Welcome to the new books network. Hello and welcome to new books in interpretive political and social science with me Nick Cheeseman, host of the series, where recording this episode in the fourth week of July 2024, Joe Biden has stepped down as candidate for US President in the upcoming elections, a week after Donald Trump narrowly escaped being shot dead while at a rally in Pennsylvania. The FBI has since searched in vain for what they refer to as the shooters underlying ideology. Meanwhile, Republican media outlets blame woke ideology for what they see as the weakening of the US national security state. On the other side of the American political fence, the LA Times warns that Christian nationalism is a "once secretive right-wing ideology emerging as an over threat to democracy." Meanwhile, across the pond, the telegraph decries trans ideology for changing Britain beyond recognition. While in India, the Congress party has accruised Narendra Modi's BJP of politicising public service on an ideological basis. And here, where I am in Australia, both sides in the debate over nuclear energy accuse the other of being ideologically opposed to their eminently sensible positions. If ideology has never been so much in evidence as a fact and so little understood as it appears to be today, then Jason Blakely argues in his new book Lost in Ideology, "This may not be because we are like travellers guided by old maps of the political world, but because we make the mistake of thinking that our maps are the worlds in which we live and that we read them as if they are somehow naturally reality rather than representations of it and creative acts that make the reality in which we live." Jason Blakely is an associate professor of political science at Pepperdine University and he's joining me to discuss this further. Jason, thanks for joining the show. Now, what I've said is that a fair way of capturing what you're saying and doing in the opening pages of the book. Yeah, that is a fair summary. And I think a lot of your listeners will appreciate that what I'm trying to do, whether successfully or not, is bring the insights of interpretive or hermeneutic social science to the concept of ideology and push the understanding further because I really think that interpretive social science and interpretive approaches have something helpful to say both at the sort of level of high theory and on the street level when it comes to all the ideological confusion and tumult that you just described that's happening right now that's going on. And yeah, one of the major errors I think that happens at the street level, but it can also happen in high theory, is that ideologies are falsely naturalized. And so I call this being lost in ideology when we mistake a cultural tradition for something like a state of nature or mere science or mere common sense. Listeners who are sophisticated within the interpretive social science tradition might shrug your shoulders and say, well, sure, but I think it does a lot of work reorienting us because I think many of our ideological misunderstandings have to do with sort of asserting almost like a dogma, you know, the common sensicalness of our own ideology, you know, our own political position. And then really thinking that the other side's position must be either some kind of lunacy or wickedness and not to take away that real moral issues are at stake in ideology. But we don't really have a good way of understanding the strongest version of ideologies. Say more about why you think an interpretivist approach enables you to do that. So what I tried to do in this book is I'm not reinventing the wheel here. I mean, many of your listeners will know of Clifford Gertz, of course, the American anthropologist, massively influential and important interpretive theorist, he gave this really famous definitions of ideologies as cultural maps that orient us within social and political space. I tried to build on that and push it further. I mean, Gertz is a hero of mine. He's an inspiration of mine. I've learned so much from him. But I think that if I had to pick sort of a little bit of a fighter, at least maybe try to, instead of putting it in oppositional terms, if I had to try to advance his position further, I would say something he did not emphasize enough is that yes, there are maps, but the maps are world-making in such a way that we inhabit the maps. So if you take Gertz's original metaphor too straightforwardly, it might seem like I have a map over here and then there's the world over there. But in the case of ideology and ideological traditions, the map makes the world, which is part of why there can be these hermeneutic feedback loops that are really confusing to people at all levels. If you're in certain milliuse, it can look like your map just is the world. And of course, the book starts with this famous story by Jorge Luis Borges in Exactitude and Science where he talks about this completely invented lost civilization that gets so crazy about map making that they try to make a map that's the exact same size as the empire. They try to unroll it over the whole empire point by point. And I sort of think that's how ideologies work when we're lost in them. We don't see their cultural, they kind of unroll, I say in the book, one step before us so that we never quite have contact with the rival culture. We don't have ethnographic cultural contact with them because we're sort of stuck in our own map. And that's not to say our map is false or we should just drop it. We in a real sense don't have dialogical cultural contact with the other group. So I wanted that in there. And also, if I can say one other thing, I think Gertz sometimes slides a little bit into a kind of positivism where he basically thinks he can just describe the ideologies neutrally and I don't think