Beyond confusion: A dual process model, part 1
(Section 2 of Ideology and Practice)
The stimulus to look for a new model was the realisation that the conflicting meanings attributed to ideology seemed to include at least two mutually incompatible meanings. On the one hand an explicitly articulated system of ideas and values, such as religious theology, or neoliberal economics, for example. On the other, a more nebulous concept of received ideas, norms and unquestioned assumptions that people absorb involuntarily from the society that shapes their lives.
The other source of inspiration was the dual process model of cognitive psychology taking developed by various researchers in that field, but which has come to be most known to the wider world through the work of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman.
Before explaining or attempting to justify what concepts relevant to individual cognitive psychology could have to do with a socio-cultural phenomenon like ideology, the briefest of brief outlines of dual process theory is needed.
In a nutshell, the concept is that there are two different systems of human cognition, System 1 and System 2 (the names are deliberately blank to avoid essentialism), that people can use to arrive at judgements on problems or 2situations demanding a choice or reaction. The first system is characterised by its speed and “pre-conscious” or instinctual nature. It’s the “fight or flight” system that picks a rustle in the undergrowth out from the ambient noise as the threat of an approaching predator and triggers the rush of adrenaline and readiness to flee. It is not only quick, but also efficient in being able to arrive at a snap judgement with very little mental energy. Consequently, due to the evolutionary drive for the “laziness” principle of least effort, we tend to use System 1 as a default, most of the time. System 1’s big downside is that while it produces a “good enough” result, most of the time, it is also prone to serious errors on occasion or in certain contexts. System 2, by contrast, is the deliberate application of conscious cognitive effort. It is much slower and consumes far more mental energy. However if the snap judgement System 1 provides is wrong or problematic, then System 2 is the only way to come up with an alternative answer.
In our waking lives, our internal monologue is usually chewing on some problem or other. Whether trivial ones like what to have for lunch, or whether to go to the movies tonight, or working through a mental “things to do today” checklist, or processing tasks imposed on us by the day job or, on occasion, more existentially-threatening questions. Generally we are in the habit of thinking that we are using the conscious, deliberative, “rational” System 2 100% of the time to resolve all these questions. However the results of cognitive research, not just by Kahneman and Tversky but many others working in this field, is that this belief is in fact largely an illusion. In reality most of our decisions are really being produced unconsciously by System 1 and then being presented to our interior monologue as the product of rational deliberation, with a post-hoc bogus rationalisation tacked on, to pass it off as a System 2 product.
Many people still find this depiction of our cognitive processes unpalatable or upsetting, even though it’s really only a more scientifically-grounded exploration of the role of the unconscious in human thought that has been in the public realm since Freud’s impact over a century ago. Rather than discussing the source of this reluctance to accept that humankind is not the 100% rational being that Enlightenment thought presented as an achievable aspiration, we’re just going to take it as read that those still in denial on this basic subject after all this time and the accumulated evidence, are being wilfully obstructive.
Daniel Kahneman’s book “Thinking fast, thinking slow” is the go-to introduction on the subject of the dual process theory of cognition, so rather than try and recapitulate the ground it covers, we’ll just signpost it here and move on to our discussion of how we can adapt the theory, by analogy, as a grid for the analysis of ideology.
The first important observation regarding cognitive dual process theory, is that it does not impose a normative hierarchy between System 1 and System 2 that might assert that one is superior to, or primary to the other. Above all, it does not hold that one process is ontologically prior to the other, i.e. that one is primary or original and the other is secondary or derivative from the primary. From its evidence-based perspective, cognitive science is not able to say anything definitive about the origins or inter-relation of the two systems, due to the impossibility (at least, at present) of directly observing the inner workings of thought in the brain (as opposed to observing patterns of neurological electrical activation). But for purposes of the model, each system is assumed to have its own autonomous mechanism and dynamics.
The Two Systems of Ideology
If we are using System 1 and System 2 from cognitive dual process theory as an analogy for the different meanings of ideology, we need to distinguish which is which in our new context.
Let’s start with System 2. The deliberative, consciously mapped-out theories and doctrines of societies, groups and individuals we will bundle under the ideological equivalent of System 2, which we’ll call (for reasons we’ll get to shortly) “doctrine”.
