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DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197646700.001.0001
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CONTENTS
Preface vii
Acknowledgments xi
PART I. GROUNDWORK
v
vi Contents
Notes 311
Index 337
P R E FA C E
I began writing this book before the 2016 US presidential elections, before the
terms “fake news” and “alternative facts” were coined, and before the further,
ever-continuing escalation of America’s ideological civil war. What prompted
the book was not any particular political development but, as all intellectual
ventures should ideally be, a deep sense of wonderment; wonderment at the
way people tend to be wholly enclosed within their ideological frames and en-
tirely deaf—indeed, react with total rejection and hostility—to arguments
and claims about the world that come from the opposite camp, no matter how
valid they might be. Ideology consists of cherished normative prescriptions as
to what is just and how social reality should accordingly be shaped, together
with an interpretive roadmap indicating how these normative prescriptions can
be implemented in the real world. Ideological fixation is the result of the ever-
present tensions and conflicts between our normative wishes and interpretation
of reality. I have always been intrigued by this phenomenon and by the built-in
biases and gross errors in the understanding of reality it breeds.
I am an Israeli, a citizen of a country that since its inception has experienced
profound existential concerns and ideological divides. More remarkably, after
social theorists around 1960 proclaimed the “death of ideology”, ideological
divides and clashes have re-emerged with renewed intensity throughout the
world. Currently, they include not only the challenges to liberal democracy
presented by illiberal and non-democratic China and Russia or by fundamen-
talist and jihadist Islam, but also deep cleavages and all-pervasive antagonisms
in the liberal democracies themselves. In the United States they have become
particularly acute and venomous. The zeal of the opposing sides is often scarcely
less than that which characterized the religious ideologies of old, or that which
prevailed between the great rival ideologies of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries: liberalism, socialism, and fascism. The other side is widely viewed
as malicious, irrational, or downright stupid and, often, as barely legitimate.
vii
viii Preface
People are strongly predisposed to regard their own camp as both patently right
and righteous, while viewing the other side as malevolent and willfully wrong.
In my experience, the prospects of bringing even the best and the brightest—
particularly the best and the brightest—on either side of an ideological divide to
critically examine their camp’s dogmas or consider the possibility of even a par-
tial validity of some of the other side’s arguments are very slim indeed. That those
who express the opposite claims are identified with the other side is enough to
close ears and minds. In this dialogue of the deaf, the arguments simply do not
register and are received with a mixture of contempt and rage.
Ideologies, and hence ideological clashes, antagonism, and fixations, are as
old as civilization itself. During most of history, ideologies were mainly religious,
whereas during modern times they have taken the form often described as “sec-
ular religions” or “religion substitutes”. They have always served to legitimize so-
cioeconomic and political orders, or have projected alternatives to them. The
ideological mode of interpreting and relating to the world, as well as ideological
fixations, seem to be intrinsic features of the human mind. In his book Thinking,
Fast and Slow (2011), psychologist Daniel Kahneman has suggested that the
human mind has two basic systems of operation: the first and more common
relying on simple cues and heuristics used to arrive at split-second decisions;
the second, far slower and more deliberate, is occasionally resorted to when
a more systematic analysis of complex problems is called for. The ideological
mode of thinking may belong to a third category. It involves highly complex
interpretations of and emotional-behavioral reactions to the world, for which we
rely on ready-made and deeply internalized templates to produce instant, reflex-
like attitudes and propositions.
This book is not a survey of past and present ideologies. There are many such
excellent surveys on the market. Instead, it is an attempt to understand the cog-
nitive, emotional, and social roots of the ideological phenomenon: why we are
so prone to—indeed, are captive of—the ideological mode of thinking. To find
the answer to this riddle, the book combines insights from evolutionary theory
regarding the nature of some of our deepest proclivities with a sweep through
the great drama of history, from the Stone Age, to the rise of civilization, to the
present. Ideology has been the subject of prodigious study over the past century
or so. Scholars and publicists have emphasized both ideology’s indispensable
role as a compass guiding large-scale action and the application of social visions
in the public arena and built-in biases and dogmatic, zealous rigidity in the in-
terpretation of reality. We hope to take the inquiry of both these aspects a step
further. Reversing Marx’s famous saying (himself both a pioneering theorist and
victim of ideological fixation): I have little faith in the ability to change this deep
human propensity—my aim is to understand it.
Preface ix
In the first part of the book we lay the groundwork by undertaking to deci-
pher, first, what truth is—does this concept have a meaning, or is everybody
equally entitled to his or her facts; and, second, how we are to understand mo-
rality, our vivid and deeply emotive normative coloring of the social world. Both
questions have been the source of profound confusion, resurfacing with great
public fanfare in the intellectual discourse of the last decades. I think you may
learn from, and enjoy, this part a lot. However, if you are less interested in these
profound questions that have preoccupied both philosophers and ordinary
people throughout the ages, you can safely skip these preliminaries and jump
right to the second and third parts of the book and into the great ideological
divides and fixations of the past and present.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Friends, colleagues, and other dear ones read parts or all of the manuscript and
made very helpful suggestions. Alex Yakobson and Peter Berkowitz stand out in
their dedication and contribution. Innumerable corrections and improvements
were offered by Uriel Abulof, Yitzhak Benbaji, Eyal Chowers, Julie Cooper,
Tomer Fadlon, Daniel Finkelshtein, Jonathan Gat, Meir Litvak, Udi Manor,
Yotam Margalit, Tamar Meisels, Dan Schueftan, Yossi Shain, Uriya Shavit,
Omer Solodoch, Alberto Spektorowski, Daniel Statman, Asher Susser, and Yoav
Tenenbaum. My editor Dave McBride excelled in navigating the book through
the process at Oxford University Press. I am grateful to them all. Needless to add,
I alone am responsible for the faults of this book and for the views expressed in it.
xi
PA RT I
GROUNDWORK
1
What Is True?
