Ideology and Utopia

Helping to Explain a Corrupt Court

Author

Anne Cunningham
July 05, 2024

I would usually consider something like Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia too deep a cut to discuss here. It’s a dense sociological analysis of philosophy that I’m only reading because Mannheim was a refugee professor in Britain in the 1930s, and thus fits into some of the history and novels of the era that I’ve been reading.

As I go along, however, I keep thinking about the recent terrible Supreme Court decision offering immunity to Trump, and Mannheim’s point of view feels very relevant. The book is about the social component of knowledge, and trying to answer the question of how different groups of people can look at the same reality and understand it in contradictory or opposite ways. Mannheim says that thought is like language. We don’t study an individual person’s speech to understand language, nor should we understand a single person’s ideas as wholly theirs. People exist in community, and therefore operate in schools of thought. And some of the bonds between people and the actions they take as a group determine the lines of the reasoning they engage in as a group.

For example, Mannheim mentions that increasing democratization in Athens was a factor in the skepticism that became a popular mode of thought at the time of the Sophists:

Was it not this process of social ascent which in the Athenian democracy called forth the first great surge of scepticism in the history of Occidental thought? Were not the Sophists of the Greek Enlightenment the expression of an attitude of doubt which arose essentially out of the fact that in their thinking about every object, two modes of explanation collided? On the one hand was the mythology which was the way of thinking of a dominant nobility already doomed to decline. On the other hand was the more analytical habit of thought of an urban artisan lower stratum, which was in the process of moving upwards. Inasmuch as these two forms of interpreting the world converged in the thought of the Sophists, and since for every moral decision there were available at least two standards, and for every cosmic and social happening at least two explanations, it is no wonder that they had a sceptical notion of the value of human thought.

This idea of social conditons affecting or determining thought fed into my reactions to the recent Supreme Court decision. It was notable that this July 4th the celebration came in the wake of a court ruling that dismantled the bedrock principle on which the country is based, that we do not have a king, and that no one—certainly not the president—is above the law. What is the concept of “high crimes” written into the constitution, for which the president can be impeached, if he is basically a king who can render any crime legal by labeling it an official act? It is not only absurd given the plain language of the constitution, but it is especially absurd if you grant the founders the all-knowing status that so-called originalists like John Roberts claim to do. Is there any clearer idea inherent in the founding that we were rejecting monarchy? How on earth does someone like Roberts justify his ridiculous philosophy, when it is plainly contradicted by any plausible reading of the originalism he is supposed to stand for?

This is where the point about democratization and the change in social status became interesting as a way to interpret the ruling. It has been obvious for some time that the entire mishegoss of the Trump administration was the forces of reaction in this country lining up to reject the election of a Black president. Our country has only truly been a democracy since the passage of the Civil Rights Act, allowing everyone, including Black people, the right to vote. Obama’s presidency was the marker of that relatively new democratization, and carried along many of the ideas that went along with it, such as the idea that black lives matter.

If you don’t assume that people have well-defined principles existing separately from their social group, and instead often incorporate emotion and social prerogatives, the immunity ruling makes much more sense. Mannheim describes an early version of the idea of motivated reasoning:

It may be that, in certain spheres of knowledge, it is the impulse to act which first makes the objects of the world accessible to the acting subject, and it may be further that it is this factor which determines the selection of those elements of reality which enter into thought.

If the main motivation of your thought is to act to stop Black people from voting, or to prevent Black people from gaining political power, and to punish the rest of the country for supporting a Black president, then those goals define the theories you come up with in order to facilitate the desired action. It becomes clear, looking back at Roberts’ entire term on the court, that the main thing motivating him is undoing and negating the Civil Rights Act. That was the goal, not the nonsensical and now apparently openly self-contradictory “originalism.” The only thing originalism seems to have meant is striking out most of the Civil War era clauses of the constitution, as well as the fruits of their passing, such as the Civil Rights Act.

