ideology an interdisciplinary study in literature and politics

International Research Journal of Humanities Vol 4, No. 9;Sep 2012

11 [email protected]

Ideology: An Interdisciplinary Study in

Literature and Politics

Dr. Mahdi Shafieyan

Department of Foreign Languages, Imam Sadiq University

PO box: 14655-159, Tehran, Iran

Tel: +989353353523 Email: [email protected]

Abstract

In literary criticism, “ideology” proper has a vast range in various methods by numerous theoreticians. The discrepancies among those who posed the term make a researcher deal with different respects of the matter. This essay as an interdisciplinary piece of research aims, first, to find out the original source(s) of the notion, and, second, to scrutinize the validity of the theory.

Within this argument, the researcher will survey and analyze the contingent weight of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathanfor the American neocon politics during the tenure of George Bush Jr., as a case study. The researcher has selected this period for now that Bush’s government has terminated we can take his holistic policies into consideration. The findings confirm the presupposition that literature can sway home and international politics of a country and vice versa. However, at the end, the writer of this essay concerns the question whether we can name every impression as ideology; if not, first, is the generality of the theory not called into question? On the contrary, can we easily label every kind of literature as universal? The response to these questions can lead critics to changes in hermeneutics.

Key Terms: ideology, universality, national interest

1. Introduction

Although Marxists posed the term “ideology” proper as what determines literature, Althusser, a Marxist himself, counteracted the impression by prioritizing literature over ideology (127-93), the point inciting the researcher to review and revise the notion. The conception was chased by Gramsci’s “hegemony” (277), Lacan’s “Other” (Bertens 163), as well as Foucault’s “discourse” (Power 119), episteme (Bressler 131), and “panopticism” (Discipline 197-201), among others. Nevertheless, Thomas Hobbes spoke of the concept through “Leviathan” three centuries prior to them: “by art is created that great Leviathan called a Commonwealth or State”, which is the fusion of state and nation (1596). In the present study, the textually defined meaning of ideology is detected by the researcher in Hobbes’ work, although the concept and the affect have been existing through history.

Literary and political studies evidence that great writers’ texts have had profound influence upon the U. S. establishment; for instance, Aristotle’s Politics is a renowned example that affected the American constitution; Cicero, Montesquieu, Locke, or Burke, among others, can be aligned, as widely known authors (“The Federalist”). Notwithstanding the mentioned pieces are celebrated for development of democracy and free speech, the researcher would like to catch the eyes to the probable impact of Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651), which is notorious for the dissemination of military and political violence, on neocon policies, the most recent sample of which is the previous



American body politic led by George W. Bush. In the following paragraphs, some key sentences from Leviathanwill be compared to Uncle Sam’s stances in different situations, and then the attempt will be made to treat of the efficiency of the policies.

2. Argument

Hobbes, in the first place, supposed human beings as “an artificial [made by art] animal”, and compared them with machines, owing to their “motions” (1596). Speaking of animosity of human brings forth the matter of instincts. To pursue the mentioned notions in the neocon government, one has to speak out of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prisons, the camps in which humans were behaved as or less than animals, for the reason of a ruling system’s instincts. In the former, documents evince urinating on detainees, jumping on their legs that has already wounded by gunfire, continuing by pounding the wounded legs with collapsible metal baton, pouring phosphoric acid on them, sodomizing prisoners with a baton, as well as tying ropes to their legs or sexual organs and dragging them across the

floor, to enumerate some (Zernike A1). In the latter, interrogation techniques include sleep deprivation, humiliation, and subjection to extreme temperatures (“British Report” A15). However, they went further; one of the allegations at the camp is the abuse of the detainees’ religion, including flushing Quran down the toilet, defacing, tearing, squatted over, and writing comments on this holy book (Eggen and White A01). It was in the case that, as attested by the documentary The Road to Guantanamo, a great majority of the prisoners were held without charge or legal representation.

Then, Hobbes came to define Leviathan, Commonwealth, or State, the main duty of which is salus populi, the people’s safety (1596). In order to provide security, the state should do anything possible, since “no action can be unjust” (1602). Furthermore, the end of the State is “delectation”, yet some may interrupt that; therefore, due to the

diffidence [mistrust] of one another, there is no way for any man to secure himself so reasonable as anticipation; that is, by force or wiles to master the persons of all men he can, so long, till he see[s] no other power great enough to endanger him. (1598)

Again, we come back to Bush’s methods of operation. In spite of the fact that after September 11, 2001 the United States government tried to expose Al-Qaeda as the responsible, as Watson puts it,1 in May 2002 the former FBI Agent Robert Wright described how his superiors intentionally obstructed his investigation into Al-Qaeda financed by Yassin Al-Qadi (“Primetime”), who per Pope “talked very highly of his relationship with [the then Vice President] Dick Cheney.” Senator Bob Graham, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee from June 2001 through the buildup to the Iraq War, also, asserted that two of the hijackers had a support network in the United States that included agents of … the Bush administration, and FBI blocked a congressional investigation into that relationship (Graham and Nussbaum 25). While George Tenet, the former CIA Director, claimed that Richard Perle, the prior assistant Secretary of Defense, the day after 9/11 had told him that Iraq bears the attacks responsibility (306), the latter, speaking to Wolf Blitzer, refuted that matter. Therefore, the grounds on which the neocon government stood become slippery, and these statements make us believe that the attacks were just some shows to justify the breakout of Afghanistan and Iraq Wars (Griffin and Falk 131). Further proof is provided when one finds Francis Fukuyama, a passionate neocon, together with some others from the faction, after the event writing a letter to Bush and called for raiding on Iraq “even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack”. In this way, one is forced to know “anticipation” as casus belli.

