I recently had the pleasure of reading The End of Ideology by Daniel Bell, one of the four “New York Intellectuals” as they were called. I came across this particular gem by sheer accident while browsing a local bookstore that specializes in rare and antiquarian books.
Bell essentially agued that the problem with the intellectual community of his day (early Cold War era) is that it was ideological. He did not argue that some of those who comprise the intellectual community were ideologues, rather he opined that ideology was itself the culprit. With all due respect to Mr. Bell, he could not have been more wrong.
We all have ideologies, or a basic world-view. What is a world-view but a conceptual framework born of our environment, our knowledge and our experiences. This framework provide us with a basis upon which we live our lives and view our world. Ideology includes, but is not limited to, religion, culture, politics and philosophy. The problem with some intellectuals is not that they have ideologies but that they allow their ideologies to control their view of the world rather than guide it. The difference manifests when despite reason, logic, facts and evidence we begin to cut and trim reality, so as to make it fit within the parameters of our world-view. In essence our world-view serves as a prism through which we filter our view of reality whether past, present or future and as a result we become Ideologues.
What really spurred Daniel Bell’s treatise was the inability of Communist and Fellow Travelers to come to grips with the fact that the realities of Communism, particularly the Soviet Union, was at odds with the fanciful image they so passionately wanted to believe. They had given up the scientific search for the truth that was and had become engineers endeavoring to create a truth that never existed.
It seems the old adage is true: those who do not learn their history are doomed to repeat it.
Bell essentially agued that the problem with the intellectual community of his day (early Cold War era) is that it was ideological. He did not argue that some of those who comprise the intellectual community were ideologues, rather he opined that ideology was itself the culprit. With all due respect to Mr. Bell, he could not have been more wrong.
We all have ideologies, or a basic world-view. What is a world-view but a conceptual framework born of our environment, our knowledge and our experiences. This framework provide us with a basis upon which we live our lives and view our world. Ideology includes, but is not limited to, religion, culture, politics and philosophy. The problem with some intellectuals is not that they have ideologies but that they allow their ideologies to control their view of the world rather than guide it. The difference manifests when despite reason, logic, facts and evidence we begin to cut and trim reality, so as to make it fit within the parameters of our world-view. In essence our world-view serves as a prism through which we filter our view of reality whether past, present or future and as a result we become Ideologues.
What really spurred Daniel Bell’s treatise was the inability of Communist and Fellow Travelers to come to grips with the fact that the realities of Communism, particularly the Soviet Union, was at odds with the fanciful image they so passionately wanted to believe. They had given up the scientific search for the truth that was and had become engineers endeavoring to create a truth that never existed.
It seems the old adage is true: those who do not learn their history are doomed to repeat it.
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