The jumbled assemblage of received ideas and presumptions that people acquire as if through osmosis in their social development, without ever having been explicitly taught them, or even been fully aware of how and when they acquired them. These we will call the equivalent of System 1 for ideology, which we’ll call “doxa”.
Doxa is an archaic word from ancient Greek where it was put in a contrasting pair with episteme. The latter being the critically and scientifically acquired knowledge that corresponds to our “doctrine” (Ideology 2) and doxa being the term for common beliefs or popular opinions acquired in an uncritical or unexamined way from one’s peers. Pierre Bourdieu uses the term doxa to refer to what is taken for granted in any given society, that which “goes without saying because it comes without saying” — which is a beautifully succinct way of expressing the link between acquisition and questionability.
However we need to make note of a big change in the shift from individual cognition to social belief systems, namely that we can no longer talk about conscious and unconscious in the same way. To illustrate with an example, it would sound strange to say that the argument in a journalist’s opinion piece that we are reading is a form of “unconscious” ideology. The writer was obviously conscious while articulating their opinion as also are we while reading it. To avoid confusion, we can use the term “implicit” for ideological beliefs that “come without saying,’’ as Bourdieu puts it, and “explicit” for the ideological analogue to System 2 cognition.
In moving from the field of psychology to that of sociology, we are also shifting our object of investigation from the thought processes within the individual mind to the discursive processes of groups and societies. In the process we are both losing and gaining visibility regarding these processes. If the internal thought processes of an individual mind are not directly observable, mapping out their dynamics must be by done by controlled experiments to gain insights on the outcomes of this “black box”. By contrast all the discursive flows of the social order are (at least in theory) open to inspection. But on the other hand, we lose the ability to conduct controlled experiments on the system because we are all inside the box — there is no outside. Further the fairly clear empirical distinction between conscious and unconscious in cognition becomes more a matter of judgement when you have to analytically divide discourse into implicitly and explicitly ideological categories.
Notions vs Concepts
To aid this distinction between implicit and explicit ideology in discourse, we’ll start with the smallest component, the notion or concept. In our model we will assert a difference between a notion — an implicitly ideological coded unit of meaning (doxa) — and a concept — a unit of meaning referring to an explicitly formulated ideological framework (episteme) [1]. In brief, the difference is that a concept is a signpost to an explicit theoretical framework that gives it meaning. However, the meaning of a notion appears to be attached directly to its name in an organic, “obvious” way similar to how words like “dog” or “cat” relate to their object.
For example, in the sentence “America is a rich country” the predicate “rich country” is assumed to have an obvious meaning. That is we have a clear notion of what is being said in this phrase. If, by contrast, we read in the newspaper that economists are worried that “the inversion of the yield curve is warning of an impending recession,’’ we know that “yield curve” is a term that has a defined meaning in the fields of finance and macroeconomics, even if we may personally need a little reading-up with google and wikipedia to get an idea of what that meaning might actually be. A yield curve is a concept because it is recognisable as a name that refers to an explicit doctrinal field (in this case economics) where the theoretical framework that gives the term meaning is laid out. We could say it is an analytical concept because it explicitly signposts towards an “analytical” framework. In Bourdieu’s terms, it is very clearly not something that goes without saying.
The scare quotes around “analytical” above, are to warn that explicitly ideological frameworks are not necessarily scientific, in the sense of being strongly-evidence based, etc. To take an example from the far right lexicon, the term “Zionist Occupation Government” may be appear to be from an entirely different universe, morally speaking, from that of the yield curve. But its meaning is neither obvious to the lay person or “notional” in any general sense, but is direct referencing an explicitly formulated ideological framework of a neo-Nazi type. The conspiratorial, delusional, incoherent and histrionically malevolent nature of that ideological framework does not make it any less an “analytical” framework in the specific sense we are talking about here. “ZOG” is most definitely not a term “that goes without saying, because it comes without saying” in the manner of the notions of the implicit ideological commonsense of general society. Therefore it is a concept, not a notion, in our framework, even if the very opposite of a scientific one.