(Though Never the Whole Truth)
When I originally wrote this chapter, the phrase “alternative facts” did not yet
exist. However, the questions underlying it—what is true, is there truth—are
among the most profound questions that have preoccupied humanity since
the dawn of civilization. The nature of truth needs to be clarified prior to any
discussion of ideology, ideological differences, and ideological fixation. In this
opening chapter we argue that while the skeptical tradition concerning the ex-
istence of truth, from antiquity to present-day “postmodernists”, has a point,
and a highly significant one, this point has been vastly overdrawn. Truth about
reality—properly understood—is a very meaningful notion, and not everything
is equally true, or true at all. We begin with some elementary and familiar stuff,
at least to those with a little knowledge of the history of thought. So the more in-
formed readers are asked to exercise some patience as we progress in this chapter
from the basic to the more advanced.
In a very deep sense, we live in a world of our own making—the world
that exists in our mind is largely a product of that mind. This is the conclusion
reached by millennia of philosophical reflection and centuries of modern scien-
tific discovery. Thus, people see only a limited section of the spectrum of colors,
from red to violet, and are blind to anything on the infrared and ultraviolet
spectra. Our hearing is similarly restricted to a limited tonal range on the spec-
trum of vibrations, roughly between 20 Hz and 20 kHz. Moreover, color and
sound themselves are regarded within our current understanding of the world
as mental renderings that exist only in the mind, of physical properties of the
world (waves, particles) that impact our sense organs. The seventeenth-century
philosopher John Locke called such mental representations of reality, which also
include products of our other senses such as smell, taste, touch, and heat-chill
“secondary qualities”. If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does
it make a sound, or only create vibrations? Much the same applies to objects’
Ideological Fixation. Azar Gat, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197646700.003.0001
4 Ideological Fixation
physical extension and solidity, Locke’s “primary qualities” that supposedly be-
long directly to the objects themselves, irrespective of our sense perception. We
inhabit a perceived world of solid objects of roughly our own size range, and be-
come aware of the infinitesimal world of elementary particles and the vast spaces
that separate them, as well as of the imperceptible size of the universe beyond
the observable heavens, only by means of instruments that extend our senses’
reach and by inferences beyond sense perceptions.
Different organisms have different senses and sense perceptions, tuned to
the different physical features that constitute their relationship with their en-
vironment. Hence they experience different images of the world. Selecting an
especially alien example, philosopher Thomas Nagel has illustrated this point
in an article that stimulates the imagination: “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”1
The ancient Greeks, who almost miraculously raised all the big questions that
would preoccupy humanity through the ages, made pretty much the same point
millennia ago. The Greek school of skeptics, confounded by the elusiveness of
our sense perceptions and the limitations of our concepts, cited as examples the
differences in their inner experience between men and a variety of more or less
alien creatures, from frogs to bees to shellfish.2
If our perception of the outside world turns out upon reflection to be different
from the transparent one-to-one mirror that we instinctively feel it is, what then
is the relationship between reality and our mental representations of it? What
part of the picture of the world that we carry in our heads comes from reality it-
self and what part is contributed by our own sense organs and mental processes?
How can we separate the two, the “objective” from the “subjective”, and tell what
the world is really like? Aristotle defined error and truth in the following com-
monsensical way: “To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is
false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true.”3
Plato had articulated a similar definition.4 This is known as the correspondence
theory of truth: a correspondence between our ideas and realities in the world.
But in what way do ideas, which are mental phenomena in the mind, correspond
to real things outside? What barriers exist between the two, and what kind of
bridges allow us to cross between them? Each of these questions has turned out
to be a monumental puzzle and the subject of intense contemplation from the
ancient Greeks on, as well as outside the Western tradition, to the present.
We shall touch on some of the main points in this intellectual journey as suc-
cinctly as possible. First, how do we know that the image of the world in our
mind actually represents a reality outside? In dreams, we get along pretty well
in an imagined reality. Maybe our lives are similarly just a dreamlike illusion.
