As evidenced by at least one previous post, I’ve been pretty well exercised by the silliness associated with “oh-my-god-I-can’t-believe-he-said-that (even-if-its-true)” nature of Obama’s reference to the bitterness, xenophobic communitariainism and libertarian approach to guns that characterizes post-industrial rural America in the East (as if it didn’t also apply to much of the South and West.  On this front, and even more important in the light of the minor brouhaha over Obama’s decision not to campaign hardly at all in West Virginia, the New York Times yesterday ran an op-ed by Charles Blow, showing that those counties in Appalachia – which are “whiter, poorer, older, more rural and less educated than the rest of the country, and seems to be voting like a bloc” – that have voted have voted for Obama at a rate of about 12 percent.  At the same time, less than ten percent of the 410 Appalachian counties voted Democratic in both the 2000 and 2004 elections.

Contingently tied to this, I am teaching a general education summer class in Society and the Individual at Michigan State this summer and assigned Horace Minor’s semi-classic article, Body Ritual among the Nacerima for next Monday.  That article, which does a useful – if neither up-to-date nor exceptional – job of pointing out the strangeness of the ways American’s understand the meaning of and engage in the treatment of their hair, teeth and illnesses, is reprinted – with permission – on John Dowell’s pages at MSU and, at the bottom, there are links to other resources, the last of which is one to P. Kerim Friedman’s anthropology blog,  Savage Minds.  On one of Friedman’s other pages focused on Anthropological classics, he refers to Slavoj Zizek’s definition of ideology as an “active refusal to know.”

Zizek’s definition of ideology struck me hard and it immediately reminded me of 1) the discussions in Society and the Individual class over the meaning of “the social construction of reality” advocated by Pragmatists and embraced by the strand of sociology called Symbolic Interactionism and 2) the semi-regular instances in the narrative component of me teaching evaluations which state that I need to keep my opinions out of my teaching and simply teach the material. 

In the latter case, I am almost always accused of being a liberal and being biased.  While I do express opinions when teaching, I always preface them with the statement that these are opinions about things I know relatively little about… these are not the instances students are writing about.  What has a good number of the students I have from whiter, poorer, rural and less educated areas of Michigan concerned is that the sociological research presented to them doesn’t jibe with what they’ve been taught – and since many of these students have been taught by post-modern conservatives that “scientific theory” is “just theory” and therefore basically just opinion, repeatedly studied and tested analysis of social situations which undermine cherished beliefs are treated as opinion, the teacher is then defined as biased, and the selection of class materials is then seen as manipulative.  This represents an active refusal to know – and it is correlated with two other moments embedded in ideology, an active refusal to question oneself or explore the world.

It is at this point that the latter issue overlaps with the former.  “Social construction” has been wrongly understood as idealism – stereotypically presented as the belief that, if we all “simply” changed what we BELIEVE, then the world would BE different.  The foundational ideas of social constructivism are twofold.  First, there is no unmediated access to reality – think the Heisenberg principal writ large… the mere fact that there is an observer/apparatus affects the activity of the objects under study.  Second, all material that exists in historical in nature – its material existence and cultural meaning are products of prior engagements between diverse and multiscalar material processes and social actions.  Combining the two, and making everything more chaotic, the increasingly complex and diverse divisions of labor in global society makes this all worse because there are so many different observers, apparatuses, institutions and meanings that any idea of a universal science (and therefore nature) or culture (and therefore humanity) is indefensible.

The problem most folks have with this approach is that both premodern and modern ideas of nature and society, the sciences and the humanities, the worldly and the spiritual, were based on the idea of there being singular, knowable laws and truths about the way the world really is.  The idea that this singular universe of knowledge – taught at universities, see? – is a fiction and that reality with a capital R, science with a capital S and god (or at least the good) with a capital G is inordinately upsetting to romantic cultural conservatives and progressive scientistic liberals – both are afraid of relativism, the former moral relativism, the latter scientific relativism.  I’d argue, and do argue in my classes, that the problem is not relativism, the problem is the idea that there ought to be a singular standard of spiritual and scientific truth that experts ought to be able to give us… in short, the problem is that we actively refuse to want to know, to question and to explore.  Most of us have been taught this kind of passivity, this kind of receptivity, this kind of moral and material authoritarianism all our lives… and it is the foundation of ideology. 

Most tragically, this authoritarian ideology generates an inactive, bitter, xenophobic, and isolationist populace – one uncommitted to active participation in democratizing civil society.  The response to social constructivism, the response to the know-nothingness of modern conservatism (see the Chris Matthews/Kevin James exchange), and the response to a world that is in perpetual ecological, scientific, personal, health, infrastructural and cultural – much less political and economic – crises, is democracy.  This is not the formal, elitist democracy Bush talks so much about, it is the democratization not only of representative democracy but also administrative bureaucracy, it is the democratization not only of market consumption but also of commodity production, and it is the democratization of science and environmental policy, of medicine and self-realization, and of culture and social space.

The key, of course, is that these kinds of democracy demand that we want and do not fear to know, that we want and do not fear questioning and that we want to and do not fear exploration.