It is oftentimes in moments of extreme polarization and transformation that a given ideology's unique anchor points become most (or least) visible, depending on who is looking. Part of this has to do with the intense obsessive focus on the finer points of an originating ideology, so as to legitimate a given course of action.
Contrary to the popular image of the otherworldly and doctrinaire zealot, clinging to a set of abstract ideals in a sort of detached fugue state, there are often good practical reasons for this. A successful society, as an organic collective, possesses a certain distinct character which was responsible for its particular success in a particular place and time. As it expands and grows increasingly complex in order to maintain its successful character throughout the course of this metamorphosis and expansion, attempts are made to abstract and systematize this character into an ideology which prescribes the replication and growth of this character in time and space, oftentimes specifying how the character is to adapt to varied conditions, and how that character is to be built on itself to form greater complexes, all the while retaining its original patterns of its success.
This involves a simplification into symbol which compresses the endless complexity of observable reality into manipulable and navigable artifacts, which could be leveraged to guide individual and collective actions in certain directions, the reality of which is internal to a self-referencing technological-social construct.
A good parallel might be one using a ruler to build a house: one can collapse infinitely divisible space into numerical placeholders that are set in relation to each other (measuring something in inches say) to increase or decrease magnitude, which in turn can be used to produce consistently measured building pieces so as to enclose space with a tight fit. It is the coherence and consistency of the abstraction which in turn orders a consistent material reality, which can be controlled at finer and finer levels.
Leaving construction to organic things that can either grow or remain inert and stable by their own properties results in building materials of wildly varying dimensions and properties, which can certainly be narrowed down and controlled for through traditional technique, but which ultimately leave tiny variations in place that allow for a permeability to remain between enclosed spaces. I have a sense this is an obscure point, so I want to repeat it: the more simple and clear one's abstractions and one's tools, the more consistency and coherence is allowed in material reality, which allows for tighter fits, and ultimately less permeability between spaces and more control over those spaces.
Once more from a slightly different angle: the "inch" acts as an abstract fiction with real material effects that are compounded as the materials directed by that fiction are set against each other. Precisely measured foundations allow for the building up of precisely measured walls and roofs, each additional layer of strata corresponding to and depending on the previous, which in turn can sharply divide internal and external spaces. As a side note for another time, here simplicity and complexity are both sides of the same coin, which ultimately functions to make a thing more distinct from its environment and become ever more itself.
But back to the construction of ideology. In many cases across the last couple thousand years of history, this was carried out through the maintenance of ideology in writing, which through its durability against the fragility of human memory, could be continuously returned to and then renewed, in order to verify and buttress the original character of a given guiding ideology. It was no coincidence that writing first tended to emerge in palatial economies which initially found the need to manage ever-growing material complexity and material mass with some sort of simplified accounting process, which then took off from there.
This tendency began with a more compartmental nature, remaining exclusive to a scribe class that maintained its privilege through the complexity and expense of writing itself, but which became ever more generalized and pervasive as writing both simplified (much of it through necessity in trade) and became less expensive through the generational accumulation of material wealth strata and technological evolution, which lowered the labor time and specialization required of traditional writing. And then through this steady evolution and increasing prominence of ideology, you begin to see an increased emphasis and importance placed upon ideological purity and function in the modern age.
Ideology carries with it a fetishism of its own: a given ideology can be built out further and ever higher from its anchor point - as systems of reference and direction and construction, ideologies must begin somewhere - growing ever more dazzling and complex, inspiring awe and devotion to its towering and sprawling majesties, so that the structure itself is all anyone any longer sees.
Of course, while everyone is dazzled, the entire set of foundations underneath are drifting and changing. And so a social organism, increasingly aspiring to a monolithic eternity, comes into conflict with an earthly reality in perpetual flux. In great times of stress, oftentimes the originating successful patterns have become dramatically obscured or transformed, and it becomes necessary to rediscover and renew them, which as we'll see, can make things much worse. Lost, one digs down as far as one can go, to the foundations, to see just where the ideology is coming from, using the cold, hard bedrock it is anchored to as an axiom to retrace one's steps with.
The problem lies in the idiosyncratic and often provisional and iterative nature of the anchor points themselves, which are the subject of this post. And further, where these anchor points touch down and what they commit to are the product of countless individuals and their particular values, fixations, commitments, and interests. Through the struggle of countless individuals in competing factions, a greater guiding ideology is carved out through excruciating conflict over a long period of time. This problem is illustrated well in Daniele Bollelli's excellent History on Fire podcast series on John Brown and the run-up to the American Civil War.
Given the lasting legacy of Christian ideology in the dawn of the modern era, the prevailing culture of the young United States was awash in Christian language, which was used to rationalize and legitimate one's actions and standing. In making ideological sense of the intractable conflict between pro-slavery and abolitionist interest, both sides went back to their respective roots, everyone siting differing Biblical passages to buttress their positions. And of course the pro-slavery ideologues were able to produce Old Testament passages that enthusiastically encouraged dominion and conquest, while the abolitionist ideologues were able to produce New Testament passages laying waste to the very notion of slavery.
And unfortunately both sides were right in their respective argumentation, at least in terms of the textual merit. This was because the historical figure of Jesus - and the body of theological work attributed him, or attributed to his guidance - however revolutionary and iconoclastic his religious teachings were at the time, had to anchor those teachings upon a body of traditions and understandings that were already in currency, themselves anchored to an ancient culture and tradition. However contradictory his teachings were to the older canon, he wasn't recorded as all that critical of or dismissive of the old teachings, but seemed to have intended to build upon them with reverence and respect.
Of course, this contradictory and confused ideological jumble only reflects the nature of the reality it is describing and attempting to navigate. However clean and elegant an ideological coherence can appear, it is always resting upon something older and stranger that it must reckon with, which is at the same time obscured as it is built upon. And to put the problem generally, human nature has been bequeathed with conditions that appear as some kind of cosmic joke: that as the human organism has become ever more successful, it has placed ever more transformational pressure upon the foundations for its success, and its cradle, the earth from which it came. And then the conditions for its continued success become an ever faster-moving target as its intensifying success places intensifying pressure on the conditions for its success.
We see this in the emergence of Christianity, which took root in an ancient world bathed in blood, slavery, and genocide, which partially expressed horror at such a state of affairs, promoting messages of peace and love as an answer to it, while simultaneously coming to terms with its continued survival in such an environment.
Moving forward, we saw the modern world emerge in a series of fits, as it first struggled to overcome the cruel brutality of the medieval torture execution spectacles in the domestic sphere, and then the extreme violence of conquest and then the later process of colonial domination, and then of course there was the bloody struggle over the elimination of slavery in the United States. But it could never quite banish those demons of the past; it could only build up and over them, transforming them into something else while retaining their essential character.
The Christian revulsion of ritual sacrifice for example, or the bourgeois turn from colonialism, especially after the excesses of the World Wars, could be transposed into symbolic ritual and act in the former, and debt imperialism in the latter, while the living organisms administrating those cultural processes of reproduction could continue to grow in power while incorporating into themselves the vital energy of weaker powers all the while.
Building upon something does not erase it for good, and indeed, the buried is gradually unearthed again as the higher constructs break down and open up. The old antagonisms intensify all the more as those old fault lines grind directly against each other as the insulating material falls away once again, like built up cartilage deteriorating around an arthritic joint.