Plato thought that the connection between the world of our senses and reality
is so distorted that we are like people eternally locked in a cave with only faint
shadows of reality projected on the wall opposite them.5 From antiquity on,
W hat Is Tr ue? 5
some Buddhist schools have taught that reality is an illusion, something like a
big dream. In the seventeenth century, René Descartes, setting in motion the
train of modern philosophy, focused his search for secure knowledge of the
world on this fundamental problem. He concluded that God, whose existence
he thought he had proved a step earlier, would not conceivably play such a dirty
trick as to deceive people that they lived in a real world rather than in a dream.6
Unfortunately, we tend to regard both the existence and benevolence of God
as less straightforward than did Descartes. Indeed, in the early eighteenth cen-
tury, philosopher George Berkeley, an Anglican bishop, evidently viewed God’s
work very differently from Descartes. He argued that there was no material re-
ality and that the world actually existed only as ideas in the minds, a view known
as idealism.7 In his Critique of Pure Reason (1781), philosopher Immanuel Kant
conceded that we could not really know the world “in itself ”, beyond what our
senses and perceptual tools presented to us. He consoled himself with the view
that knowledge and certainty are at least secured in the world of phenomena as
experienced in our mind, precisely by virtue of the fixed features of the mind’s
sensual and perceptual apparatus that imprint all experience. This line of thought
has been taken up by the philosophical school known as phenomenalism from
the late nineteenth century on. After all, there appears to be no conceivable way
that we can step outside ourselves to check what reality is beyond our inner
world of sense perceptions.
Ordinarily, we find doubts regarding the reality of the world futile. In the
eighteenth century, Dr. Samuel Johnson, famous, among other things, for his
wittiness and commonsense wisdom, responded to Berkeley’s denial of the
existence of a material world by vigorously kicking a stone, saying: “I refute it
thus.”8 Our world seems very real and solid to us—most of the time. But how
can we tell for sure? Who has not felt sometimes that the reality we live in is elu-
sive and perhaps deceptive? The hugely successful Hollywood movie The Matrix
(1999), which portrays a simulated world created by artificial intelligence to de-
ceive the people who are locked in it, has become an often-invoked metaphor, a
modern equivalent of Descartes’s problem, Plato’s cave, and the Buddhist world
as an illusion. Thus, the often-made claim, amusingly illustrated by Dr. Johnson,
that nobody truly believes—let alone actually acts on the belief—that the out-
side world is not real may be generally correct; and yet it is not a refutation of the
skeptics’ fundamental doubt, because it is precisely the vividness and cage-like
nature of the world as a possible illusion that is the issue. “Commonsense” and
our immediate sense perception are no help either, because even seemingly self-
evident sense perceptions, such as the apparent flatness of the earth, the move-
ment of the sun around it, and, indeed, colors, turn out to involve perceptual
illusions of some sort.9 On the other hand, empirically well-supported scientific
theories can be so counterintuitive and non-commonsensical as to cause Albert
6 Ideological Fixation
Einstein (whose own relativity theory is far from intuitive) to rebel against the
implications of quantum mechanics, despite its huge predictive success. Nor
do the amazing achievements of science and technology constitute, in and of
themselves, a refutation of the skeptic position, as they too apply to the world of
phenomena that we perceive—the world as it appears to us. The laws of nature
themselves may be part of a dreamlike illusion of an outside world.
Thus, as almost everybody who has concerned himself with this problem
agrees, it is not possible to refute the skeptical doubt regarding the foundations
of our entire picture of the world. In a strict sense, the overwhelming majority
of humanity holding that the world outside us actually exists—a view known as
“realism”—assumes or believes this proposition because, given the world’s con-
creteness in our mind and our existential need to live and survive in it, it is more
natural and it appears more plausible to take that position where no substantial
evidence for the opposite view exists. The formal systems of logic and math-
ematics enjoy a higher level of certainty only because they are taken to reflect
forms of the mind rather than beings in the world.
Therefore, contra Descartes, our knowledge of the world rests from its very
foundations not on certainties but on assumptions or beliefs that seem more
plausible given the other elements of our worldview. The same applies at every
stage up the edifice of our knowledge, as more and more assumptions are added,
based on the same criteria. Indeed, the problem of reality and of our comprehen-
sion of it concerns not only the actual existence and nature of the world but also
the status of every individual statement about it.
The intrinsic interdependence of the various elements of our worldview was
first pointed out by the Greek skeptics. It puzzled them because it suggested that
there were no foundational, self-evident facts on which everything else we think
we know about the world could be securely based.10 This may be taken to mean
that human knowledge is arbitrary, circular, and relative—as to some degree it
is. In the spirit of Greek philosophy in which the Roman elite were schooled,
Pontius Pilate sophisticatedly responded to Jesus’ profession of truth with the
words: “What is truth?” ( John 18:38). And the Roman philosopher-emperor
Marcus Aurelius wrote skeptically, albeit less cynically: “Remember that all is
opinion.”11
The view that our knowledge of the world is not certain in any absolute sense
has become commonplace from the second half of the twentieth century. Some
of the period’s most influential analytical philosophers, such as Willard Quine,
Wilfrid Sellars, Donald Davidson, and Hilary Putnam, incorporating older phil-
osophical traditions, have argued that our picture of the world is based on beliefs
that are judged more plausible given the weight of the evidence and all the other
interrelated elements of our worldview, a view known as “holism”. These include
the best methods of observation and more persuasive explanatory theories
W hat Is Tr ue? 7
is also an ostensibly simple concept that actually covers great internal diver-
sity)? Moreover, how do we distinguish them from the entirety and continuum
of being? As “holistic” philosophers have argued, all our concepts of “objects”
are only partial abstractions extracted from their innumerable deep connections
with the rest of the universe.
