Worldviews and Ideologies: analysis (or description), evaluation, and … construction

By way of background and context, I’d like to begin this post with a personal story. I bought several books from our town’s best used bookstore the other day and confess to being rather excited about one of the volumes because it is by my late teacher and friend, Ninian Smart, Buddhism and Christianity: Rivals and Allies (London: Macmillan Press, 1993). I learned beforehand (from its online description) that the book had a gift inscription by Ninian … and sure enough, I recognized his inimitable handwriting. It appears the book has never been read (or opened!). It was inscribed “For Bill, with best wishes from Ninian.” I suspect it was for Ninian’s colleague, Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies and East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies, William F. Powell, who specialized in Chinese Buddhism, but of course I can’t be certain.

As a propaedeutic of sorts to what’s to come, I’d like to share some material from the opening paragraphs of the book because it conveys perfectly several of Ninian’s principal intellectual foci and broader “political” concerns in the field of “Religious Studies, foci and concerns I share and hope to illustrate in a forthcoming post, a taste of which follows the excerpt from Smart’s book:

“Perhaps there are four billion worldviews, since every person has her or his set of values and perspectives on life [this is why I distinguish the individuation of worldviews among persons with the term ‘life-worlds’]. But there are also major patterns and systems which shape and are shaped by societies, and we give to these such labels as ‘Christianity’ and ‘Buddhism.’ They break down of course into varied incarnations, such as Roman Catholicism, the Theravāda, Protestantism, Mahāyāna and so on, and more particularly into breeds, such as Anglicanism, the Quakers, Hua-yen Buddhism, Zen and so forth. Blending with these varieties are national and regional variants: Sri Lankan Theravada, Scottish Presbyterianism, German Catholicism and so on. There are other blends too, where social and political diversities get conjoined to major traditions: liberal Protestantism, say in the United States; and socialistic Buddhism in Sri Lanka. Each hybrid in this luxurious garden of the spirit commands its own loyalty [Ninian was well aware that not all of these blends make for ‘gardens of the spirit,’ as when ethno-religious identity and worldviews become fused with nationalism]. How do we get such plants to grow together, as the psychic surface of the globe shrinks, and every culture and every set of values is in interaction with all the others? [….]

There is more. I have listed above some of the great religious movements. But secular worldviews, such as Marxism, secular humanism, nationalism [I’m reluctant to call nationalism a worldview, preferring instead to see it as an ideology; however, it’s likely that it partakes of both in many cases.] and so forth play (so to speak) in the same league as religion, often struggling against it, and sometimes beguilingly takings its hand. That is how we have the combinations I referred to above. But the bitter struggles between some modern ideologies and traditional religions match the more internecine fighting of former times [something which, for better and worse, preoccupied Hobbes]. The Khmer Rouge mowed down Buddhist monks and turned temples into granaries and barracks. Stalin persecuted Ukranian Catholics and Russian Orthodox; nationalism in Italy came into conflict with the Church during the time of Garibaldi; and so on. Consequently, it makes sense to treat religious and non-religious worldviews together [this does not mean, however, that we obliterate the differences or distinctions].” [….]

I am working on an essay entitled “religious and philosophical worldviews as seedbeds and greenhouses for spiritual praxis and philosophy as therapeia,” which includes an attempt to distinguish the concept of “ideology” from the notion of (religious and non-religious) worldviews, while conceding there is a porous boundary between them. For now I want to introduce one part of that essay that falls under the heading “worldviews and ideologies: analysis (or description), evaluation, and … construction.”

Speaking generally and simply, the concept of worldviews is wider in scope and more personal in meaning (particularly at the individual level of ‘lifeworlds’) than ideology. Ideologies may borrow pieces or fragments from worldviews, or in some way be dependent upon them—as a necessary yet not sufficient condition—while worldviews, in turn, may contain ideological beliefs or elements, but it is only from the vantage point of worldviews (a Marxist worldview, for example, but perhaps, say, a Buddhist one as well) that we can critique ideologies, get “beyond” ideology,¹ in other words, an ideology by its very meaning cannot avail itself of an “auto-“ or “self-critique,” for that is precluded by its function as ideology. This treatment involves making methodical (or methodological) distinctions between our attempt to objectively or impartially describe, analyze and understand—make sense of—worldviews that differ from our own (Smart refers to this project as demanding an arduous ‘attempt of fairness, dispassion, imagination [which includes empathy] and objectivity’), a task within the respective purviews of philosophy, the social sciences and “religious studies” (the corresponding division of intellectual labor is not always availing). We also need to critically compare and evaluate such worldviews, an endeavor wholly dependent on properly and thoroughly performing the prior task, which of course is extremely difficult given our cognitive biases, avowed (personal and collective) identities, political allegiances and sensibilities, and possible passions and prejudices, for example.

