Get Real: How to Tell it Like it is in a World of Illusions. Eliane Glaser
pass under the radar precisely because we deny their existence. And they don’t just govern the world of politics: they permeate every corner of our everyday lives, from work to leisure, from food to sex.
If we’re to understand contemporary politics and culture, we need to restore the lost world of Marx and Engels’ camera obscura: the secret life of ideology which produces a distorted image of society in which inequality is downplayed and social harmony prevails. It’s a fascinatingly paradoxical and mercurial concept which we have lost sight of today at a cost: because it describes the world we live in even better than the one in which it was first developed. Improving our world begins with rediscovering overt ideology’s lost value; but analysing our predicament begins with rediscovering covert ideology’s lost meaning.
When I was a teenager, I had a brief flirtation with Orthodox Judaism. I went to study the Bible at a yeshiva in Jerusalem. At the yeshiva, I asked the rabbi why it was that women were not expected to take part in religious rituals like going to the synagogue and reciting morning prayers, especially since those rituals were so important and prestigious in the community. The rabbi told me that women didn’t need to take part, because women were so much more holy than men. It was a textbook ideological manoeuvre: portraying power relations as the opposite of what they are in reality in order to keep the status quo in place. My flirtation slightly cooled after that.
For Marx and Engels, ideology was not just an intellectual concept, a set of abstract ideas. Capitalist exploitation meant that people were actually living a lie. In order to maintain their privilege, the ruling classes had pulled off a cunning trick. They had got the workers to internalise the upside-down belief that they weren’t really being exploited at all. The interests of the powerful were legitimated at the expense of ordinary people, but with ordinary people’s consent. We tend to think of Marxism nowadays as having about as much subtlety as a Five-Year Plan. But Marx and Engels’ ideas were complex and elegant: this was no cartoon battle between virtuous labour and evil capital. They argued that the dissemination of ideology was not just about deliberate manipulation by the ruling classes; it also involved unconscious self-deception on the part of the workers, who came to regard the dominant ideology as their own. Ideology is not simply the work of PR men: it’s also made up of diffuse information that cannot be traced to a specific source. It’s unspoken cultural norms, ‘the way things are’, the social equivalent of an odourless gas.
Marx and Engels’ theory of ideology as a wily, dissembling force was developed by a series of subsequent thinkers, from the French philosopher Pierre Bourdieu’s colourful analysis of polite and civilised behaviours (such as knowing which cutlery to use for each course) as forms of ideology which alienate the uninitiated, to the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci’s notion of ideology as ‘hegemony’: the cultural tricks which the ruling classes use to persuade everyone else to accept their subordinate status. Gramsci described the subtle and pervasive ways in which power relations are diffused through the habits of everyday life, woven into the fabric of culture and normalised as social rituals: from school to work to weddings. Gramsci showed how power and control are achieved not only through brute force but also through consent and the evolution of shared ‘common sense’.
Covert ideology is also at work in that defining characteristic of modern authority, soft power. The phrase was coined by the international-relations guru Joseph Nye (who is also credited with inventing neoliberalism). He defined soft power as co-option rather than coercion. You get what you want not through the imposition of force, but by cultivating a sense of legitimacy around your project. America is a global empire not because it has the most bombs, but because it promotes enlightened democratic values around the world. If Joseph Nye was down with this kind of thing, the psychologist and social theorist Erich Fromm was more critical. He contrasted overt authority, which is strict but upfront, with anonymous authority, which pretends that it is not exerting force, that everything is being done with the individual’s consent. ‘While the teacher of the past said to Johnny, “You must do this. If you don’t, I’ll punish you,”’ Fromm explains, ‘today’s teacher says, “I’m sure you’ll like to do this.” Here, the sanction for disobedience is not corporal punishment, but the suffering face of the parent, or what is worse, conveying the feeling of not being “adjusted”, of not acting as the crowd acts. Overt authority used physical force; anonymous authority employs psychic manipulation.’ Now, I know caning is brutal, but at least it’s an exercise of power without the pretence of benign liberalism.
To see the two meanings of overt and covert ideology in action, take the example of David Cameron’s 2011 public-spending cuts. They were frequently denounced by critics as motivated by ideology. This is the first, overt meaning of the word. But in a key speech to defend the cuts, Cameron said, ‘We are not doing this because we want to, driven by theory or ideology. We are doing this because we have to.’ Here we can see ideology at work in its other, covert form. The cuts were indeed driven by a right-wing ideological intent: you could see that in the enthusiasm with which cheering Tory back-benchers waved their order papers as each set of ‘austerity measures’ was unveiled. But claiming that the move was simply a matter of necessity ensured that this intent remained largely hidden. One Conservative politician commented: ‘Voters know there have to be cuts, it’s the realism of working people.’ What a great way to advance iniquitous policies under the cover of expediency, and with the apparent blessing of the people who will be hurt the most. These appeals to necessity and realism enable elites to do what they want. But they also leave us with a lack of agency, a curious sense of paralysis. Without a clear sense of what leaders stand for, what their principles are, what direction they want to take the country in, we’re faced with the sense that we just have to accept what happens, because it’s the plain truth, a matter of unavoidable fact.
I find it fascinating that ideology is a word with two meanings, one directly opposed to the other. Like propaganda, it means something obvious and something underhand at the same time. Covert ideology is not about labels or badges or isms. It’s about ruses, hidden agendas and delusions. It’s into this shady underworld that I’d now like to delve.
The fake’s progress
In the new world of covert ideology, subliminal deception has taken over from explicit argument and overt persuasion. So I don’t think it’s a surprise that we’ve forgotten ideology’s covert meaning, because that enables the deception to pass unnoticed. The twentieth century saw the evolution of myriad beguiling techniques in advertising, marketing and PR. And gradually, those techniques were applied to all areas of our public and private lives: from political campaigns to adverts for condoms.
Wasn’t it ever thus, you might ask. How new is this covert form of ideology, and where in the world is it most powerful? To attempt some kind of answer, let’s go back to 1948 and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, a novel which seems – on the face of it – to be relevant to our age. George W. Bush’s Clear Skies Act of 2003 actually relaxed the rules on air pollution, rather like Nineteen Eighty-Four’s Ministry of Peace, which keeps Oceania in a state of perpetual war. But Orwell retained a powerful faith in the impervious soul of human beings. The state ideology of Nineteen Eighty-Four may be clever, and it may be powerful, but it ‘can’t get inside you’. Fast forward to Western liberal democracies in the early twenty-first century and quite a lot has changed. Today’s consumer-citizens are focus-grouped, market-researched and second-guessed; and policies and product-desire are designed to slip undetected into our minds and homes without awakening hostile antibodies. Who needs Big Brother when we’re complicit in our own subjection? Orwell did not predict the subtle ideology of democratic, rather than totalitarian, states. He did not predict this age of consent.
While there were elements of covert ideology in the historical past, the virus has mutated into a more insidious strain. That’s why the focus of this book is on the developed world, primarily the UK and the US, from the 1990s onwards. Contemporary Burma – or any regime which uses violence to impose its policies on its population – is, like Stalinist Russia, heavily ideological. But those regimes are ideological in a brutally overt sense of the word: they employ external force to implement their ideas. There’s a paradox, a trap here. The more developed and mature the democracy, the more susceptible its citizens are to thinking that everything is fine, and to willingly internalising covert forms of ideology which may