that's true. I want to hang on to or at least I want to make more robust and philosophically clear that the cultural conception of ideology is critical, critical of what? Well, it's a cross-cutting criticism of any ideology that says it's just a science or just common sense or just a state of nature like we were just discussing. That can't narrate itself as cultural and a lot of my book is an effort to do two things at once, both give a charitable full-blown account of the different ideological traditions as cultures, but also criticize each of them in so far as they fall into false naturalizations. And so it's kind of negative work where then you're left with what I think are the stronger versions philosophically of ideologies, which are the versions that can say we're cultural, we're a tradition. Yes, we're a map. Now let's have the debate as opposed to well, we're just science or we're just common sense. To do that, you adopt a method which you refer to as the description, again following Gert's, now many listeners will be familiar with that term and how it's applied in cultural anthropology and in some of the other social and political sciences, but what does that mean for you as a political philosopher exploring the ideological traditions that are of interest to you in this book? Oh, I find this such a useful term for just understanding the social reality around me. And of course, thick description, the thumbnail sketch of it would be it is concept for a kind of ethnographic research where you meet the standard of an ideal informant or someone within that culture of good faith and good will would recognize the description that the social theorist offers as true to or faithful to their culture. That doesn't mean you might not try to correct the culture. It doesn't mean that there wouldn't be any gap between the social theorist and the person being observed, but thick description is this kind of local cultural account. And in the background here of my account of ideology, I'm also trying to creatively expand on people like Charles Taylor and Paul Ricor. And so I think I'm sort of trying to offer a phenomenology, Ricor called many years ago for a phenomenology of ideology, the what it's like to have an ideology. And you could see attention in this and all the chapters in my book, because the book starts out with attempting to advance the interpretive or permanent conception of ideology in the ways I was just referring to. But then it's like a field guide tour of thick descriptions of all the rival ideological traditions. And there's a kind of tension in each chapter. What I found difficult writing it or the tension I felt in myself writing it is, I'm both trying to get the phenomenological account right, the thick description, right? So, you know, conservative reading the conservative chapter will say, yeah, that was the fair capture of my ideology or the socialist reading. But at the same time, I'm not falling into like a, what I would call kind of descriptivism or positivism. I'm criticizing strands of each ideological tradition. And some ideologies come in for much harsher criticism from me than others, because they seem to do a lot more naturalizing. So there's a tension there between the phenomenological, what it's like to have an ideology and the sort of critical perspective. But I'm trying to occupy that space philosophically. You mentioned the chapter on conservatism. We might say very well, you could try to write that chapter in a way that a conservative in Australia or America would broadly agree with the terms that you've set. But you have another chapter on fascism. Now, there are many readers who would say, well, you know, why should we bother to try to offer a sickly descriptive account of that ideology, which perhaps their point of view doesn't deserve that type of day or the intellectual effort that you put into it. So how do you respond? That's a complex and wonderful question. My mind is sort of spinning at the many ways to go at it. One thought is, well, you could say fascism is back, or at least there's a big fascism debate amongst political scientists, journalists, political people in the United States, is fascism back or not with Make America Great Again, MAGA, as they call it here, you know, with Trump and his movement or not. So part of it would be, well, if we could clarify fascism as a cultural tradition, we might gain some insight into whether its themes and motifs are back. And I should say that another conceptual feature that he's really important, their hermeneutics has to offer ideology and in the debate of ideology at all levels, is that cultural traditions are what I call hybrid or liquid in the book. And if you're a cultural theorist, you're not surprised that country music can combine with heavy metal. But for some reason, when people say an ideology, well, fascism might combine with neoliberalism, which is the argument I make in the book, is that what's new about this type of fascism we have is it's not classical fascism. It's not people with the militancy of the post-World War I generation who had lived through that experience in Europe. It comes out of maybe boardrooms and executive culture and boss culture. And it's not an all or nothing debate on one side to just kind of plant a flag here. One reason to study fascism is is it back or not, to what degree, is it in a soft form, is it not hybridized form, is it just a few light motifs or is it really back in a big robust way? We're not going to know how to answer that question if we're not culturally conversant in it. But on the other side, I also think, and it's related, but it goes back to the phenomenology of ideology, which is I try to apply Charles Taylor's conception of strong evaluation that we're strong evaluators. My term for this is ethically magnetic, that