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Ideological dilemmas: A social psychology of everyday thinking
inc/~~~k/. Dttf: Vol. IO.No. I I. Pp. 1215.1989 Pergamon Press plc. Pnnted in Great Britaln
Person.
M. BILLIC.SUAS COSM)R. D. EDWARDS.IM. GASE. D. MIDDLETONand A. RADLEY:Ideological Dilemmas: A Social Ps.rcho/og~~q/ Erer~da~ Thinking. Sage. London (1988). I80 pp., Paperback; ISBN O-8039-8096-5. The six authors of this volume are social psychologists with a mission-a mission apparently conceived when they “came together as a team in the Loughborough Discourse and Rhetoric Group”. They want to explain that the thinking of all of us is ‘dilemmatic’ (or ‘dialogical’). By this they mean, it transpires, that our everyday thinking is essentially complex and shot through with “theories and structures which are contradictory in principle”. To display such contradictions will arguably enrich psychology and lend credence to a generally romantic (crisis-rich) and idealistic (consciousness-rich) critique of Western society as being replete with deep-seated cognitive tensions and as thus exhibiting a pressing need for ideological reconstruction. At the very least, we ma! all have to be considered ‘lay philosophers’, just as George Kelly once proclaimed us all to be lay psychologists. Now our ‘discourse‘. ‘theories’. ‘rhetoric’ and ‘praxis’ may leave few doubts in these authors’ own minds as to the numerosity and gravity of our ‘dilemmas’. Yet neither doubts nor dilemmas are deemed amenable to quantification as British social psychology staggers another book further towards its long-expected extinction as a branch of science. Apparently we cannot determine by any systematic means how numerous or how grave are our society’s supposed dilemmas; nor whether our own dilemmatic problems are worse than those of other cultures and ideologies; nor, indeed. whether we have any proper. non-resoluble dilemmas at all. Hence there is something of a problem of demonstration for the authors. It may be (rhetorically), as they opine, that “our social dilemmas are ideological”. that “our dilemmas of ideology are social dilemmas”. that “our social ideologies are dialogically dilemmatic”, or whatever. Yet these utterances-however the codewords are revamped--continue to sound more like the Spartist sputterings of frustrated social shakers than like propositions to which any truth-value could ever be assigned. Nor any numbers. facts and findings alone in short supply in this putative challenge to our thoughtways and invitation to a still more agonised relativism than social science already provides. Even examples of our problematic dilemmas are thin on the ground; and it is far from obvious that any of the authors’ selected dilemmas really have horns. A hypothetical speciality cook receives an impossibly large and sudden order from a valued customer-hardly a matter for breast-beating, one would have thought. Rousseau acknowledged the merits of both individualism and statism-but (presaging ‘democratic centralism’) reconciled them to his own satisfaction by absorbing the individual will entirely into the despotic General Will of the revolutionary people. Teachers think pupils need training in both freedom and responsibility-correctly, for each of these values depends upon the other. Exponents of modern feminism cannot agree whether men and women really differ (e.g. in rapacity)-but most of the rest of us can. One of the authors’ chapters is so hard pressed to delineate a remotely thought-defying dilemma that it settles for “In the midst of health we are in sickness”. Such are the brain-teasers that are dredged up for readers’ consideration. So much for the deeply dilemmatical dialogues of our discourse “Who will reconstruct his ideology for this?” Probably the authors come closest to making some kind of a point when discussing ‘disclaimers’ of the ‘some-of-my-bestfriends-are-Jews-but .’ type. Certainly they approximate animation over their discovery of such ‘new racism’: one ‘disclaimer’ of colour prejudice (elicited from a IS-yr-old girl who had once dated a black boy but later came to support the National Front) calls forth 20 pages of exegesis and critique of entrenched British prejudices. Yet it is pretty plain that the only interesting dilemma here is one for the authors themselves. As social psychologists they feel obliged to insist on the omnipresence and insalubrity of prejudice against designated minorities; at the same time their residual if innumerate professionalism requires them to show fairness when discussing those of their Ss who profess to perpetrate discrimination or who at least contemplate its possibilities after years ofreverse racism, compensation programmes and ‘anti-racist’ propaganda. In fact. the authors might be able to resolve even this dilemma for themselves if they read Robert Nisbet’s Prejudices. Just why social psychologists should grind away with pseudo-philosophy