Indeed, many of the questions that we have seen with respect to “objects” ex-
tend to what we perceive as “actions” and other “connections” and “relationships”
between “objects”. We focus on, and in this way isolate, particular connections
that we perceive as “causation” and other relationships that are of interest to us.
But as the Greek skeptics long noted, in this process we do not notice, or we set
aside, the innumerable connections and interactions existing between the things
that are irrelevant to our particular interest or perspective at a given moment, or
ever.14 This is despite the fact that ultimately everything is supposedly connected
to everything else in infinite ways.
The realization of these sorts of puzzles drove the Greek philosopher Cratylus
to a desperate conclusion, which he allegedly adopted in practice. He felt that,
given the unresolvable limitations of our conceptual tools and comprehen-
sion of the world, one best serves the truth by keeping silence and not uttering
a word, as any speech is necessarily inaccurate and incomplete and therefore
distorts reality.15 We find Cratylus’ plight and existential decision amusing,
not only because we do not ordinarily pay much attention to the constraints of
our strongly intuitive system of concepts, but also, or mainly, because we give
practical life and the needs of human communication a vastly greater priority
over the idealistic quest for an unattainable absolute accuracy and comprehen-
siveness. Furthermore, in a more reflective mode, we look at the full half of the
glass and are in awe at the magical stuff that fills it and serves us so amazingly in
comprehending and coping with the world. Rather than keeping silent, we may
better serve our understanding of what is truth by paying the closest attention to
how our cognitive and conceptual system works.
Assuming that the world outside us does exist and that we need to live and sur-
vive in it, it is not possible for our necessarily finite cognitive system to compre-
hend reality in its entirety or totality. Such an ability was traditionally reserved to
God in the Western tradition, and has survived in some strands of metaphysics
in what philosopher Hilary Putnam—echoing Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous
“death of God”—has called (and dismissed as) “God’s eye view of the world”.16 As
already mentioned, in the absence of infinite comprehension, we use an ingen-
ious shortcut by focusing on and conceptualizing features of reality—objects,
actions, connections, and relationships—that best serve our more general or
momentary needs and interests. Our conceptual tagging system functions as a
shorthand or translation code that converts the infinity of the world into finite
concepts and conceptual grids. Every ostensibly simple concept, such as a tree
W hat Is Tr ue? 9
that exist within each concept when such differences become relevant. Human
history can be regarded as a process in which we develop increasingly abstract
conceptual symbols and grids that appear more distant from the “tangibility” of
objects, but at the same time enable us to condense and simplify a complex re-
ality and in this way also manipulate it more effectively.
Therefore, unlike the greater certainty, precision, internal coherence, and
comprehensiveness of the abstract, empty frames of logic and mathematics
that our mind projects onto the world, our concepts of reality cannot presume
to capture the fullness or totality of the objects to which they refer. Instead,
concepts are usefully used as frames or boxes in which we arrange in an orderly
manner features that are similar enough according to some intellectual or prac-
tical criteria. Concepts abstract, in effect flatten, differences and diversity. They
cover, encompass, a range—coding infinity into finite forms.
understandable that it has been developed in all directions to call into question
metaphysical and metahistorical “grand narratives”; undermine other cherished
narratives of all sorts; expose subjective tendencies behind them, including the
“hegemonic” interests of the powerful in society; and claim validity for a diver-
sity of points of view. It has thus spread like fire in the humanities and social
sciences and has been celebrated, sometimes excessively. For unless one adopts
the belief that reality is all in the mind, the world we experience is a composite
of our subjective mental apparatus and input from the objective world outside.
While the two are difficult to isolate and separate, the latter is as present as the
former. Therefore, although Nietzsche famously wrote that “There are no facts,
only interpretations”,19 perspectivism cannot mean that everything is equally
true, or true at all. Indeed, the concept of truth is perhaps better clarified through
the concept of error. Simon Blackburn’s Truth: A Guide (2005), one of the best
introductions to the subject, takes this line, which I wish to develop further.
We begin with an example. The answer to the question of what and who caused
World War I remains contentious and problematic to this day. When asked what
he thought the judgment of future generations on this question would be, the
indomitable French prime minister during that war Georges Clemenceau re-
portedly retorted: “They will not say that Belgium invaded Germany.” As long
as we assume that there is no devil or illusion that confuses us on this point—a
preliminary assumption we always need to make—Clemenceau’s statement is
obviously true. But is it the whole truth, and does it exhaust the subject?