ideologies are ethically magnetic, and that we really don't understand what makes them tick if we don't understand that they make a claim on people's affections and desires and their sense of what's significant, and that goes for fascism too. And so we're not going to understand fascism well unless we can give a thick phenomenological account of it, of what makes it attractive to people. And I say in the chapter, like it or not, some of the most formidable intellectuals of the 20th century were in the orbit of fascism. Carl Schmidt is an obvious one, but Martin Heidegger, Ezra Pound, and you could keep going on to the list. In fact, family lore used to be because my grandmother's maiden name is pound, and they're from the Midwest, that we were related to Ezra Pound. So I always grew up with this tension of everyone in the family admires this poet, who we may or may not be related to, was a fascist for a while. And so talented, by the way, I mean, he recognized the literary talent, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot. I mean, the list isn't long, he had a nose for literary talent. And yet here he is, his politics. So how do we square that? And I think this kind of phenomenology can make sense of that. You know, so what's attractive about fascism? It's sense of crisis. It's sense that the world has gone badly wrong, that liberals are sort of murdering away time talking. I mean, if you start to get into what its ethically magnetic features are, not for one second to subtract or sanitize it, because I can say I'm anti-fascist at the same time, I want to understand as an interpretivist, why do people, even people of tremendous intelligence and sensitivity, get pulled into it? To do that in part, you've spoken about the need to be culturally conversant. And this is a recurrent theme throughout the book. You talk about the needs or the desire for readers to gain some fluency in a range of ideologies that aren't their own. So they may be less in the throw of their own. How do they go about doing that? What steps do you take in order to introduce the possibility that they become, as it were, a multi-lingual, rather than monolingual, ideologically speaking? One way at this is just the importance of the imagination to understanding the human situation, because there's a bad history of the imagination as just fantasy and what doesn't actually exist. But there's a counter-tradition, if you think of things like the social imaginary or the horizon and gautama, there's a counter-tradition that holds that humans are imaginative creatures, and collectively, we imagine together socially, we imagine an inherent horizons of meaning. So if we're going to understand our predicament or situation as humans, it's a little bit like someone asking, why should I learn another language or leave my hometown? It's like, well, you won't actually know your hometown as well as you think you do if you never leave. It's you only know yourself better by leaving and getting a view from outside. Also in the United States, in any case, I say at the beginning of the book here, you know, inspired by Gertz, that the near cultures become the far culture. Gertz was so wonderful at doing ethnography and learning languages and going to far-flung places and whatnot. But I actually think ethnography needs to be brought back home to understand the ideological other who shares our natural language and many of our practices and some of the artifacts of the ideological culture we were left post-20th century, but they've actually become very alien to us. It makes no sense what they're saying, what they're doing. It's very perplexing. So the bid would be that I understand myself and the other better if I'm willing to take the risk of a kind of phenomenological bracketing of my strong evaluation. My strong evaluation can't go away. It doesn't go away. The bid is at understanding another. And if I can say one other thing, this might just be parochial to the United States, but the extreme polarization has made us feel like we're all in one bucket. I am just liberal. I am just conservative. I'm just socialist, et cetera, et cetera. And that's not really how cultural reality works. You know, there are cross-resonances, threads, which are opportunities for dialogue, subversion, debate that we often deny ourselves because everyone's sort of shouting, "Who's side are you on?" And people are sort of aligning or trying to conform very heavily to the militant line or standard line of the culture war to kind of hold the line against the other side. You've mentioned the fluidity or liquidity of ideologies, but the impression you're creating in the book is that some are more fluid or liquid than others. It's a part of the book that deals with a number of those that you use the analogy of splatter paintings. So how do we differentiate between those ideologies that work in a dichotomized manner as against those that are of like something that Jackson Pollock would have produced? Yeah, I think, for instance, the criticism I make of conservatism and the conservative chapters, that something that gets right is that politics is traditionary. This is from Gautimer, but you inherit a tradition. And Burke roughly gets that right, that you inherit a tradition custom. So Burke gets spectacularly wrong, is he thought the radical enlightenment, on my reading anyway, would never itself become a tradition or stabilize. So, you know, he thinks that's going to be like summer flies, that all the revolutionaries are going to eat their own children, alive, and that it won't stabilize. But part of what's perplexed everyone in the 20th century is the rationalist enlightenment spawned, or created, or generated, and inspired rival traditions. And I think one thing that conservatives often miss is they see their own tradition as, and