you to learn Spanish. You’re a college Professor.” Yes, there were a few jumps in his logic. There always is when ideology so nakedly reveals itself. But let me see if I have this man’s wisdom right. No wonder we fear the influx of the hispanic hordes. The least educated of them has the ability (while working 2 jobs probably) to learn English, one of the hardest languages to master, while only high-toned college types have the mental ability to learn Spanish, one of the easiest. ( My doctor is not an exception. I’ve found empirically that an incredulous anger is the dominant response to the statement that one is trying to learn Spanish.) Death's Dream Kingdom: The American Psyche since 9-11
By Walter A. Davis
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The first example is about ideology as infantalization. The second is about ideology as resentment. Together they illustrate perhaps the two primary functions that ideology plays in the Amerikan psyche. The first is to bathe the collective consciousness in the mindless bliss of endless happy talk. The second is to feed a cruelty that is projected on anything that offers the slightest threat to one’s well-being. This is what I was trying to get at the other day in talking about the interview that Soledad O’Brien conducted with the father of Nicholas Berg shortly after the news of Al-Zarqawi’s death. Her question to Mr Berg was quite simple, a replay of the very words in which the news of the death had been announced a few minutes previously. “Aren’t you glad this man, who beheaded your son, was brought to justice.” The key, as I’m sure you all perceive, is the words “brought to justice.” That’s why a site such as MWCNews exists. The mainstream media do not give the news; they give the ideological directions on how to receive it. In this case, Orwell’s five –minutes hate. As Hegel said long ago, the daily news is the morning prayer of modern man. Unfortunately, Mr. Berg failed in his duty, refusing to echo Hosanna on cue. That’s what made what followed so interesting. An exasperated Soledad went into attack mode, telling Mr. Berg in no uncertain terms that most people were overjoyed with this news because they knew that at that very moment Zarqawi was “suffering in Hell.” In everyday life ideology works in three ways. It bathes our consciousness in messages to which it presumes we will assent. It is angered whenever its instructions are not heeded. And it will then do anything necessary to compel compliance. Don’t say it too loudly, but the previous examples offer hard-headed empirical evidence of why psychoanalytic concepts are essential to theunderstanding of what ideology is and what it accomplishes. Ideology refers to all the ways in which subjects are programmed so that they will salivate on cue to an endless stream of messages that have a single overriding purpose: to guarantee that its subjects will regulate their experience—how they think, feel, and act—in a way that reinforces the needs of the capitalist order. (1)  The mainstream media do not give the news; they give the ideological directions on how to receive it. In this case, Orwell’s five –minutes hate. As Hegel said long ago, the daily news is the morning prayer of modern man. Unfortunately, Mr. Berg failed in his duty, refusing to echo Hosanna on cue. That’s what made what followed so interesting. 
My mother taught me more about ideology than Hegel, Marx, Freud, Gramsci, Lukacs, Althusser, Lacan, and Zizek ever did. My late mother, whom I loved—the daughter of a socialist and Union organizer, a great angry red-faced man who when I was just a boy often showed me the many scars he carried on his body from his battles on behalf of the working man. My mother— who became with no effort or resistance (and that is the key to it all) a Reagan/John Paul reactionary who loved both Bushes for all they were doing to bring morality back into politics and world affairs. Because my mother, you see, was the purest product of ideology. Essentially a cheerleader, she loved it whenever she could latch onto the next mindless slogan she could repeat on every possible occasion in order to assure God and Country that she was on the right side. (That audience was for her, as it is for many, the true audience of every utterance.) Discussion always proved impossible because there was no way to dislodge the ideological need for simplistic certainties; or to get her to confront the underlying fears and insecurities that gave ideology such control over her. Over 200 years ago, William Blake wrote about the need to “cleanse the doors of perception.” His belief was that the Imagination endowed each of us with the inner power that made this act possible. History, however, changes everything. Today the only way to begin to cleanse ourselves is by perceiving how deeply we are trapped in ideology. That is, how so often we see, think, feel, and believe what ideology commands because, quite simply, we find it impossible to do otherwise. A striking example was provided by the Tony Awards Sunday night. The History Boys took all six of the top awards for drama. One could say much about this meretricious play, but the most important is the thing that the audiences who have flocked to it, sung its praises, and are now collectively gratified by the honors it has garnished are unable or unwilling to perceive. Yes, yes, indeed, it’s a comic work and so clever in its dialogue replete with learned allusions (and including one whole scene in French) and its appeal to the anglophile in us that it’s easy apparently to miss the fact that the heart of this work is a thinly veiled justification and celebration of pedophilia. I won’t burden you here with all the ways the author displaces the gravity of his subject to make his fantasy palatable to whatever “censor” (to use Freud’s term) may remain in us.(2) The unprecedented success of this play dramatizes a more important point. Namely, that the moral agency in us that judges what we enjoy is also historical—and may be the place where the deepest ideological changes take place. For to enjoy The History Boys depends on the forgetting or repression of a primary fact. The sexual abuse of the young is a national epidemic in the United States today. Moreover, the primary danger does not come from outside the family. Perhaps, without knowing it, the true pleasure of this play is the chance it gives the audience to share a warm-hearted laugh or two as it voyeuristically witnesses the representation of something displaced just far enough from perception that the audience can find mirth in what should horrify it. And perhaps that’s the deepest way ideology works in us as each day we take the next step in our long journey toward a collective inner deadening. But isn’t it pretty when Broadway too gives the cue to a standing ovation under the collective smirk “That’s Entertainment!?” As antidote I want to recommend a neglected and misunderstood film that coincidentally just came out on DVD. Running Scared. Its central scene presents a horrifying picture of the inner sanctum of the pedophilic imagination. And, in response to it, a character who takes the only appropriate action…. “But, Prof. Davis, what can this example have to do with the subject of this essay? Are you suggesting there’s some kind of connection between pedophilia and late capitalism?” Preposterous—or a question to ponder today as we fine tune our perceptions to the many ways we are awash in ideology. What I want to propose in closing is a shared research project. Write up and share with me here some experience you have today of ideology. (I promise a later essay devoted to discussion of these contributions.) These examples will help us begin together to take what has become an abstract academic concept—ideology—and make it again something we can experience every day. The task of freeing ourselves from ideology will thereby again become something that lives in us concretely.
ENDNOTES: (1) I know, psychoanalysis isn’t a science. And therefore…But then perhaps science itself is a term that is often deployed for ideological purposes, one of them being to protect the capitalist order from the kind of analysis of the Amerikan psyche that a radical psychoanalysis could offer. It’s a thought to keep in mind, especially on a left currently endorsing the reduction of all questions of consciousness and social behavior to a Darwinian paradigm enchanted with the most reductive forms of explanation. But my purpose today is not to take up the ramifications of ideology as a concept but to re-open it as an experience. (2) Works of art—especially popular ones-- are often like dreams. They stage individual and collective fantasies, using condensation and displacement to disguise and enhance desires that are thereby make aesthetically pleasing. Biographical: Walter A Davis, Editor in Chief at MWC News Contact Dr. Davis Recommend this article...
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