As Mannheim points out, just because there is social mobility for the former lower classes does not mean that the ruling class feels forced to change:

In a well stabilized society the mere infiltration of the modes of thought of the lower strata into the higher would not mean very much since the bare perception by the dominant group of possible variations in thinking would not result in their being intellectually shaken. As long as a society is stabilized on the basis of authority, and social prestige is accorded only to the achievements of the upper stratum, this class has little cause to call into question its own social existence and the value of its achievements.

One thing you can’t help but notice is how whiny someone like Justice Alito is about perceived threats to his prestige, even as he succeeded in destroying fifty years of feminist precedent in the form of Roe. It is a unifying theme in various corners of the right that they clearly see certain new ideas—such as “black lives matter”—as a threat to their interests as a class.

What really got me, though, was when Mannheim started talking about the dogma and scholasticism defining the outward projection of power. Because one thing I’ve remarked on is the preponderance of Catholics on the Supreme Court. And not just Catholics, but graduates of Jesuit institutions. In fact, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh attended the same Jesuit high school. The Jesuits, of course, being the old masters of counter-revolution. As Mannheim put it:

This intellectual stratum [the intelligentsia], organized as a caste and monopolizing the right to preach, teach, and interpret the world is conditioned by the force of two social factors. The more it makes itself the exponent of a thoroughly organized collectivity (e.g. the Church), the more its thinking tends towards ‘scholasticism.’ It must give a dogmatically binding force to modes of thought which formerly were valid only for a sect and thereby sanction the ontology and epistemology implicit in this mode of thought. The necessity of providing a united front to outsiders compels this transition.

And, further:

The second characteristic of this monopolistic type of thought is its relative remoteness from the open conflicts of everyday life; hence it is also ‘scholastic’ in this sense, i.e. academic and lifeless. This type of thought does not arise primarily from the struggle with concrete problems of life nor from trial and error, nor from experiences in mastering nature and society, but rather much more from its own need for systemization, which always refers the facts which emerge in the religious as well as in other spheres of life back to given traditional and intellectually uncontrolled premises. The antagonisms which emerge in these discussions do not embody the conflict of various modes of experience so much as various positions of power within the same social structure, which have at the time identified themselves with the different possible interpretations of the dogmatized traditional ’truth.’ The dogmatic content of the premises with which these divergent groups start and which this thought then seeks in a different way to justify turns out for the most part to be a matter of accident, if judged by the criteria of factual evidence. It is completely arbitrary in so far as it depends upon which sect happens to be successful, in accordance with historical-political destiny, in making its own intellectual and experiential traditions of the entire clerical caste of the church.

Which is to say that the ideology largely exists to protect the social group promoting it, and bears little relation to “concrete problems of life,” such as Trump becoming a dictator and destroying the country. The Supreme Court may take the view that Trump will help them and their group, but they don’t have to have that view in order to promote these particular ideas. It’s more that they arise from the type of ideas their social circle tend to have, historically, and are dear to them for that reason, not because they describe reality in any way.

One thing I noticed about the Trump presidency was that his failure to contain Covid as much as possible, and then his failure to distribute the vaccine, meant that he did significant economic damage to himself. Trump’s money comes from the rental of office spaces. We are four years out from the beginning of the pandemic and rents for office space in midtown Manhattan have still not recovered. He will likely do further damage to himself and his supporters if he is elected again. A country that is not being governed is one where all sorts of unpredictable things can happen.

The Supreme Court had to change the entire way its protection operates after the Dobbs verdict, because people started coming to protest in front of their houses—including at least one protestor who showed up to Kavanaugh’s house with a gun. In other words, in the service of protecting their class, they lost sight of the immediate impact on their homes and persons. Do they honestly think that if the U.S. descends into chaos, and the public views them as to blame, they will not feel the impact of that?

Mannheim helped me see the court’s nonsensical reasoning and justifications in the correct light. It drew back the cloak of rationality from these emotional, reactionary ideas.