A further example would be the discussions and writings of the scholastics in the West European Renaissance of the 12th century. Influenced by the access to Aristotle and the Greek and Arabic philosophical and scientific knowledge emanating from the Toledo School of Translators of Al Andalus, the scholastics analysed the world around them through the framework of theology and Aristotlean dialectics. The results may not be scientific in the way we understand that term today, but they were very much the explicitly formulated and taught doctrines of an ideological system attempting to understand people’s place in the world and the dynamics of society and history.
Pitfalls of simplistic rationalism or “positivism” in judging concepts
The danger here is that we label seemingly delusional, conspiratorial and incoherent explicit ideologies, such as those of the radical right, as “irrational”. That is, we divide explicit ideologies into those that are rational or reasonable (and thus “true” in some objective, positivist or non-normative “value-free” way) and those that are irrational, or “unreason”. Unreason, from a positivist viewpoint is a “non-thing”, that is an absence of reason (in the manner of the “metaphysics of presence” discussed in this sidebar on logocentrism, etc: A parenthesis on “logocentrism” and duality).
This prejudice is not only a barrier to any serious analysis of explicit ideologies one is personally opposed to (because if unreason is a pure negative, then there is no meaning to be extracted from it) but it also inverts the relation between conventional, doxic “common sense” or reasonable views of the “political centre” and its radical antagonists.
No matter how perverted its values, how delusional its presuppositions and beliefs or how incoherent its logic, any explicit radical ideology or doctrine, has to be collectively constructed and articulated by a process of reasoning. The product of articulating a new narrative, separate and distinct from the default narrative of that “which goes without saying because it comes without saying”. All radical ideologies (2) are necessarily “rational” in this sense of being the product of creative rationalisation. Whereas, by contrast, the dominant doxic, implicit ideology (1) is not produced by any process of rationalisation, but simply absorbed by social osmosis. It is the common sense of the “reasonable” centrist that is actually “irrational” in its lack of explicit formulation or doctrinisation.
Ideology as unreason and the chimera of non-ideological thought
The biggest pitfall with the naive rationalist desire to divide ideologies into the “irrational” and “rational” is some value-free objective sense, is that the term “ideology” itself tends to become associated with the former only — i.e. with “false” ideas — which in turn inevitably implies the existence of non-ideological “correct” thought, as a consequence. The ideological (1) content of the idea of “non-ideological thought” — which is an integral part of centrism — and its relation to social power is a question we will return to later.
Another problematic side of the “notion” is what Althusser called “empiricism”. In some ways it is the flipside of seeing falsehood as a pure absence. By contrast, we now have the idea that falsehood is indeed a thing, an actual presence in its own right — but as a barrier or veil (in the ubiquitous metaphor) that obscures the truth that would otherwise become obvious, once the obstacles of superstition, misconceptions and “ideological thinking” are removed. This, to avoid confusion, is not the methodological empiricism of the scientific method, but an epistemological empiricism that assumes the positive possibility of perceiving truth directly, once the barriers of falsity have been cleared away.
The notion of “false consciousness”, for example, as an explanation for actually-existing class consciousness appearing to be at odds with what orthodox Marxists think a “correct consciousness” would otherwise be, if only the pernicious effects of bourgeois ideology were not interfering, is still extremely widespread. This is not due to any lack of repeated and sustained critique of this way of thinking on the part of theoreticians, both Marxist and otherwise. But because notions are the cognitive shortcuts we resort to as easily and unconsciously as we breath. Whereas the effort to conceptualise models of the relationship between class and consciousness that avoid these positivist or empiricist biases take time and effort.
Hitting Pause
We’ve really only begun to outline the model, so it may seem odd to stop here. So far we have only the barest abstraction of a dual process model, implicit and explicit ideologies 1 & 2 respectively, and corresponding notion and concept atoms. So far we are lacking any concrete linkage to practice, power and strategic implications for working for social change. All of that will have to wait for part 2 of the exposition on the model. However, the bare minimum that we have is already enough to return to our historical study of Marxism and Ideology in the classical period with the aforementioned “grid” we need to make sense of how the failures to conceptualise ideology effectively contributed to the catastrophe of the 1920s and 30s.
Notes
- There is some parallel to Althusser et al’s distinction between ideological notions and scientific concepts in “Reading Capital”. Reviewing Althusser’s theorisation of ideology is for a later section, here it is only important to note that a dual process model allows for both forms to be ideological terms, just of a different category or order.