In my earlier books on war I happened to deal with this particular question, so
here are a few relevant propositions. First, Britain and France created vast colo-
nial empires in Africa in the decades before 1914, and Germany, a leading indus-
trial power, felt that if colonial empires were the way of the future, then it, too,
was entitled to one of its own. As most potential territories were already taken,
this necessitated accommodation by the other powers, which they were not in a
hurry to offer. Second, given the system of rival great-power alliances in Europe,
Germany, which was by no means keen on war, felt driven into it as a measure
of self-defense. Its leaders considered that if there were to be a war, then it had
better come early rather than late, as they feared that a fast-industrializing Russia
would become too powerful to cope with. It is not our business here to delve
into these and other long-discussed questions, as this is not a history book. They
are presented here as an example of how our comprehension of reality works (as-
suming we are after understanding and have no particular axe to grind). Within
an infinitesimally complex reality, we focus on some features and connections/
lines of causation that we regard as most pertinent to the question at hand and
weave them into a causal-narrative sketch. Narratives are the format whereby
we order the facts in a way that makes sense of complexity. Detailed as we may
strive to make them, such pictures of reality are necessarily a simplified model,
W hat Is Tr ue? 13
in which we ideally seek to incorporate and assign relative weight to events and
angles of view or perspectives that best serve as a representation of the situation
that draws our attention.
things as truth and error: Germany invaded Belgium (given our generalized tag-
ging for these aggregate human collectives), not the other way around; the in-
vasion was launched in 1914, not in 1915 (using our conventional yardstick for
the division of time); Dan lives in a house in California, not in New York (using
our standard geographical framing). Each of the concepts here is a shorthand
or a frame that covers an infinite internal diversity and can therefore always be
refined by elaborating our conceptual grid and making it denser. However, if we
do not judge this as necessary under the circumstances, such further elaboration
will not be pursued, first, because our cognitive machinery is inherently limited
and needs to prioritize its tasks; and, second, because more information may not
always improve our judgment of a situation. As absolutely complete information
is unattainable, more information may tilt our picture of a situation in a partic-
ular direction, thereby cluttering and throwing our simplified model of reality
off balance. There is some cognitive trade-off here, in which reduced “noise” and
“keeping it simple” are sometimes preferable.
even if the traditional Chinese theory and map of the human body that accom-
pany it turn out to be not merely indistinct and inaccurate by modern scientific
standards but perhaps largely or wholly bogus.
Verification or falsification can be quite ambiguous not only in relation to
“crude” concepts, but also, at the opposite end of the spectrum, with respect to
complex and highly abstract models of reality. As many features of reality are in-
volved and interact with one another, the truth may be more elusive in such cases
because our simplified model raises doubts as to whether we have not omitted
certain aspects, considerations, perspectives, and broader contexts that we may
judge relevant to the question at hand. This is what habitually occurs with respect
to propositions such as: Whatever its shortcomings, the market economy is by
far the most effective system of wealth creation the world has known; or, democ-
racy is the type of regime most in tune with modern conditions and is likely to
spread across the globe as modernization advances in less-developed regions of
the world. Our judgment in weighing the evidence for such propositions tends
to be more qualified and tentative, or it should be.
Furthermore, we have seen that our shorthand system for coping with the
infinite complexity of the world is based on the generalization of diversity into
a simpler finite order. This also applies to our constant search for regularities,
patterns of causation, relationships, and other connections and dynamics be-
tween things, where we again count on proximate similarities. We are ever on
the lookout for, ceaselessly hypothesize about, and test any trace of regularity—
more rigorous or sufficiently probabilistic—in our natural and social surround-
ings that will make our dealing with these surroundings cognitively more
economical and practically more effective. This strong propensity extends from
the instinctive heuristic rules of thumb we formulate in everyday life, to more
abstract precepts and principles of various applications used to decipher and
make sense of the world, to the yet more fundamental and ideally more rigorous
theorizing of “science”. It involves constant revisions based on trial and error,
but also exhibits a great deal of conformity, so as to reduce and economize our
cognitive load.
On the whole, this pattern-detecting and ordering system has been tremen-
dously successful. At the same time, given the mind-boggling complexity of
reality and the vast array of the conceptual schemes that we interweave to re-
flect it, it is easy to understand why we err so often. Furthermore, our pattern-
detecting cognitive system is prone to misfire, regularly producing false signals
of imagined patterns—“faces in the clouds”—to which, among other things, the
human addiction to “superstitious” beliefs and practices is widely attributed. We
can be suckers for regularities.
A detection of error or at least of some problem with a proposition’s truth
value often occurs when we become aware that some scraps of our conceptual
16 Ideological Fixation
grid do not align or accord with other scraps of that grid; that is, that which we
hold to be true in one part of our mind does not cohere with what we believe in
another part. In such a case, some adjustments to one or both of them and, po-
tentially, also to much else in the conceptual grids in which they are imbedded,
are called for. This is known as the coherence theory of truth. It emerged as a
rival to the naive notion of a transparent correspondence between ideas and
objects, but more recently has become part of the more sophisticated, “holistic”
notion of correspondence as conditioned on, and interdependent with, every-
thing else we hold to be true.21 Of course, we know that in the real world, people
regularly live with any number of contradictions and tensions in their conceptual
representations of the world. Because of both subjective and objective reasons
relating to the limits and functional utility of our cognitive system, absolute co-
herence or consistency is not within our grasp more than absolute accuracy or
comprehensiveness is. Moreover, it is time to note that the term “conceptual
grid” itself involves a very considerable simplification. It should more accurately
be described as pieces or scraps of grid relating to various aspects of the world
that attract our attention, pieces which are more or less tenuously, loosely, and
coherently stitched together in our minds.