this is the bad side of Burke, that I'm critical of, emerging from time immemorial and a kind of unitary, uncontested patrimony. And that's never how traditions work as interpretive theorists know. I mean, traditions can always be disaggregated into rival strengths, even if you take the set that you want to roughly call conservative. In the United States, you're going to have arguments over theology, or, you know, the application of morality, or whether markets are good or not, even intra-conservative. So, the idea that there's this monolithic patrimony, I always think of the line in reflections in the revolution in France, where Burke says something about, you should only approach the errors and shortcomings in your society's tradition, the way you would approach the wounds of your father, who's like dying on his bed, you know? It's this image that's hard to get out of your mind, what's in there. And the idea that there's a sort of unitary tradition there, I'm not sure that it means that conservatives don't have a liquidity to their ideologies, just they often don't recognize the liquidness of their ideology, whereas other traditions sometimes embrace the avant-garde, and thinking some left ideologies will embrace the liquidity of ideology. Though there, then you get a problem around authority and rational authority, which is a sort of internal problem to some left ideologies, who has rational authority, etc, etc. But I wouldn't so much say conservatives don't have liquidity in their ideology, as much as they have a blind spot, as to that liquid dimension to their traditions, and to their different customs and folkways. There's not just a monolithic "we" that's sitting over here. It isn't that characteristic of all ideologies, to come back to some of the basic points that we began with. Now, you've mentioned Paul Ricker, you raised him in the book as well, and the essay that you refer to in the book, he sets out a number of characteristics of ideology. I went back to it and had a look before our discussion, and among those, one of the basic points is that the reasons that ideologies do they work is because they're schematic, they're simplifying, and also they present participants in the ideology with an opportunity to occupy a place within it. In other words, they invite people to inhabit ideologies rather than think about them critically. Now, of course, his project, as is yours, is to try to get the participants in an ideological project to a position where they are capable of reflecting upon what it is that that ideology is doing, and what they are doing as a participant in it. And yet, it seems right up and down the whole range of ideologies that you explore, those traditions you explore throughout the text, we encounter a situation where, if that's the task, the recurrent challenge is that all the ideologies are working to prohibit precisely that sort of undertaking that you're advocating for. My first knee-jerk reaction is there might be a disagreement there between myself and record, because I don't think ideologies always tend towards simplification. I think that you can also correct toward greater interpretive sophistication. One way you can be critical of ideologies as a cultural theorist is from the outside and a denaturalizing critique. But another way you can be critical is a kind of imminent critique where you try to correct people inside the tradition to better versions of the more coherent versions, more canonical versions of their own. So it was a little hard on Burke there, but some aspects of Burke are very rich descriptions of the conservative vision of an ethically magnetic, good society, or he takes something like T.S. Eliot in The Wasteland. If you want to take that as an artifact of cultural pessimism and conservative lament, which is how I tend to read it, I still think it's a great poem and I don't think you have to be conservative to appreciate it. Just if you want to look at it as an artifact of ideology. So I tend to think that ideologies don't always press in the direction of simplification. I almost want to say the bad versions of ideology do. But you could do some of the same with liberals. Like it's become big in the United States for sort of center liberals. So not exactly social democrats, but sort of center post-war liberals to put signs in their yard that say things like, "In this house we believe in science." As though if you just state it, then everyone will understand very obviously that's not the most intelligent version of progressive politics. And for instance, in the chapters on liberalism, I'm very critical of people like Thomas Payne not going to be surprising now because his whole shtick, or at least if you want to be kind of hard on him, is while liberalism's common sense. Whereas I'm quite affirmative of someone like T.H. Green, the British idealist Hegelian liberal. Whether you want to be a progressive liberal or not, something T.H. Green gets right is I'm defending a tradition. It's a cultural tradition. It advances as historically self-aware system of thought. So again there, I would see T.H. Green as a non-simplifying push in ideology. And I would see Thomas Payne to be hard on him. I know there's more to than that. But the common sense Thomas Payne, let's just say for the sake of simplifying. He would be the bad kind. And similarly, T.S. Eliot would be the more complexifying rich, subtle, pessimistic, conservative. Whereas some aspects of Burke would be quite critical. Let alone when you get to the street level, like Rush Limbaugh or something that's just completely demagogic in its presentation. Right? Yeah. So I'd like to try and work through this a little bit more. Going back to the point you made early on in the response about outside criticism and inside criticism. Because that's something that