The Ruling Elites- How They Justify Their Role
The ideology of cultural power
Part 2 of How Ideology Works
Last week we explored How Ideology Works In The 21st Century. In this post we go a step further and examine the question of how the ruling elites use ideology and try to gain legitimacy and authority.
The problem of elite cohesion
Historically the discussion surrounding the question of ideology has often focused on its capacity to dominate and legitimate. While these qualities attributed to ideology are important themes to consider, they need to be discussed in relation to the problem of elite or ruling-class cohesion. Ideology is not simply about influencing the public. It also provides the ruling class and elites with a narrative that can justify their privileged status and right to rule. Ideology provides the medium for developing a common view of the world. It offers a grammar of meaning and language and rules through which members of the elite can arrive at a shared understanding and communicate with one another.
Numerous observers believe that in the contemporary era, the ideology that justifies the privileged status of the ruling elites is a mixture of neo-liberalism and meritocracy. An example of this type of ideology is that of the cognitive elite, which Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray outline in their widely debated, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life [i]. Yet, the claim that an aristocracy of talent runs society tends to provoke resentment and hostility and can, therefore, not be used too explicitly to legitimate class domination. It is widely understood that claiming authority based on intellectual or, indeed, any form of superiority is likely to provoke resentment. Even the idea of a meritocracy is criticised on the ground that it breeds resentment amongst people who did not make the grade. That is why cognitive privilege tends to be refracted through a narrative of expertise and professionalism. This way, a claim to authority can be asserted and maintained by grounding it in professionalism and expertise.
How the so-called cognitive elite has sought to gain and maintain its authority is by instrumentally applying science to the problems of morality, politics and culture. Scientism purports to apply scientific principles to the domain of human behaviour, value and morality. Its advocates believe that they possess the insight necessary for curing the diseases of culture and for producing a new, enlightened, aware citizen. In this way, they have established a corporate identity as The Aware. They implicitly claim that they possess the authority to decide what that awareness means. Through wielding this cultural power, they strive to bring people’s inner life and consciousness under their control.
They regard themselves as possessing superior sensibilities to the conformist ways of others. Today, this sensibility is expressed through calls for ‘raising awareness’. The term ‘raising awareness’ implicitly draws attention to the superiority of aware people over those who are unaware. The state of being aware serves as a mark of cultural distinction, connoting an identity of superiority towards those who are presumably still in the dark. Those who are aware or are members of the Awareness Raising class do not simply possess information that the unaware lack. They are also self-aware and psychologically more in tune with reality than their emotionally illiterate inferiors.
As Stewart Justman explains in his insightful study, The Psychological Mystique, ‘awareness’ is a ‘good impossible to question and a power impossible to. oppose’ Initiatives designed to raise awareness provide participants with virtues and moral qualities that distinguish them from those who do not see the light. The very gesture of ‘raising awareness’ thus involves drawing symbolic distinctions between those who possess this quality and those who do not. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, in recent decades, the meaning of being aware has shifted from being on guard to becoming well-informed. In its 2008 revision of the term, the OED added that being aware meant ‘generally concerned and well informed’ and being sensitive and ‘savvy’.
The imputation of intelligence, sensitivity, broadmindedness, sophistication and enlightenment ensure that campaigns oriented towards awareness raising provide an important cultural resource for their participants. Those who draw on these resources have every incentive to inflate the behavioural and cultural distinction between themselves and the rest of society. That is why awareness raisers are preoccupied with constructing lifestyles that contrast sharply with their perceived inferiors.
Despite its innocuous and feel-good appearance, the word ‘awareness’ is a politically loaded one. To be aware is to be informed, but it also signifies being watchful, vigilant, being on one’s guard. In its most neutral form, raising awareness can mean enhancing people’s consciousness of a problem. But in practice, the call on someone to raise their awareness is a demand to adopt the awareness raiser’s outlook and values. Raising awareness targets supposedly outdated norms and values, customs and forms of behaviour, and claims to unmask prejudice and hurtful and dangerous assumptions. The possession of awareness is a marker of superior status, while its absence represents moral inferiority. That is why the refusal to abide by the exhortation to ‘be aware’ invites the act of moral condemnation.
Though The Aware do not use this term to refer to themselves, they perceive themselves as possessing the moral authority to raise the public’s awareness. The project of raising awareness is devoted to changing the so-called obsolescent ‘out-of-date’ attitudes of groups. The recurring theme promoted by The Aware is the necessity for cultural change.
Raising awareness is a quasi-ideological project directed at individuals. Unlike classical ideologies, which sought to transform society, awareness-raising aims to change individual attitudes and behaviour, in effect to reform or re-engineer personhood. But it is also more than that. By accepting the outlook of the awareness-raiser, a person implicitly recognises the authority of the aware. The very act of putting oneself in the position of raising awareness represents a claim to authority.
Those who are aware do not constitute a formal group. Nevertheless, a heterogenous body of awareness raisers embody attitudes and beliefs that distinguish them from their target audience. Their possession of awareness is not simply a technical, scientific or intellectual accomplishment but also a moral one. At least implicitly, they assume that, as against the unaware, they possess a degree of moral superiority. So, the claim that someone’s awareness needs to be raised conveys the implication of moral inferiority. The use of expressions like ‘they don’t get it’ or ‘educate yourself’ evokes a relationship where there are those who ‘got it’ and who are ‘educated’ and those who live in a state of ignorance and unawareness.