We saw that the more complex and abstract the issues, the more difficult
it is to determine whether our propositions are true or not—that is, corre-
spond to reality—and, indeed, how true they are. We need only the most basic
assumptions regarding the non-illusionary nature of the world to determine
that Germany invaded Belgium in 1914, and not the other way around. But an-
swering the question of what brought about World War I requires a selection
and ordering of facts and perspectives within an explanatory model or repre-
sentation to which high truth value may or may not be attributed. And while
World War I belongs mainly in the past, and the reality surrounding it can only
be reconstructed in our minds, a question such as the merits and demerits of the
market economy is highly relevant to current realities and their potential future
trajectories. It concerns very practical decisions that will need to be made and
that will deeply affect the life of people. Setting aside the value questions in-
volved (values are discussed in the next chapter), it is crucial to get the models
of reality we construct in relation to such questions as right as we can if we want
a valid picture of the world to base our actions on.
The cognitive scientist Terrence Deacon has described the seemingly magical
process involved thus: “The ability to use virtual reference to build up elabo-
rate internal models of possible futures, and to hold these complex visions in
mind with the force of the mnemonic glue of symbolic inference and descriptive
shorthands, gives us unprecedented capacity to generate independent adaptive
behaviors. Remarkable abstraction from indexically bound experiences is fur-
ther enhanced by the ability of symbolic reference to pick out tiny fragments
W hat Is Tr ue? 17
of real world processes and arrange them as buoys to chart an inferential course
that predicts physical and social events.”22
inherently subjective? We are quick to define present-day believers that the earth
is flat or that Elvis is alive as irrational, if not somewhat insane. Many attribute
similar irrationality to a variety of religious beliefs that seem to be absurd, delu-
sional, or even crazy within the overall framework of our prevailing picture of
the world. Freud, for one, framed religious belief as a kind of neurosis. Others
may be less quick to extend the label of insanity, and perhaps also of absurdity or
irrationality, to religious beliefs—for various intellectual and practical reasons.
We shall look at religion more closely later in this book.
Much of mainstream philosophy has rightly stepped away from the notion
that there are definitive meanings or criteria to rationality, truth, and objectivity.
This, more or less, is the gap in which the postmodernists, deconstructionists,
and other contemporary skeptics have established a firm foothold. Thinkers such
as Jacques Derrida have left an enormous impression on their contemporaries
by arguing that the meaning of words and concepts is ceaselessly created and
shifting, largely open, illusive, and elusive, because of their irreducible con-
text dependence.30 On the other hand, it is equally necessary to get away
from the view that since meaning and rationality, like all concepts, cannot be
fully determined—they entail intellectual construction and hence are partly
subjective—they are therefore entirely constructed and wholly subjective. This
intellectual misstep has all too often led the social sciences astray over the last
decades. The intrinsic flexibility of our concepts does not make the world itself
infinitely flexible. A more relativist and qualified view of our cognition does not
mean infinite relativity and an absence of the objective.
However, to begin with, Rorty never explains why it is that certain scientific
facts and theories are more useful than others if they do not correspond to re-
ality in some way. He asks: “in what sense Pasteur’s views of disease picture the
world accurately and Paracelsus’ inaccurately.”37 One cannot help thinking that
this is simply silly. The discovery of germs and of their role in causing disease
was a huge advance in understanding the world by way of approximation to
reality. By the same standard, older notions that bad air caused disease or that
worms emerged spontaneously from muck can be judged to be either extremely
crude or entirely wrong. Indeed, while the catalogue of past historical errors is
long and seemingly impressive, can it seriously be doubted that modern scien-
tific study has made our understanding of both the human body and disease
immeasurably vaster? And that this knowledge is directly associated with and
responsible for the great advances in medicine and the huge improvement in our
health and longevity?
Moreover, because of his all-or-nothing conception of correspondence and
representation as an “isometric” relationship between beliefs and facts, rather
than a simplified code shorthand to be understood in terms of more or less elab-
orate and accurate map or model, Rorty is bound to regard all statements about
reality as equally “unrepresentative”. And yet he must concede that the state-
ment “Jupiter has moons” does in fact correspond to reality in a way he argues
“Love is the only law” or “History is the story of class struggle” are not. And he
must accept that the same distinction also applies elsewhere: “Can true beliefs
or sentences be treated on the model of realistic portraiture? Obviously some
sentences can, at least prima facie, be so treated—for example, ‘The cat is on
the mat’. There are many other cases, such as the sentence ‘Neutrinos have no
mass’ or ‘The pursuit of scholarly truth requires academic freedom’, to which
the notion of ‘parts of the world’ has no evident application. We philosophers
haggle endlessly about whether the notions of ‘correspondence’ and ‘representa-
tion’ can be extended to these harder cases.”38 What Rorty (and perhaps also his
many critics) do not seem to notice is that such a distinction between easy and
hard cases—indeed, allowing the status of correspondence to the world to any
statement—undermines his fundamental position.39
The difficult problem of empirically verifying the existence of elemen-
tary particles (like the neutrino) aside, the propositions that Rorty cites as
examples actually suggest—demonstrate—that there are vastly different levels
of modeling in terms of crudeness and metaphoric abstraction, which cannot
be squeezed into his one-size, all-or-nothing, conception of correspondence.
