[PEN-L:33525] ideology in prehistory

[Chris Burford <cburford@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I appreciate, Melvin, you quoting Engels's 1890 letter, which is what I
vaguely had in mind. There is much about which we would agree. The
differences are once of nuance but perhaps explain our different
approaches. I felt your formulation  of ideology as "how people
thinks things out", did not necessarily give enough emphasis to the
cultural and economic context, and the massive power of inherited
ideology. Engels discusses this relationship with depth and
subtlety.

The other difference of emphasis relates to our disagreement about the
interpretation of Sumerian texts, and perhaps is also for me a difference
of emphasis with Engels. We come down to fine nuances of
translation.

But even in the English translation you quoted, your paraphrase about
"ancient bunk", is not what Engels actually said:

a prehistoric stock..... of what we should today call
bunk

Here the translator uses the word "should", which can in
English imply obligation, but it can also imply a possibility, and a
doubt. It can be read different ways nowadays. The German is
"wurde" and I really do not know how that should best be
translated by modern conventions. My point is that Engels is not actually
saying this is bunk full stop.

 I would say that for the purposes of Engels's argument he says that
it would be pedantic to go into the precise meaning of prehistoric myths.
The German word translated as "bunk" is "Bloedsinn"
and can mean nonsense, rubbish or foolish tricks, without a necessary
implication that this is totally outmoded. The philosphical point Engels
is making about going from the more absurd to the less absurd is
compatible with what came to be called the dialectical theory of
knowledge of moving from partial knowledge to less partial, but never
complete knowledge. 

But I disagree frankly with a possible implication of Engels here that
prehistoric ideology might never be worthy of analysis for its economic
determinations. In the work I have cited on the Prehistory of Mind, there
is a well thought out model of how anthropomorphic magical thinking
created a cultural revolution linked to a great advance in the
productivity of prehistoric human beings, twenty thousand years before
the neolithic revolution. 

So to analyse what might be dismissed as rubbish by a more arrogant
rationalist bourgeois world, could be seen constructively among other
things, as 1) a representation of the magical qualitative transformations
that occur in nature and 2) a projection onto gods of the collective
power of the people. The management of this ideology by a priestly caste
appears to have been an important accompaniment of the emergence of city
states., plus other ideas.

(Thus I do not know what Engels means by saying that prehistoric
religious ideas have "for the most part only a negative economic
basis". I cannot recall elsewhere any place where Marx and Engels
talk about a negative economic basis.)

But I suggest, Melvin, without such an approach as I think is a logical
application of the historical materialist approach back into prehistory,
you might be vulnerable to a persuasive analysis of ancient texts, which
reveals their fundamental rationality in blinding form, by contrast with
the myths which do not receive such attention, but which perhaps made
just as much sense for a time in the ideological, political, and economic
formation of those communities, but which lack a persuasive advocate who
has dedicated 9 books to their ingenious explication as related to
extraterrestrial intelligence.

You are free to suggest in turn that there are some differences of
emphasis in what I am saying here and what Engels said in the passage you
quoted. We could try joining in the middle and say what a wonderful
genius Engels was, or we could say that he was working on the frontier of
knowledge, as we still are, in this sort of debate.