you explore in the conclusion of the book. And in fact read us to reflect on the preceding chapters in relation to these alternative approaches. You seem to be suggesting that there are some fairly easy ways to deal with some of the more obnoxious or as you just put it bad ideologies from the outside. Whereas the imminent criticism for other ideologies strikes me as a much more challenging task. So let's deal first of all with external criticism. One point that you make in the conclusion is that if an ideology can't make a philosophically strong or robust defense that squares with the best account of the natural sciences, then we can probably write it off. Part of what I'm thinking of there is either really, really crazy stuff that is maybe on the edge of ideology gets into classification problems like the flat earth or movement in the United States. I mean, is that its own ideology or not? Is that a spin off of Christian fundamentalism or libertarianism? So this whole idea that the earth is really flat and that elites are hiding from you with a very elaborate apparatus that it's flat and that it's not a global. But then there are, of course, things like white supremacy, which I'm very hard on in the book. I do try to suss out its strongly valued of features and one on why people are drawn to it. God forbid, you might be in a family with someone as a white supremacist or friend as a white supremacist, you're enough to deal with that fact about them. But I do think that that's one of these ideologies that's hard for me to conceive of a form of it that survives the fact that they're not natural racial types, like subspecies. Because it's true that racial bigotry precedes the modern era. But the modern form of the ideology seems to rely on this kind of like genetic or biological determinism forms of Darwinism. And so if you threw all those out through a denaturalizing critique and through with a natural sciences that's not really what the human species like, then I'm not sure there's much left there. But I think with the major ideological traditions, unfortunately, it's sad. But one of the messages in my book is a certain epistemic humility. It's harder to get rid of them by just gesturing at the facts because I think the most sophisticated versions of the major ideologies can get right by. They're not always right by, but they can get right by the basic scientific account of the world and are excessive. And that's why I use this term ethically magnetic. They have a vision of the good. And so the kind of debate you're in in ideology is once you're dealing with people who aren't going to sort of just say science doesn't have a certain domain of authority or whatever, then what you're dealing with, it's a kind of interpretive debate. It's similar to debates over what's the meaning of life, or what's the meaning of a play or a poem. But it's like, what's the meaning of a good society? What's significant? And those debates, I don't think we should just throw up our hands in despair. I'm not a subjectivist about that. Those are harder. And that's why ideology is so painful for humans. It's like, we don't have a way out of it. I agree with Gurds. It's an ideological age. But we also don't have a way of settling the sort of pluralism and contestation between rival traditions. That leads to a point that you make strongly in the conclusion about the risk of relativism. So if that's the case, then how do we evaluate? How do we reach some position from which we can objectively say it's word that a particular ideology has a stronger claim than others? How do you go about dealing with the relativism problem? Strictly speaking, already we know it's not relativistic because there are ways to evaluate ideology, but then the question is there relativism with the standing options that can take into account like our best science, et cetera, et cetera. And there I think that you can narrate this in various ways. You could see it as a very long holdover of Aristotle's teaching that in politics, you shouldn't expect the same amount of exactitude as in other sciences, like geometry or whatever his other was, which is different thought world as listeners well know. But in politics, you need to judge. He thought it was an area of practical judgment. And so the way you judge between rival schemas is by moving positions back and forth back to your question actually about the importance of the imagination in order to see who can give a narrative that has less self-defeating features to it and is better able to clarify one's own social situation. So for instance, to give an example of that, because that sounds very abstract, say your position was that you're a liberal, but you sort of just think that rights of being left alone are good enough. And so rights should basically be about non-interference, which there's obviously an extremely long robust philosophical ideological tradition around rights as just negative rights. But the way this would partly work is if you got in an argument over this, say it was an intra liberal debate between social liberals who have more like communitarian basis for their liberalism and sort of negative freedom liberals, the way you would get in a debate over this in my ideal schemas, you would tack back and forth between the two positions and you would say you were going to go on the offensive against the negative liberty position, you'd say, well, are there certain goods, including the good of liberalism itself? That's an argument I make in that chapter. The liberalism itself is a culture that can't be secured by the mere non-interference position. I actually think this is part of the crisis of liberalism right now, the so-called crisis of liberalism is liberals assume in the simplified version that their ideologies just natural and people are naturally