Rorty’s “isometric” conception of correspondence is a straw man that, par-
adoxically, deceives him above all. The symbols of our conceptual grid corre-
spond to reality as simplified code abstractions, by framing and tagging aspects
of it. “Correspondence” means sufficiently representative code symbolization,
24 Ideological Fixation
statements as either true or false. Our map of true statements about the world
consists of “crude” and less “crude” facts. Truth value, correspondence with the
world, increases as we think inside the boxes, while progressively adjusting and
tightening their framing of reality.
On the one hand, this goes against our strongly intuitive sense of the imme-
diate transparency and tangibility or our interface with the world while, on the
other, it belies the suggestion that all perspectives are equally valid. Concepts
and conceptual grids, including narrative structures, pattern-based rules, and
imagined situations, past and future, can be entirely fictional or simply wrong, in
the sense that the feature of the world they purport to cover is not there. At the
same time, what is or is not there—say, unicorns, fairies, the gods, you choose—
is problematic to ascertain. Even seemingly self-evident sense perceptions have
been revealed to be preconditioned by our prior conceptions about the shape of
the world, as well as often being deeply misleading. Moreover, inferences about
the less immediate features of the world are held or withheld to the extent that
they agree, integrate, with basic assumptions that shape our conceptual grid
or the scattered pieces that constitute it. Worldviews are more important than
“facts”, or, less provocatively, they fixate as well as being fixated by them.
from his achievement . . . man lives in a symbolic universe. Language, myth, art
and religion are part of this universe. They are the varied threads that weave
the symbolic net, the tangled web of human experience. All human progress in
thought and experience refines upon and strengthens this net. . . . [Man] has so
enveloped himself in linguistic forms, in artistic images, in mythical symbols or
religious rites that he cannot see or know anything except by the interpretation
of this artificial medium.”44
2
What Is Right?
How Morality Should Be Conceived
Morality, what is the proper behavior toward others and in the social context, is
the second element of ideology that needs our prior attention. It is widely agreed
that we are moral creatures, not in the sense that we act morally all or most of the
time, but in that we have a strong and deep proclivity to issue moral judgments
and experience feelings of condemnation or approbation—often intense—
in response to human behavior. Other questions are more in dispute: Do our
moral percepts resonate in some way with the deep structure of the universe or
are “true” or “objective” in any other sense? Or are they pure projections of our
inner attitudes, feelings, and emotions onto the world, and are therefore “sub-
jective” or even “relative” to the individuals or societies that hold them? This is
how the question is typically presented and the battle lines drawn. Indeed, they
have been drawn so for millennia, which may raise the question of whether this
dispute can ever be resolved. As we have seen in the previous chapter, no ques-
tion can ever be resolved in the strict sense, and no answer, however absurd or
fatuous we judge it to be, can be refuted conclusively. Nonetheless, we form our
views of what is true in the context of everything else we take to be the most
plausible explanation of the evidence. So has anything substantial changed in the
cognitive constellation that shapes our understanding of morality?
From ancient through medieval to modern times, moral philosophy has been
influenced by changes in people’s cosmological worldviews—regarding man,
God, and the universe. However, in recent decades, philosophers have failed to
recognize the major contribution that the Darwinian revolution and the evo-
lutionary perspective have made to the understanding of major questions for
which there were previously no satisfactory answers: how morality came into
being, what sustains it, and perhaps also, to some degree, what can be expected
of people morally. Thus, this chapter seeks to clarify the implications of the nat-
uralistic perspective, immensely enhanced by evolutionary theory, for moral
Ideological Fixation. Azar Gat, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197646700.003.0002
W hat Is R ight? 29
philosophy. Rather than dealing with moral questions per se, we shall try to ad-
vance our understanding of what morality is.
harming others would ultimately boomerang and cause harm to oneself. Other
major traditions in the developed civilizations of Eurasia shared a more or less
similar view regarding the fundamental affinity between individual and collec-
tive interests as recognized by the wise. With greater or lesser supernatural un-
derpinning, this applied, for example, to the Hindu and Buddhist concept of
Dharma, somewhat akin to the Greek logos and aretê, as well as to the Confucian
doctrine of a harmonious life in a harmonious society.
It was, however, Christianity, with its non-naturalistic, God-centered, Jewish
heritage and the mantle of the neo-Platonic and Aristotelean conceptions of
God, that dominated the Western tradition from late antiquity until (at least)
the early modern period. Its adherents, and those of the other monotheistic
religions, did not fully share the comfortable view that in and of itself it paid
for individuals to behave well toward others—to cause them no harm and to
extend to them some helping hand. They were not entirely sure that in the final
analysis individual and collective interests aligned, so that it would not be ad-
vantageous for an individual to pursue his selfish interests at the expense of the
collective and by doing harm. “Why does the way of the wicked prosper?” asked
the biblical prophet Jeremiah (12:1). Nor were the adherents of the monothe-
istic religions as confident as the Greeks, Buddhists, and Confucians that the un-
bridled, “excessive” “indulgence” of sensual pleasures was intrinsically harmful
to oneself. In short, they did not quite trust morality to successfully stand on its
own feet. There were various conceptions, of course, but it was now largely the
role of God, and of His divine sanction—in this or the next world—to deter
people from doing “evil”. (True, both Plato and the believers in karma also partly
relied on harm to evil-doers in the next reincarnations of the soul.)