about our scarcely daunting dilemmas thus tends to become less obvious as the book proceeds. Presumably the authors share with Freud of old, and with developmental psychologists of the more recent past, a fundamental mistrust of human rationality and objectivity. Unlike Freudians and Piagetians. however, the present authors have no engaging causal fable with which to subvert naturalistic, common sense understandings of the assimilative workings of human intelligence. Nor do they explore the way in which major ideologies like capitalism and socialism already provide millions of people with passably intelligent, dynamic compromises between such principles as liberty and law (in the case of capitalism) and between equality and authority (in the case of the more politically successful manifestations of socialist ideology). So convinced are the authors of the necessary persistence of dilemmas that they neglect to explore psychologically these well-meant political syntheses at which modern man has actually arrived. Finally, the book is largely devoid of humour. There is a little analysis of the power-structure looming behind the formally humanistic invitation “Kate, would you share your feelings with us?” Otherwise, mesmerized by the existence of even the dullest dilemmas, the authors do not have much fun with them. Readers who can already cope with Marx, Sartre, Adorn0 and Althusser in the original will probably find mild diversion in this volume. Yet there is a risk for them. They may at last fall victims to the pronouncement of the original German idealist, Hegel, that “every abstract proposition of understanding, taken precisely as it is given, naturally veers round into its opposite”. It is one of the great strengths of Aristotle’s objectivist belief in the resolving power of human intelligence that even those who most insist on our mental dilemmas, tensions and contradictions must come round to his realistic view in the end if they take themselves seriously for long enough. The present authors would wish us all to be romantic (lay) philosophers, aware as they are themselves of deep dilemmas, and driven eventually to reach for a reconstructivist Superman to solve such problems heroically in the social revolution for which Utopians pine. Mercifully, there is a more classical, integrated and optimistic view of the human condition and of the analytic, objective and creative role of intelligence in resolving our alleged dilemmas: at least some lay romantics can be expected to embrace it as a reaction to reading Ideological Dilemmas.
CHRLSBRAND
1215
Person.
M. BILLIC.SUAS COSM)R. D. EDWARDS.IM. GASE. D. MIDDLETONand A. RADLEY:Ideological Dilemmas: A Social Ps.rcho/og~~q/ Erer~da~ Thinking. Sage. London (1988). I80 pp., Paperback; ISBN O-8039-8096-5. The six authors of this volume are social psychologists with a mission-a mission apparently conceived when they “came together as a team in the Loughborough Discourse and Rhetoric Group”. They want to explain that the thinking of all of us is ‘dilemmatic’ (or ‘dialogical’). By this they mean, it transpires, that our everyday thinking is essentially complex and shot through with “theories and structures which are contradictory in principle”. To display such contradictions will arguably enrich psychology and lend credence to a generally romantic (crisis-rich) and idealistic (consciousness-rich) critique of Western society as being replete with deep-seated cognitive tensions and as thus exhibiting a pressing need for ideological reconstruction. At the very least, we ma! all have to be considered ‘lay philosophers’, just as George Kelly once proclaimed us all to be lay psychologists. Now our ‘discourse‘. ‘theories’. ‘rhetoric’ and ‘praxis’ may leave few doubts in these authors’ own minds as to the numerosity and gravity of our ‘dilemmas’. Yet neither doubts nor dilemmas are deemed amenable to quantification as British social psychology staggers another book further towards its long-expected extinction as a branch of science. Apparently we cannot determine by any systematic means how numerous or how grave are our society’s supposed dilemmas; nor whether our own dilemmatic problems are worse than those of other cultures and ideologies; nor, indeed. whether we have any proper. non-resoluble dilemmas at all. Hence there is something of a problem of demonstration for the authors. It may be (rhetorically), as they opine, that “our social dilemmas are ideological”. that “our dilemmas of ideology are social dilemmas”. that “our social ideologies are dialogically dilemmatic”, or whatever. Yet these utterances-however the codewords are revamped--continue to sound more like the Spartist sputterings of frustrated social shakers than like propositions to which any truth-value could ever be assigned. Nor any numbers. facts and findings alone in short supply in this putative challenge to our thoughtways and invitation to a still more agonised relativism