-
People
have interests and worries about their private life, from the activities
they need to engage in, to the friendships and love relationships they
need to entertain and the ideals they want to strive for. But there are
also public interests that derive from living within a community, where
one’s own aspirations can be cultivated, where security and justice can
be found. Precisely because there are public interests, that is values
according to which society must be articulated, and because therefore
there are also confict and difference of opinion, there is politics.
Problems in politics are not exclusively technical problems, or problems
inherent to power per se. And because we have ideals pertaining to what
we want our public life to be like that there is politics. However,
these ideals have meaning because they can be found within the vaster
context of the life of individuals, and they must respond to the
recondite movements and transformations that all individuals are privy
to. Thus political ideas rapidly become ideologies whenever they are
removed from this broader context. Revolutionary Marxist movements
played out this very parable, they channelled ferment and expectations
that were extraneous to politics of the period into the public arena;
but then they immunised these ideals from transformation and critique
alike. Liberal democracies have shown a greater propensity to welcome
change and to pass this on for political deliberation. But will these
same democracies be able to comply with the transformations of the
meaning of individual lives? Or don’t they also risk fixing an image of
society to the detriment of the plurality of visions and mdels of life
and living?
We often talk of common ideals and interests. However, ideals vary from
person to person. Each individual has his or her own. Common interest is
therefore that of the collectivity, where all the private lives are
recognised and in the name of which all ideals must be sacrificed. In
this sense, politics, by attempting to conciliate all individual ideals,
would be limiting and limited, in that it would limit personal liberties.
On the other hand, even common interest might be an idea, albeit a
commonly-agreed-upon ideal. There might be situations – however rare in
collective life – where a common interest, for example where everyone
should respect specific rules even though they do not necessarily agree
with them, is a shared ideal. Vice versa, there might well be conflict
between ideals and interests. This is one of the reasons why it is
necessary, even within diversity of opinion and evaluation, that a few
behavioural norms should be respected so as to make sure that dissent
does not degenerate into conflict. One of the greatest conquests of
modern and contemporary democracy is that once conflict has been
registered there is an attempt to convert it into competition, that is
into dissent, the articulation of opinions, while respecting specific
rules of the game. Hence derives a situation in which the multiplicity
of ideals corresponds to the common interest of the free expression of
ideals themselves.
|
Nowadays
much is being said about the eclipsing of ideologies, but the history of
European thought is full of the theme of the eclipsing of ideologies.
Firstly, where can the term “ideology” be collocated historically? The
French philosopher Antoine-Louis-Claude Destutt de Tracy coined the term
at the close of the 18th century to indicate the science of the
formation of ideas, to which concept the group of late-Enlightenment
philosophers known as the Idéologues referred. The 19th century, apart
from being the century of ideologies par excellence, was also the
century that saw the emergence of theories on the demise of ideologies.
The “social positivism”os Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte, originally his
disciple, addressed the theoretical issue of the end of ideology by
positing the primacy of scientific “laws”. Naturally, the theory of the
end of ideology can in itself also become an ideology, and more
precisely the reason for the end of ideologies, or rather it could
become the ideology that justifies and legitimates a technocratic type
of power.
Attaining some form of power consequently leads to an attitude according
to which we are no longer interested in the ideals as they were
originally thought. It is obvious that we are living in a society that
is predominantly permeated by an economicistic attitude. And it is
equally obvious that an economicist logic implies the decline of certain
types of values. On the other hand it would be wrong to believe that
ideals correspond to ideologies. The ideologies that were most
successful in the 20th century were all based on the assumption that it
was possible to radically alter the world, both within history and
through history. Once ideologies had died, the ideal, mostly regarding
the absolute “form”in which an intellectual or moral instance is
presented, is also able to subsist in our time. And this might even be a
positive point. Ideals and values surely have greater value than any
ideology. Ideology, in fact, could easily end up being an artificial and
contrived covering that is forcibly placed over reality in order to
radically transform it beyond the needs of transformation, while waiting
for a captious model of the “new society”. All the great political
forces in the 20th century have operated on ideological assumptions,
where “ideology” implied the notion of “radically changing” the world,
and not “comprehending” it. The “change” in a word coresponds to a
hypothesis of forced will aiming to unhinge a specific reality. Here the
purpose would be to construct a completely new building which, among
other things, imposes the massification of society and the systematic
violence exerted by power over its own citizens.
In the "terrifying”totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, power
essentially unleashed a war against its own people, transforming
so-called “ideologies”into systems of ideas whose aims were
“totalitarianism” itself. There was no respect for that hierarchy of
values on which a civilized and advanced society should be based.
Andrea
Pagnes,
curator, writer,
ARTIST
|