The values that motivate the first task are found in or derived from the humanities and social sciences, as well as democratic ideas and in particular the values and principles of Liberalism, most notably the notions of individual human dignity (and the idea of ‘self-rule’ or moral psychological autonomy) and pluralism (thus, for example, in the words of Ninian Smart, ‘it is a ‘very illiberal thing [the way in which] philosophy is so often taken as identified with Western philosophy’ or that ‘many of the attitudes which Westerners apply to non-Western religions are very illiberal’²). The close proximity of worldviews today, the fact that they are often “cheek by jowl” as Smart says, results in tension, conflicts, interaction (which entails influencing, borrowing, negotiating, and so on), processes of strengthening or fortifying, as well as weakening or diminishing (almost to a relative vanishing point in some cases), mutual criticism, modulation, adaptation, alteration and so forth. These processes may find us increasingly motivated to engage in “worldview construction,” meaning that a “new” worldview is fashioned that is no longer beholden to any one worldview or tradition, a combination of significant components from two or more worldviews, much like the historical formation of Sikkhism, which quickly “gained converts among Hindus and Muslims in the Punjab region,” the Baháʼí worldview, and Theosophy. The genesis of this is likely in the first instance at the level of lifeworlds, as when, for example, the Dalai Lama describes his lifeworld as “half-Marxist, half-Buddhist;” it is thus possible that others may adopt this view in which case, at some ill-defined or vague tipping-point, we arrive at a newly fashioned full-fledged worldview. In his book, Buddhism and Christianity: Rivals and Allies (Macmillan Press, 1993), Smart envisioned a future in which worldview criticism (or evaluation, including the critique of ideology) and construction will lead to “greater synthesis and eclecticism,” a higher-order pluralism, if you will, but qualified this expectation by stating unequivocally that “worldviews will not merge in the foreseeable future.”³

The word “ideology” is today often used as virtually if not actually synonymous with “worldview,” thus emptied of its original critical content, a development that stems in part from some ambiguous and vague formulations of Marx and Engels themselves, which were exploited by later Marxists. In attempting to distinguish between worldviews and ideologies, I want to retain or recover the concept of ideology as “referring to a distortion of thought which stems from, and conceals, social contradictions,” put differently and concisely, our notion of ideology should have a “clear-cut negative and critical connotation.”⁴

Notes

1. This was the title of a book by Ninian Smart, Beyond Ideology: Religion and the Future of Western Civilization (Harper & Row, 1981), a work at times absolutely brilliant but also relying occasionally on rather questionable assumptions or premises and marked by blind-spots not typical of Ninian’s work.
2. Cf. too Ninian’s further comments on the role of Liberalism: “Liberal values try to find the truth: they are the foundation of modern seeking. There may be colonial [or post-colonial] pollution in liberalism. But criticism, including criticism of colonial pollution [ideology for Marxists] is also part of the liberal ideal. Liberal study as such is no more Western than science itself. Science and liberal values had to arise somewhere.” In saying this, Ninian is implying we avoid the (informal) “genetic fallacy,” that is, explaining or dismissing Liberalism solely in terms or because of its geo-political and historical origins, it being stained, as it were, with original sin.
3. Ninian’s thoughts on this subject can be favorably compared with and in several respects complements the material in the late Hector-Neri Castañeda’s essay, “Philosophy as a Science and as a Worldview” (in Avner Cohen and Marcelo Dascal, eds., The Institution of Philosophy: A Discipline in Crisis?, 1989) although, strictly speaking, Castañeda is writing about philosophies qua philosophy. For example, among the consequences of “pluralistic meta-philosophy” noted by Castañeda is a “later stage in the development of philosophy” in which we will be rendered fit to engage in a “comparative study of master theories of the world and experience,” or what he terms “dia-philosophy.” In other words, our master theories of philosophical structures will be sufficiently rich and comprehensive for us to be able to articulate holistic and dia philosophical critique: “compar[ing] two equally comprehensive theories catering to exactly the same rich collection of data, and, second, assess[ing] the compared theories in terms of their diverse illumination of the data.” “The natural adversary attitude” will take the form of “criticisms across systems or theories,” but “not as refutations or strong objections, but as contributions of new data as formulations of hurdles for steady development.” Castañeda christens the development of master theories of the world and experience for dia-philosophical comparison “sym-philosophy:” “Thus the deeper sense in which ALL philosophers are members of one and the same team is the sense in which we are all sym-philosophers: playing our varied instruments in the production of the dia-philosophical symphony.”
4. Please see the entry on “ideology” by Jorge Larrain in Tom Bottomore, ed., A Dictionary of Marxist Thought (Blackwell, 2nd revised ed., 1991): 247-252.