Ideology II
9th November 2020
Severian is really on a roll today. Good stuff.
Continuing from below, it seems one of ideology’s most important functions is making the private public. Conservatism has often been defined as “the negation of ideology,” and when you think about ideology as the forced publication of private behavior, this makes a lot more sense. Everyone from Pickup Artists to Aristotle knows that people try hard to avoid hypocrisy. The “Game” concepts of “commitment and consistency” and “social proof” are just the old Aristotelian notions that one becomes virtuous by practicing virtue. You want to actually be what you say you are (“commitment and consistency”), and since everyone else is doing it, too (“social proof”), pretty soon the practice, whatever it is, becomes common currency.
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Ideology flips all that, and it’s a striking fact of intellectual history that you can pinpoint the exact date of the first true ideology, almost down to the day: 1536, with the publication of The Institutes of the Christian Religion. You can check out Michael Walzer’s excellent study The Revolution of the Saints if you want the details (and know a LOT about the period already), but the basic point is simple: Unlike all previous theologies or political “philosophies” (which didn’t really exist before then), Calvinism attempts to remake society, ALL of it, through politics.
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The Puritans, as English Calvinists were called, wrote difficult prose, but in translation it sounds shockingly modern. The Puritans were the SJWs of their day, obsessed with their own pwecious widdle selves. They didn’t get around to making up xzheyr own pronouns, but they did give themselves self-righteous new names — when Ben Johnson called his caricature Puritan Zeal-of-the-Land Busy he got big laughs, but he wasn’t really joking, they really did stuff like that. To be a Puritan requires two things: An obsessive focus on the tiniest micro-movements of your own soul….
….and an equally obsessive focus on forcing other people to disclose the tiniest micro-movements of their souls. There’s nothing anyone could ever do, so trivial that a Puritan could in good conscience overlook it. Calvin’s Geneva was the closest thing to a police state 16th century technology allowed, and when their turn came, Oliver Cromwell and the boys gave importing it to England the old college try. And, of course, Plymouth Bay Colony started as a Puritan police state…