Alienation, autonomy, and ideology
These are posts on philosophy from the blog Base and Superstructure. My background is in academia, with a specific focus on feminism, philosophical issues in the social sciences, and social and political philosophy. I have also done work on historical figures such as J. L. Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein. These posts incorporate some or all of these issues. The influences may be more or less explicit, depending on the topic. Philosophy can be intimidating, and so these posts present issues in a way that’s open to many people. There is also discussion of specific philosophical issues, and specific issues from a philosophical perspective, such as feminist accounts of pornography, Marxist and socialist accounts of the state and political economy, and the search for the best explanations for social and material phenomena.
At some point in their careers – usually near the beginning – all philosophy professors teach students how to identify informal logical fallacies. Teaching informal fallacies is one of the most important parts of the job. But for most of them, it’s one of their least favorite parts of the job.
Why?
After the 2004 US election, pundits – and college students like myself – went looking for answers. How could Americans re-elect a buffoonish warmonger like George W. Bush? Over the course of a decade, this search guided me from pundit-generated pablum like ‘NASCAR Dad‘ to the philosophically compelling ‘looping effects of human kinds’, as Ian Hacking put it. Let’s trace that journey.
What struck me about the punditry is their attribution of an ordinary event – the re-election of a president – to hidden, mysterious forces. Who were these NASCAR Dads riding to Dubya’s rescue? As it happens, they’re no one new. Lifting up the hood reveals the same white, mostly male, non-college educated voters who elected Reagan in 1980 and Trump in 2016. They vote Republican in every election. ‘NASCAR Dad’ is only a seemingly fresh take on an old story, loaded this time with cultural references.
But I drew lessons from getting burned by bad punditry and bad political science. Through works like ‘Making Up People‘ and The Social Construction of What?, I found philosophers doing great work on classifications of people and how people react – the ‘looping effects’ of my title! And so, I’ll start there. What are ‘looping effects’, and how do they apply to the term ‘bisexual’? Does it mean people aren’t really bisexual, just as people aren’t really NASCAR Dads? Or are NASCAR Dads real after all? Is there some ‘authentic self’ prior to how we’re grouped?
“Donald Trump looks and sounds like a professional wrestling character.” People say this figuratively, but they should mean it literally. He looks and sounds like a professional wrestling character because he is one. In fact, the WWE elected him to its Hall of Fame in 2013. His wrestling character isn’t the whole story of Trumpism, but it’s a major part.
Let’s explore that, shall we?
I read an in-depth and at times terrifying account of how moderating Facebook posts impacts staff. The Verge published it some time ago, and in fact I read it some time ago. Apparently Facebook moderation is an endless wall of hate speech, graphic porn, threats of violence, depictions of violence, etc. And people spend hours at a time wading through the stuff. It’s enough to give anyone panic attacks and nightmares.
I don’t have any stories like that, though I’ve had the kind of chronic career stress grad school in the humanities often produces. And we’re at a unique historical juncture when it comes to issues of jobs and career.
How about you? How does your work shape you?
Lots of people in the US have the idea that there’s something vaguely 1930s about our current politics. And not only in the US, but across much of the world. Mostly these conversations revolve around the potential re-emergence of fascism. But another component is the uses and abuses of propaganda in the Internet age. Democrats, including Hillary Clinton herself in her recent book What Happened, are particularly interested in the idea that Russia funds right-wing propaganda to influence politics in the US and elsewhere.
Is there anything to this?
I’ve never published any articles on propaganda, though I’ve developed material on it over the years. And I’ve delivered a few presentations. Mostly notably at the Iowa Lyceum, a summer program on philosophy and critical thinking for pre-college students.
What stands out to me most about propaganda, and what most people misunderstand about it, is the issue of who it targets. You can learn a lot about propaganda by discerning its audience. And so, I’ll say a bit about that.
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