In implicitly and sometimes explicitly drawing this distinction, different awareness raisers – public health activists, parenting experts, sex educationalists, therapists, trainers and identity politics educators – perceive themselves to be in a position of moral authority. They even possess unique or expert insights into the secrets of the art of life. In its politicised form, elites mobilise awareness as a resource for the legitimation of their superior status.
This status authorises them to believe that they know what is in the best interests of the unaware. They constantly point out that because the unaware do not understand their true interests, they frequently fail to realise what’s good for them. They often assume that their target audience possesses outdated traditional beliefs and prejudices that threaten the unaware and wider society. An intensely polarised representation of the moral distinction between the aware and unaware is frequently found in discussions about childrearing. As one very aware commentator on parenting matters explained in December 1922: ‘the average mother of to-day understands’ the ‘mental and spiritual enemies, these psychological foes lurking to prey upon her child as little as her grandmother understood the physical danger of germs.’
Parenting experts' infantilised representation of parents offers a paradigm of how awareness raisers regard the unaware. Although in one form or another, awareness raising is a pursuit that has been around for some time, it is only in recent decades that it has been systematically recast into an activity that legitimates the activity and status of government and sections of the ruling class.
Whereas in the past, the attempt to raise awareness focused on broad social issues such as child labour and the plight of the poor – today, it tends to direct its attention to matters that arise in the domain of the personal – health, behaviour etc. Awareness-raising also fosters a sense of group cohesion and mission among identitarian activists. Through the possession of aware attitudes, awareness-raising groups set themselves apart, reinforce their status and draw a moral contrast between their supposedly superior lifestyles and the morally inferior lifestyles of the rest of society.
Awareness-raisers frequently exhibit an enthusiasm, not unlike that of zealous missionaries. They believe themselves to be in possession of the truth itself. The implicit intolerance towards dissident views shown by impatient awareness-raisers is captured by today’s put-down of choice: ‘Educate yourself.’
The late Irish commentator, Desmond Fennell, characterised today’s raft of awareness-raisers as ‘the Correctorate’. Wielding tremendous cultural and institutional power, they use opaque language, consisting of words like ‘inappropriate’ or ‘problematic’, to try to ‘correct’ people. But no matter how often awareness-raisers invoke science or insist on their correctness, their project lacks moral force. And above all, it fails to provide people with a web of meaning through which they can understand their place in the world. Today’s cultural elites may talk endlessly about raising awareness. But they seem painfully unaware of their own failings. In thrall to the ideology without a name, they are not solving cultural conflicts – they are driving them.
Though awareness-raising can often come across as a benevolent act of enlightening people, it also serves as a medium of political domination. In the 19th century, raising awareness served as a more or less explicit ideological project. Its target was to combat what was characterised as false consciousness and, more specifically, the false consciousness of the working class. Marxists, socialists and progressives all believed that people suffer from illusions and mystifications that had to be combated to free people from their false consciousness. In their German Ideology (1846), Marx and Engels declared;
‘Hitherto men have constantly made up for themselves false conceptions about themselves, about what they are and what they ought to be. . . . Let us liberate them from the chimeras, the ideas, the dogmas, imaginary beings under the yoke of which they are pining away.’
The new discipline of psychology also pursued rendering people conscious about their illusions and misconceptions. In his Ideology and Utopia (1936), the sociologist Karl Mannheim wrote about how the discovery of the unconscious is used as a weapon to denote a superior status: ‘at first those parties which possessed the new “intellectual weapons” the unmasking of the unconscious, had a terrific advantage over their adversaries’. It gave the person doing the unmasking a ‘weapon of marvellous superiority’[ii]. This weapon of marvellous superiority has been seized with both hands by The Aware, who rely on the ideology of scientism to legitimate their activity.
Mannheim’s insight into the role played using psychology to endow those unmasking the unconscious with a sense of superiority is important for understanding the ideological role of awareness raising. Some have referred to the concept of ‘treatment ideology’ to illuminate this trend. Schneid defines
‘treatment ideology as the complex set of beliefs health care providers hold about mental health, illness and treatment’[iii]. Others refer to what they characterise as the ‘medical model’ as the ‘Ideology of the Therapeutic State’[iv].
As I noted in my study, Therapy Culture, the ideological turn towards it, is indissolubly linked with the exhaustion of the main political ideologies of the 20th century – liberalism, conservatism, socialism and communism. The dominant narratives used to interpret political and socio-economic developments lost much of their legitimacy. Problems previously interpreted as principally social were increasingly presented as cultural and psychological. In its psychological form, Scientism readily converged with the cultural ambition of identity politics. In this way, both cultural practices and individual beliefs were challenged by Awareness Raisers' activities. The relative ease with which so many dimensions of public life became medicalised highlights the effectiveness of this form of ideological thinking.
In Part 3, we will discuss the problem of Authority.
[i] The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life {New York: The Free Press, 1994).
[ii] Mannheim, K. (1960) (published 1936) Ideology and Utopia, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd: London, pp.36-37.
[iii] Scheid, T.L., 1994. An explication of treatment ideology among mental health care providers. Sociology of Health & Illness, 16(5), p.670
[iv] Dee Leifer, R. (1990). Introduction: The Medical Model as the Ideology of the Therapeutic State. The Journal of Mind and Behavior, 11(3/4), 247–258.