The notion of ideology is very important in political thought, as well as in everyday discourse. But even though scholars have produced mountains of erudite writing on the topic, there’s disagreement about exactly what ideology is and how, if at all, we can square the various notions of ideology with one another.

Most current notions of ideology grew out of the 19th century writings of Karl Marx. Marx’s main discussion of it is inThe German Ideology, an early work that he co-authored with his friend and benefactor Friedrich Engels. Marx and Engels argue that economic forces drive social life. It’s the economic facts on the ground, and the class structure arising from them, that are responsible for the beliefs, values, and assumptions that are prevalent in any society. In their day (as in ours) most people took it for granted that it’s our beliefs and values that shape economic structures, rather than vice versa. But Marx and Engels turned the commonplace view on its head. They argued that people who believe that ideas have priority over the material conditions of life are enmeshed in the web of ideology.

They illustrate their point with an intriguing analogy. “If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process”. A camera obscura is a box (or sometimes a whole room) with a small hole in one of its sides. When light shines through the hole, it projects an upside-down image of the outside world on the opposite interior wall of the box, just like the way that light passing through the pupil of the eye projects an inverted image on the retina. Their point is that ideology presents us with an upside-down picture of thesocialworld—a deformed representation which, if we are not careful, we are likely to mistake for reality.

There’s more to extract from the metaphor. The camera obscura wasn’tdesigned倒立:产生倒立的图像它这样做是光学定律的结果。人类的眼睛也不是为产生倒置的图像而设计的(在这种情况下，是进化的结果)(我们的大脑必须把图像颠倒过来)。记住这一点，马克思和恩格斯的类比表明，意识形态的目的并不是生成一幅扭曲的社会世界图景。这种颠倒只是“历史生命过程”——支配社会制度发展的规律——的结果。

我将用一个例子来说明这一点。白人至上主义，一种认为白人在本质上优于有色人种的意识形态信仰，在17世纪和18世纪随着跨大西洋奴隶制的发展和扩张而兴起。人们很容易想象欧洲人奴役非洲人是因为他们认为非洲人低人一等，但马克思和恩格斯会说，这种解释本末倒置。The truth, they would say, is that white supremacism was aconsequenceof slavery rather than its cause. Europeans didn’t enslave Africans because they believed them to be inferior: they believed them to be inferior because they enslaved them. And Europeans didn’t intentionallycraftthe ideology to suit their purposes; itemergedas a result of the rise of a capitalist economy that allowed planters to rake in huge profits using slave labor.

The picture of ideology that I’ve just presented sits uncomfortably beside a different strand of Marxist thinking—one that states that ideologies are designed to legitimate统治精英的地位。Terry Eagleton rightly notes in his bookIdeology: An Introductionthat, “This is probably the single most widely accepted definition of ideology” and he goes on to list six “strategies” by means of which they are implemented.

A dominant power may legitimate itself bypromotingbeliefs and values congenial to it;naturalizinganduniversalizingsuch beliefs so as to render them self-evident and apparently inevitable;denigratingideas which might challenge it;excludingrival forms of thought, perhaps by some unspoken but systematic logic; andobscuringsocial reality in ways convenient to itself.

Reading this description, it’s easy to imagine that the 1%deliberatelyconcoct and promote ideologies to keep the 99% in line. But this way of looking at things bumps up against the fact that the purveyors of ideology are addicted to their own Kool-Aid. Far from being cynical manipulators, they believe, often zealously, in the falsehoods that they dispense. Of course, it would be breathtakingly naive to say that the Powers That Be never feed disinformation to the public. Of course they do. But this is propaganda, notideology.The beneficiaries of the transatlantic slave trade didn’t (for the most part) wittingly fabricate lies about white superiority in order to feather their own nests. Theyreally did believethat white people are intrinsically superior to people of color.