Chris Burford

London



At 30/12/02 10:24 -0500, Melvin wrote:
> In a message dated 12/30/02
> 12:46:43 AM Pacific Standard Time, cburford@xxxxxxxxxx writes:
>
> > I have a different concept of ideology to that
> > summed up in your description. See the discussion in the encyclopedia of
> > the Marxists Internt Archive
> >
> > http://www.marxists.org/glossary/frame.htm
>
>
>
>
>
> "Here economy creates nothing absolutely new (a novo), but it
> determines the way in which the existing material of thought is altered
> and further developed, and that too for the most part indirectly, for it
> is the political, legal and moral reflexes which exercise the greatest
> direct influence upon philosophy."
>
> Engels Letter to C. Schmidt, October 27, 1890
>
> Below is reproduced the rather lengthy paragraph from which the sentence
> above is taken. Underline has been added for emphasis. 
>
>
> "As to the realms of ideology which soar still higher in the air,
> religion, philosophy, etc., these have a prehistoric stock, found
> already in existence and taken over in the historic period, of what we
> should today call bunk. These various false conceptions of nature, of
> man's own being, of spirits, magic forces, etc., have for the most part
> only a negative economic basis; but the low economic development of the
> prehistoric period is supplemented and also partially conditioned and
> even caused by the false conceptions of nature. And even though economic
> necessity was the main driving force of the progressive knowledge of
> nature and becomes ever more so, it would surely be pedantic to try
> and find economic causes for all this primitive nonsense. The history of
> science is the history of the gradual clearing away of this nonsense or
> of its replacement by fresh but already less absurd nonsense. The
> people who deal with this belong in their turn to special spheres i! n
> the division of labour and appear to themselves to be working in an
> independent field. And in so far as they form an independent group within
> the social division of labour, in so far do their productions, including
> their errors, react back as an influence upon the whole development of
> society, even on its economic development. But all the same they
> themselves remain under the dominating influence of economic development.
> In philosophy, for instance, this can be most readily proved in the
> bourgeois period. Hobbes was the first modern materialist (in the
> eighteenth century sense) but he was an absolutist in a period when
> absolute monarchy was at its height throughout the whole of Europe and
> when the fight of absolute monarchy versus the people was beginning in
> England. Locke, both in religion and politics, was the child of the class
> compromise of 1688. The English deists and their more consistent
> successors, the French materialists, were the true philosophers of the
> bourgeoi! sie, the French even of the bourgeois revolution. The German
> petty bourgeois runs through German philosophy from Kant to Hegel,
> sometimes positively and sometimes negatively. But the philosophy of
> every epoch, since it is a definite sphere in the division of labour, has
> as its presupposition certain definite intellectual material handed down
> to it by its predecessors, from which it takes its start. And that is
> why economically backward countries can still play first fiddle in
> philosophy: France in the eighteenth century compared with England, on
> whose philosophy the French based themselves, and later Germany in
> comparison with both. But the philosophy both of France and Germany and
> the general blossoming of literature at that time were also the result of
> a rising economic development. I consider the ultimate supremacy
> of economic development established in these spheres too, but it
> comes to pass within conditions imposed by the particular sphere itself:
> ! in philosophy, for instance, through the operation of economic
> influences (which again generally only act under political, etc.,
> disguises) upon the existing philosophic material handed down by
> predecessors. Here economy creates nothing absolutely new (a novo),
> but it determines the way in which the existing material of thought is
> altered and further developed, and that too for the most part
> indirectly, for it is the political, legal and moral reflexes which
> exercise the greatest direct influence upon philosophy.
>
> About religion I have said the most necessary things in the last section
> on Feuerbach." 
> (End of Quote)
>
> I wrote the following: 
>
> >That is to say that ideology predates the emergence of productive
> forces and the mode of production in material life. In fact this
> preexisting ideology - what Engels call "Ancient bunk," is
> actually reshaped from the absurd to the less absurd on the basis of
> developed in man's material conditions of production. 
>
> This is to say that man possesses the power of observation before his
> transition to modern man no matter what the primary catalytic agent. This
> power of observation is inseparable from cognitive functioning. The power
> of observation and the symbolic form that characterize the manner in
> which people think things out is the meaning of the word ideology.
>
> The Encyclopedia of Marxism lists Ideology as follows: 
>
> "Ideology is a system of concepts and views which serves to make
> sense of the world while obscuring the social interests that are
> expressed therein, and by its completeness and relative internal
> consistency tends to form a closed system and maintain itself in the face
> of contradictory on inconsistent experience. (End of Quote)
>
> "Ideology is a system of concepts and views which serves to make
> sense of the world," is not that far from saying - what is basically
> the same thing, "how people think things out," or
>
> "The power of observation and the symbolic form that characterize
> the manner in which people think things out is the meaning of the word
> ideology."
>
> The explanation of ideology continues with the below. 
>
> "The word is used with a wide variety of connotations, even among
> Marxists; Terry Eagleton, in his Ideologies, lists a range of
> meanings:
>
> * the process of production of meanings, signs and values in social life;
> * a body of ideas characteristic of a particular social group or class;
> * ideas which help to legitimate a dominant political power; 
> * false ideas which help to legitimate a dominant political power; 
> * systematically distorted communication; 
> * that which offers a position for a subject; 
> * forms of thought motivated by social interest; 
> * identity thinking; 
> * socially necessary illusion; the conjecture of discourse and power;
> * the medium in which conscious social actors make sense of their world;
> * action-oriented sets of beliefs; 
> * the confusion of linguistic and phenomenal reality; 
> * semiotic closure; 
> * the indispensable medium in which individuals live out their relations
> to a social structure; 
> * the process whereby social life is converted to a natural reality;
>
>
> Melvin P.