liberal. So then what do you do when people don't want the bare commons of even a liberal culture? They use liberal rights to own the liberals or to become fascist or to become reactionary, whatever it is. Well, then liberals don't have any way to create a commons anymore. So it'd be these kind of debates over, is that a self-defeating aspect of liberalism, if that makes sense? But what we're doing there is we're sort of tacking back and forth in a kind of practical rationality over whose position can clarify or give more clairvoyance to sort of acting and interpreting in the world. Just out of interest, would you class as a pragmatic approach? You know, it does share a lot with pragmatism in a weird way. I remember the conversation you and I had a few years back with Mark Beaver in interpretive social science. And in that book, we try to argue for kind of big tent philosophical pluralism. Mark has more of an analytic philosopher, more phenomenology, hermeneutics, but we both agree there should be an interpretive term. And this is one of these cases where, and pragmatism too, I think has a basis for interpretivism, this is one of these cases where I think people are coming out of a phenomenological or hermeneutic tradition, have a certain overlap or affinity with pragmatists. I think what's shared there is the anti-foundational if people want to kind of feel soft global, right? Like we're not going to have a foundationalist case for ideology. It's not going to be this set of data or this syllogism that finally makes everyone a socialist, liberal, feminist, whatever it is. It's going to be this kind of debate. And what I want to say to people who worry about relativism, because I often get this response far and wide. So I take it as very legitimate worry, is do you really think like all interpretations of a Shakespeare play are in equal go? And usually the answer is no. They're obviously better and worse. And then the question is how do you deal with the strongest interpretations? But once you see that you're dealing with meaning and that the debate is over meanings, it's a certain amount of epistemic humility about the contestability of interpretation. At the same time, that's not the same as relativism. I think people ping-pong back and forth between a foundationalist conception of objectivity. It's not available, maybe in the natural sciences, and a kind of radical subjectivism. And they miss that there are ways to be objective about things where objectivity is not final, it's provisional, it's practical. It's a little bit like you're asked how do you know you love your friend? Well, I can't give you a syllogism or data for it, but it's not like I don't trust that I love my friend. It's a different kind of assurance or credibility around that. Jason, we're rapidly running short at a time. I want to ask you, having written the book or in the course of writing it, have your interactions with people whose ideologies you find repugnant or perhaps in opposition to your own views, have those interactions changed? And if so, how? Yeah, so I'm very hard on neoliberalism and libertarianism because we're talking about white supremacy and things. I think most neoliberalism, this might be in the United States, tends to rely on a science of markets that's a naturalization of the ideology that I can see as false. I have no problem objectively saying that that's not persuasive. But for some reason or another, a certain group of libertarians or right liberals in the United States have liked the book. One group paid it at Law and Liberty, which is infamously sort of right-wing libertarian group here that wrote a review of it online and said it was no good and it was relativistic. But another set of libertarians sort of liked it. I think the reason they liked it is they detected in its general outlook a commitment to sort of trying to work through political contestation through dialogue. And so there's still some traces there, if you like, of maybe liberal commitments, right? Now, my commitments are coming out of a gotamarian humanism. So how that links up with liberalism further down the road is like a bigger discussion. But in the book, I don't come out that way because the book is written from a liberal perspective. It's written from a gotamarian fusion or horizons perspective. But it surprised me that a group that I tend to think their ideology doesn't quite work in its main forms liked something about the book. You know, they liked the sort of dialogical spirit of it. The risk is the book like this could be re-engineered by one or another of these ideologies. And if not weaponized, at least instrumentalized for purposes that are contrary to those that you had when you wrote the book, did you give thought to that in writing the book, or again, subsequently in view of these kinds of engagements? Great question. I've never been asked that question for uses and abuses of theory is always sort of a scary thing. I mean, I can always sort of say, well, that wasn't my intention. I mean, I do say at the end of the book that I consider myself a humanist, meaning ontologically, because I've had a few seminars on the book where some philosophers said to me, well, humanism is an ideology. And part of my answer to that is, well, yes and no. I mean, it's an ethical commitment, but it cuts across the ideologies. It's not particular to one of the ideologies. But part of me also says the wants to say, well, I don't believe in a kind of neutral, positivistic position as a social theorist. So that's not a contradiction on my part. But I do say at the end of the book that a humanist like myself could hope for, humanists of long hope, going back to people like Erasmus and Thomas Moore, but all the way through to the present day, have long hoped, even if it's not their religion, for more