The two descriptions of ideology that I’ve presented seem irreconcilable. One takes ideology to be the offspring of impersonal economic forces, and the other claims that it has the purpose of maintaining the power of dominant elites. Each view makes sense, but it’s hard to see how they can both be true.

我认为有一个解决这个难题的方法——一种将两个账户融合成一个无缝的整体的方法。奇怪的是，它来自生物学哲学。让我解释一下……

When we’re trying to understand the natural world, the principle that parts of organisms have purposes—that there’s something that they’refor—seems both obvious and indispensable.Eyes are for seeing, wings are for flying, teeth are for chewing, and so on. But how can account for the purposes of natural things? Clearly, things like eyes, wings, and teeth aren’t like can-openers, which get their purpose from the intentions of their designers (thanks to Darwin, God exited the explanatory arena a long time ago).

从亚里士多德时代起，哲学家们就试图解决这个问题，但直到最近才取得成功。一位名叫Ruth Millikan的哲学家似乎在进化论的帮助下终于找到了答案。她是这样解释的。一件自然事物要有目的，它必须是世系的一部分，也就是说，它必须是某种先前事物的再生产(或再生产)，必须有某种关于该事物的祖先所做的事情导致了它们的再生产。The purpose of any natural thing iswhatever its ancestors did that caused them to be reproduced.

As is often the case with philosophical theories, this description makes the thesis sound a lot more complicated than it really is. Here’s the idea. Hearts pump blood. They also make a pitter-patter sound. It’s a no-brainer that the purpose of hearts is to pump blood rather than make a pitter-patter sound. That’s because pumping blood, rather than making a pitter-patter sound, accounts for why hearts were reproduced down the generations.

这一理论的效用远远超过生物学。Anythingcan have a purpose if it’s part of a chain of reproductions that get copied because of their effects. It can be used to explain the purposes of words, social conventions, learned behaviors and….ideologies. Ideological beliefs are members of lineages. And they’re reproduced, again and again, because of their effects, and these effects are their purpose.

Looking at things from this perspective banishes the appearance of contradiction. It allows us to understand how ideologies can be the upshot of non-intentional social processes and yet also have purposes. Let’s consider white supremacism one last time to see if this analysis pans out. Slavery was big business. Europeans accumulated enormous fortunes by creating and sustaining what was, in the words of the historian David Brion Davis, “the world’s first system of multinational production for what emerged as a mass market – a market for slave-produced sugar, tobacco, coffee, chocolate, dye-stuffs, rice, hemp, and cotton”.

人们很容易低估其庞大的规模。“到1820年，超过1010万奴隶离开非洲来到新大陆，而白人只有260万……因此，到1820年，非洲奴隶几乎占到前往美洲的庞大人口的80%，从1760年到1820年，这一移民潮中，每8.4个非洲奴隶对应一个欧洲人。种植园主、商人、进口商、制造商、造船商、保险公司和其他从人肉交易中获利的人，在很大程度上不是反社会者。他们就像你我一样，有着正常的道德感知力，他们生活在一个自由、自治和普遍人权的观念日益盛行的时代。如果他们认为非洲人在道德上和他们是平等的，那么奴隶制的暴行就会更难以容忍。很容易理解为什么白人至上主义会在这种情况下得到支持。它像病毒一样增殖，一次又一次地繁殖，因为它让信徒们积累了优势。正是这些优势确定了它的集体目标，将其从一个单纯的想法转变为一种成熟的意识形态。

总而言之，这两种意识形态的观点，起初似乎是不一致的，但实际上是完全兼容的。Ideologies arise from purposeless economic forcesandthey have the purpose of legitimating dominance. They’re self-serving representations of the political landscapeandthose who endorse them are committed to their truth.

It’s excruciatingly difficult for those of us who are ideologically entangled (including virtually every fan of中国伊朗亚洲杯比赛直播and every reader of this blog) to free ourselves enough to see through the distorted representations to the disturbing social reality beyond. But if anything has the power to assist us in this liberatory task, it’s good, clear, politically engaged philosophy.