Kindness and the Good Society: Connections of the Heart

Chapter 7 Ideologies

Chapter 7 Ideologies My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see. —Joseph Conrad, The Heart of Darkness Marxist Critique The object of this chapter is to resume and extend the analysis of false consciousness in terms of self-deception, dogma, or principle blindness, and the desire for power. Marx’s word for dogma, or principle blindness, is, of course, ideology. In the same light, I will extend his analysis to the work of Carol Gilligan, who has also effectively advanced a hermeneutics of suspicion about the false consciousness of women. I will attempt to buttress her arguments with a sketch of a phenomenology of boyhood and manhood to match her descriptions of girlhood and womanhood. I will then conclude by defending the moral psychology begun in the last chapter against certain criticisms of it, chiefly with regard to certain radical feminist attacks on the notions of care, sympathy, and trust. As with Nietzsche, our concern with Marx is narrowly focused in a specialized context. Our only interest in his voluminous reflections lies in what those reflections can tell us about a hermeneutic suspicion of kindness. Further, like Nietzsche, Marx is worth studying these days more for his criticisms than for his solutions. The worldwide success of capitalism has apparently eliminated the viability of any other economic system or ideology. It is the only game in town; even the Chinese are enthusiastic players. However, even though the ideal of a free market is alternately appealed to as mantra or shibboleth, either way it continues to be risible for individuals, social groups and classes, and whole nations that do not have the resources to compete. Those who are excluded from the game can easily grasp that much of what Hallie and Douglass 199 said of the slave owner Marx would ascribe to the capitalist as well. Yet with slavery, there was only one clear remedy, whereas with capitalism, there are several alternatives, each of which has been defended and criticized at length in terms of its alleged economic, political, and moral advantages and its practicality . As a result, twenty-first-century debate will revolve around government restraints and interventions in a free market rather than whether there will be one. From all that appears, this debate will concentrate on two major issues: the familiar tensions between individual freedoms, and the needs of communities and conflicts between local communities and corporate power— particularly in regard to mergers, corporate ability to coerce and exploit local government and subvert local autonomy, and the preservation of local, and even national, culture. Despite its global triumph, though, capitalism will never lose its inherent injustices , even if it can shed its worst abuses, and so, as Lyotard says somewhere, Marxist criticisms of capitalism will always be privileged. Similarly, as another writer notes, “All decent social theory is a footnote to Marx, because the capitalism that Marx criticized has now become almost worldwide, with terrible, destructive impact on the world’s poor, workers, and environment” (Marsh 1999, 177).1 However, even if the untenability of Marx’s solutions leaves us unconvinced that his work is the source of all “decent social theory,” it remains true that the reason given for that conclusion does prove that no responsible social theory can ignore Marx. For, as is clear from Part One, capitalism harmfully impacts both developed and undeveloped societies through its use of nature and human beings as mere means to ends of exploitation and greed. This exploitation falls especially hard on the developing world, which is plundered for cheap labor, as in the maquiladora factories discussed earlier, and for raw materials. It is also plagued by crushing debt, massive unemployment, illiteracy , the arms trade, and a class system of a powerful, privileged elite set of landowners oppressing the impoverished mass of citizens. Corporate exploitation , aided by World Trade Organization (WTO) rules, even imperils their infants .2 These are the types of facts that have driven Derrida to exclaim, “[I]t must be cried out, at a time when some have the audacity to neo-evangelize in the name of the ideal of a liberal democracy that has finally realized itself as the ideal of human history: never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the earth and of humanity” (1994, 85). Nonetheless, there are evangelizations...