During the early modern period, God was in retreat among European
intellectuals, or at least His role was being redefined and vastly contracting,
as His traditional conceptual framing did not sit well with the new cosmolog-
ical outlook and philosophical standards of ontological and moral coherence.
Anthropocentric and naturalistic conceptions of the sources and nature of mo-
rality were back, most notably with Benedict Spinoza and Thomas Hobbes in
the seventeenth century, and with the British school of moral sentiments—Lord
Shaftesbury, Francis Hutchinson, David Hume, and Adam Smith—in the eight-
eenth century. They regarded morality as a human creation in the service of so-
cial life and believed it functioned quite successfully on this naturalistic-social
basis. However, in a Western world steeped in the Christian tradition, even
among those who reacted against it, many were far less sanguine.
Among the philosophers of the Enlightenment—a few of them atheists and
the majority deists who did not believe that God intervened in the world—it
was nonetheless widely held that a God that vouched for morality was a vital
illusion. Voltaire stated that “if God didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent
W hat Is R ight? 31
him. Let the wise proclaim him, and kings fear him”.5 He was reportedly even
more apprehensive of the people than he believed in the kings’ piety, suspecting
that without God and the fear of hell people would have no inhibitions against
cutting each other’s throat when nobody watched. A profound, widespread
sense of crisis regarding the Death of God, in Nietzsche’s famous phrase, most
notably concerning His role as the guarantor of morality, spread in the late nine-
teenth century. The statement by Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov that
“if God does not exist, everything is permitted” and the murder committed
by Dostoevsky’s other literary character Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment
typified the bewilderment about and apprehension of what the people of the
time termed “nihilism”—the collapse of all transcendent guarantees and cus-
tomary standards for value and the good.
Philosophers, most typically of the so-called existentialist school, rushed in
to fill the void. Announcing the death of God and all the metaphysics—moral
and otherwise—that depended on Him, Nietzsche cast himself in the role of a
prophet of a new self-centered ethics of the Will to Power. One may suggest that,
by his own standards, Nietzsche fell victim to the very same ill he criticized: his
projected super-man may be regarded as merely a more advanced stage of what
Nietzsche ridiculed as the illusions of the God-centered world, which he tried
to replace with something of almost similar mythical magnitude—fictitious and
metaphorical-poetic or not. Nietzsche, too, could not really stand the void and
embrace morality on a human scale with little supra-human heroic aura.
Half a century later, the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre similarly rejected God,
and all external authority, as bygone illusions, skyhooks to hang morality on.
Instead, he proclaimed the free, autonomous, and self-creating individual as the
agent whose moral choices and actions were responsible for shaping the kind
of world he or she and all of humanity would live in. As suggested by the title of
his 1946 pamphlet “Existentialism Is Humanism”, Sartre could not quite avoid
the connotation that some moral choices were good and some bad. In a famous
example, he presented the options of joining the Resistance against the Nazis
or staying at home to care for an ailing mother as equally autonomous and self-
creating moral choices. Yet he did not mention the option of joining the Nazis,
autonomous and self-creating as it may be, as a moral choice on quite the same
footing. His was an uplifting message about man (and woman) pursuing their
“authentic” choices. As it surfed on the crest of a generational rebellion against
what came to be viewed as the petty, narrow-minded conventions, constraints
and prejudices associated with traditional “bourgeois” society, it was received
with great popular fanfare in his time.
Philosophers of the analytical school active during the early and mid-twentieth
century were more prosaic than the existentialists, whose lofty musings they often
regarded with suspicion and scorn as romantic mumbo-jumbo. Nonetheless,
32 Ideological Fixation
they held a view not dissimilar to that of the existentialists regarding human
preferences as the source of morality. Interested almost exclusively in the log-
ical and linguistic status of moral statements, they emphasized the distinction
already made by Hume: that moral statements are not descriptions of facts in
the world but expressions of our emotions, attitudes, and wishes with respect
to such facts, particularly those relating to human and social behavior. Moral
judgments are expressively “emotive” and “prescriptive” with respect to the
above.6 Thus, rather than being objective in the sense that they captured truths
about the world, moral judgments are subjective or, at most, intersubjective,
that is, they come from us and reflect the inner emotions and expectations that
people have and, to some degree, tend to share with other people.
This view of the nature of morality has been the subject of intense contro-
versy. Although I generally agree with “emotivism”-“prescriptivism”, some of the
criticism directed at these views reveal genuine shortcomings in them. Most no-
tably, they tell us little about the content of the moral judgments people tend to
have and on why they have them. In the eighteenth century, Hume had already
made all the major points of “emotivism”-“prescriptivism”, while offering a much
more complete picture of the nature and sources of morality. Indeed, I share the
view that the philosophical discussion of morality has made very little progress
since Hume—if anything, it has periodically retreated. This high evaluation of
his moral philosophy may raise the question of whether there is any purpose to
dwelling further on a subject he has already illuminated. But, as suggested here,
Hume was missing one huge piece of the puzzle, and, moreover, recognized that
such a piece may be missing. We shall get to this after reviewing his ideas of what
morality is and is about.