than social science already provides. Even examples of our problematic dilemmas are thin on the ground; and it is far from obvious that any of the authors’ selected dilemmas really have horns. A hypothetical speciality cook receives an impossibly large and sudden order from a valued customer-hardly a matter for breast-beating, one would have thought. Rousseau acknowledged the merits of both individualism and statism-but (presaging ‘democratic centralism’) reconciled them to his own satisfaction by absorbing the individual will entirely into the despotic General Will of the revolutionary people. Teachers think pupils need training in both freedom and responsibility-correctly, for each of these values depends upon the other. Exponents of modern feminism cannot agree whether men and women really differ (e.g. in rapacity)-but most of the rest of us can. One of the authors’ chapters is so hard pressed to delineate a remotely thought-defying dilemma that it settles for “In the midst of health we are in sickness”. Such are the brain-teasers that are dredged up for readers’ consideration. So much for the deeply dilemmatical dialogues of our discourse “Who will reconstruct his ideology for this?” Probably the authors come closest to making some kind of a point when discussing ‘disclaimers’ of the ‘some-of-my-bestfriends-are-Jews-but .’ type. Certainly they approximate animation over their discovery of such ‘new racism’: one ‘disclaimer’ of colour prejudice (elicited from a IS-yr-old girl who had once dated a black boy but later came to support the National Front) calls forth 20 pages of exegesis and critique of entrenched British prejudices. Yet it is pretty plain that the only interesting dilemma here is one for the authors themselves. As social psychologists they feel obliged to insist on the omnipresence and insalubrity of prejudice against designated minorities; at the same time their residual if innumerate professionalism requires them to show fairness when discussing those of their Ss who profess to perpetrate discrimination or who at least contemplate its possibilities after years ofreverse racism, compensation programmes and ‘anti-racist’ propaganda. In fact. the authors might be able to resolve even this dilemma for themselves if they read Robert Nisbet’s Prejudices. Just why social psychologists should grind away with pseudo-philosophy about our scarcely daunting dilemmas thus tends to become less obvious as the book proceeds. Presumably the authors share with Freud of old, and with developmental psychologists of the more recent past, a fundamental mistrust of human rationality and objectivity. Unlike Freudians and Piagetians. however, the present authors have no engaging causal fable with which to subvert naturalistic, common sense understandings of the assimilative workings of human intelligence. Nor do they explore the way in which major ideologies like capitalism and socialism already provide millions of people with passably intelligent, dynamic compromises between such principles as liberty and law (in the case of capitalism) and between equality and authority (in the case of the more politically successful manifestations of socialist ideology). So convinced are the authors of the necessary persistence of dilemmas that they neglect to explore psychologically these well-meant political syntheses at which modern man has actually arrived. Finally, the book is largely devoid of humour. There is a little analysis of the power-structure looming behind the formally humanistic invitation “Kate, would you share your feelings with us?” Otherwise, mesmerized by the existence of even the dullest dilemmas, the authors do not have much fun with them. Readers who can already cope with Marx, Sartre, Adorn0 and Althusser in the original will probably find mild diversion in this volume. Yet there is a risk for them. They may at last fall victims to the pronouncement of the original German idealist, Hegel, that “every abstract proposition of understanding, taken precisely as it is given, naturally veers round into its opposite”. It is one of the great strengths of Aristotle’s objectivist belief in the resolving power of human intelligence that even those who most insist on our mental dilemmas, tensions and contradictions must come round to his realistic view in the end if they take themselves seriously for long enough. The present authors would wish us all to be romantic (lay) philosophers, aware as they are themselves of deep dilemmas, and driven eventually to reach for a reconstructivist Superman to solve such problems heroically in the social revolution for which Utopians pine. Mercifully, there is a more classical, integrated and optimistic view of the human condition and of the analytic, objective and creative role of intelligence in resolving our alleged dilemmas: at least some lay romantics can be expected to embrace it as a reaction to reading Ideological Dilemmas.
CHRLSBRAND
1215