Ideology is a straight edge ruler in a fractal universe.

[Jim__]

A few short excerpts from a somewhat-long essay, Night Thoughts of a Baffled Humanist, by Marilynne Robinson that appeared in The Nation:

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At best there are two major problems with ideology. The first is that it does not represent or conform to or even address reality. It is a straight-edge ruler in a fractal universe. The second is that it inspires in its believers the notion that the fault here lies with miscreant fact, which should therefore be conformed to the requirements of theory by all means necessary. To the ideologue this would amount to putting the world right, ridding it of ambiguity and those tedious and endless moral and ethical questions that dog us through life, and that those around us so rarely answer to our satisfaction. Anger and self-righteousness combined with cynicism about the world as he or she sees it are the marks of the ideologue. There is always an element of nostalgia, too, because the ideologue is confident that he or she is moved by a special loyalty to a natural order, or to a good and normative past, that others defy or betray.

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The alienation, the downright visceral frustration, of the new American ideologues, the bone in their craw, is the unacknowledged fact that America has never been an especially capitalist country. The postal system, the land-grant provision for public education, the national park system, the Homestead Act, the graduated income tax, the Social Security system, Medicare, Medicaid, the GI Bill—all these were and are massive distributions or redistributions of wealth meant to benefit the population at large. Even “the electrification of the whole country,” Lenin’s great and unrealized dream for the Soviet Union, was achieved in the United States by a federal program begun in 1936. Europeans are generally unaware of the degree to which state governments provide education, healthcare, libraries and other services that complement or supplement federal programs, as do counties, cities and other political entities. Because many American states are larger than many countries, their contributions are by no means inconsiderable.

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How should we reckon cost? And how do we reckon debt? Iowa, my adopted state, has a relatively small population and an economy based on agriculture. This has described the place for as long as it has been a name on a map. Iowa also has a fine system of public universities, which represent many generations of support from the people of Iowa, now more often called the taxpayers, so schooled have we been lately in thinking of our investments as exactions. Especially in the Midwest, state universities are flagship institutions, sources of pride and identity. They are virtual city-states, distinctive and autonomous. They carry on every kind of scholarship and research at the highest levels. Historically they have offered education at modest cost to the people whose support has created them, and have opened their formidable resources to the public freely. Someone seems to have noticed that this sort of thing is not, under the strict new definition, capitalist. Something so valuable as education should be commodified, parceled up and sold. The inefficiency of profit should be added, as a sort of tribute to this economic truth. The word “elite” or “elitist” has currency these days. Its connotations are bitterly negative in some circles. Universities and those who are associated with them are considered elitist, and this somehow disqualifies them morally for positions of public trust. But the whole point of the land grant system has been to create an elite so large the name no longer serves, to create a ruling class that is more or less identical with the population. To raise tuitions and exclude on economic grounds is the sort of “reform” that will create elitism of the worst kind.

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To put it another way, we have entered a period of rationalist purgation. Rationalism and reason are antonyms: the first is fixed and incurious; the second, open and inductive. Rationalism is forever settling on one model of reality; reason tends toward an appraising interest in things as they come. Rationalism projects, and its projections typically fill it with alarm because of the inadequacy of its model, which, to the rationalist mind, appears as the perversity of the world. To this mind every problem is systemic, therefore vast and urgent. Rationalism is the omnium-gatherum of resentment and foreboding, the omnium-scatterum of everything of any kind that appears to stand in the way of a correction of reality back toward rational standards. Like paranoia, it all makes perfect sense, once its assumptions are granted. Again, like paranoia, it gathers evidence opportunistically, and is utterly persuaded by it, fueling its confidence to the point of sometimes messianic certainty. Ideology is rational, a pure product of the human mind.

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