humanistic imams and rabbis and priests, even though it's not their religious tradition, you know. And my position is I can hope for more humanistic strains to predominate in the ideological traditions. So I can hope for, you know, maybe oak shot to be the predominant voice or influence in conservatism or teach green and liberalism. So part of my position would sort of be, well, I'm happy if technocracy and treating people like mute objects loses out in the major ideology. Similarly, like I, I have a great affinity for ethical socialisms, but I'm quite critical Marxism and its tendency toward technocracy. And I know those are fighting words, but I'm happy to see the socialist tradition look more like William Morris than like Karl Marx. So part of me is sort of like, well, people within their own ideological traditions want to pull against technocracy and the naturalization of the ideology so much the better. On the other hand, I think that you've signaled something there much deeper that would require far more discussion, you know, like what to what uses can the cultural approach the ideology be put? Well, I think that some of the points you just raised you addressed really well in the book. So that's a way of urging listeners to go and take a look at it. And also to say, I think what you've brought us just now is a really good stepping off point for the last couple of questions I'd like to ask before you have to dash. One is noting that your publishing output, your work ethic is very impressive. In addition to this book, as you said, we've previously spoken together with Mark Bivier on your interpretive social science. And then there was another book along the way that I hear a lot of echoes of in the discussion we had today. That's we built reality, a book that I've had recourse to in my classes and in my own writing, and I recommend people to take a look at. Is there something else in the pipeline now that you'd like to mention your listeners' attention to? Yeah, I am working on a book. It's sort of a struggle right now, and it's in early days. On sort of reviving the Renaissance notion of cosmopolitan and utopia that comes out of figures like Thomas Moore and whatnot as humanist politics. So in lost in ideology, I try to basically assume a sort of thin commitment to cultural approach and not put my ideological position down. But the next book is in an effort at sort of giving a positive vision of a political theory that I think fits with hermeneutics and with humanism. Well, I think you're leaning into that already at the end of this book. So I look forward to more on that and more discussions about hermeneutics and what it means to be a gutter-marion humanist. Last of all, I want to invite you to say, well, what are you reading these days and what would you recommend to listeners who might be interested to follow some of the threads of thought in this conversation into works that are interesting or influential for you right now? Well, unsurprisingly, I picked up Charles Taylor's latest cosmic connections, which is completing his theory of language and aesthetics that comes out of romanticism in his prior book, The Language Animal, I believe it was called. And it's another 600 pager from Charles Taylor, but he's always worth reading. So I'm still picking my way through it, but it's always worth reading him. You know, and he's 92 years old now, and this may very well be his last book. Also, John Fosse, the Norwegian novelist, who of course is no secret now because he won the Nobel Prize in literature recently. But I spent a good portion of the summer reading Septology, and it is just a brilliant novel. I might be just overreacting right now, but to me, it's the greatest novel that has been written in my lifetime, and it's bigger than this. But if you want to put it into the discussions we just had, you could think of it as offering a kind of phenomenology of both kind of modern alienation and of religious consciousness, for those who are interested in sociology of religion, it's basically a doppelganger story of two men with the exact same name, one who's an atheist and one who's religious and their friends. But it's this bizarre doppelganger story about how they keep kind of checking in on each other and whatnot. So Septology by Fosse, the Norwegian novelist, I would hugely recommend. Thanks so much. That's high praise. I think I'll start with Septology before I go back to Taylor. Thanks, Jason Blakely for coming on to do books and interpretive political and social sites to talk about lost in ideology and interpreting modern political life, which is out now with agenda publishing. Thank you, Nick. I admire your work and I admire your work in interpretivism and you always access smart questions. I really appreciate being asked on. Thank you. Thanks for saying so on coming on. And listeners, one person who wrote a lot about ideology, who we've not mentioned today, but has certainly been on my mind, was the political scientist James C. Scott. On top of everything else that has happened in the last week or so before the recording of this episode, Jim, as he was called by his friends and colleagues, passed away. Those of us who were lucky enough to know Jim will treasure his memory and always be grateful to him for his mentorship and friendship. And all of us are fortunate to have his remarkable and many published works to revisit and discuss in the years to come. Among them, I had the chance to talk with Jim in 2020 about against the grain, his deep history of the earliest states. And you could find that episode on the series webpage, along with the discussion that they had with Mark B. Vera and Jason Blakely previously, and many other episodes in this series. And you can also find them wherever the new books in Political Science channel is streaming. [Music]