The concept of “commonwealth” is also remarkable: albeit Hobbes’ definition is different, his theories result in a word-by-word translation; that is to say, it can stand for sharing each other’s wealth; however, it goes without saying that the ruler never shares anything but misery. Five years after the Iraq War, Amnesty International reported,

1. Although in this study the researcher had to benefit from some websites, they are either the American

government’s sites or official ones.



“despite claims that the security situation has improved in recent months, the human rights situation is disastrous” and “the economy is in tatters and the refugee crisis” keeps escalating (“Carnage”). The International Committee of the Red Cross also wrote, “armed violence is still having a disastrous impact” and adds to the widespread poverty plus a lack of food and water (“Iraq”). This is, in fact, what David Rose called “Using Terror to Fight Terror” or as Hobbes himself admitted, “the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (1599). Then, when Joseph E. Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, estimated the wars costs as three trillion dollars (B01), two senators asked congressional investigators to look at Iraq’s oil revenues if the war-ravaged nation can pay for its own reconstruction (“Senators”), and America pressed Iraqi heads to pass the law regulating how to transfer ownership of the majority of their oil refineries to multinational oil companies linked mostly to the United States (Walker 11). Now, can we re-pose Greg Muttitt’s question whether the United States is stealing Iraq’s oil. This seems reasonable to American neocon politicians, if Hobbes utters that it is “the law of nature that the greater spoils they gained, the greater was their honor” (1603), because in the conditions of war “there be … no mine and thine distinct” (1600). In reality, in accordance with Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, the ulterior motive for the Afghanistan War also included a natural gas pipeline to the Indian Ocean.

Hobbes never thought of defending in the true sense, but assailing, for the reason that “augmentation of dominion over men being necessary to a man’s conservation [of his territory]” (1598). Consequently, the kind of invasion is not of significance; as a sample, it can be sexual: Baker III made public the statistics that there were 2,688 sexual assaults across the military in 2007. In the state of nature, this is ostensibly just and fair in Hobbesian discourse: “every man has a right to every thing [sic], even to one another’s body” (1601).

It can be a cultural war that has too broad a scope, yet the researcher intends to bring some famous examples in the literary or artistic domains. John Updike, who in 2003 was presented with the National Medal for the Humanities from George W. Bush (“Updike”), in 2006, wrote The Terrorist, the story of a young Muslim who has jihadist ideas. Bumiller reports on another well-known writer, Tom Wolfe, of whom the American neocon president was a reader in response to his supports (A19), and whose 2006 novel I Am Charlotte Simmons won the Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award. In 2004, Patrick Buchanan, a moralist politician, underlined this matter by saying that the culture war has been reignited:

A radical Left aided by a cultural elite that detests Christianity and finds Christian moral tenets reactionary and repressive is hell-bent on pushing its amoral values and imposing its ideology on our nation. The unwisdom of what the Hollywood and the Left are about should be transparent to all. (Toner 1)

The eventual character, relevant to cultural conflict, is media or information war, which is best depicted by American Free Press under the title of “The Media Is the Enemy”:

In the old Soviet Union, the government controlled the media. Not a word of substance could be published without prior approval from the Bolshevik commissars. Today, in the United States, the situation is starkly similar.

… a plutocratic elite … own[s] the Big Media [Media Monopoly] and … control[s] the government through their ownership of that media[:] …

The Masters of the Media decide which are the “good wars” and which are the “bad wars.”

The Masters of the Media decide who is the “hero” and who is the “villain.”

Michael Moore also in his Fahrenheit 9/11 contends that American corporate media were “cheerleaders” for the invasion of Iraq and did not provide an accurate and objective analysis of the rationale for the war or the resulting casualties there. It is noteworthy that based on the technique of “foregrounding” (Short 11), the movie starts with Fox News Channel, the top neocon medium, to indicate that it was the forerunner of the “cheerleaders”.



Hobbes carried on, “among men there are very many that think themselves wiser and abler to govern the public better than the rest” (1604). This comes true in the Neoconservatist policies as Idealism or Wilsonianism, which holds that a state should make its internal political philosophy the goal of its foreign policy; the United States uses its monopoly on power to intervene in other countries to promote democracy (Chomsky 14). On the other hand, the Project for the New American Century, a neoconservative think tank, stated its goal as “to promote American global leadership” (About PNAC). Of course, to save world’s people from poverty, corruption, and dictatorship is all right, but to act the opposite, and by military force is what Noam Chomsky calls “Military Humanism”.

Speaking of “contracts”, the British “philosopher” had a firm conviction that “covenants without the sword are but words, and of no strength to secure a man at all” (1603). Neoconservativism, too, is less wedded to the preservation of international institutions and treaties while pursuing assertive or aggressive stances to push its goals. Whereas only the U. N. Security Council may authorize the use of force against an “aggressor” (United Nations Charter Ch. VII, Art. 39-42), “from the charter point of view it [the 2003 invasion of Iraq] was illegal”, said Kofi Annan, the then U. N. secretary general. As another illustration, whereas Brahic states that the United States is the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gas and an actual danger for global warming, it has not ratified the Kyoto Protocol yet. Their double standard sounds obvious: while the Islamic Republic of Iran’s nuclear program is absolutely peaceful (Latest), Bush tried, as covered by McKeeby, to throw obstacles in the path of this country, although the U. S. unlike Iran has not signed NPT. Furthermore, Hobbes condemned human “covenants” as “artificial” and futile (1604), but he never thought that his ideas, for instance, of preemptive war, make them so.

After all, in order to justify his words or deceive his reader, Hobbes sacrificed the Golden Rule:

That a man be willing, when others are so too, … for peace and defence of himself he should think it necessary … [to] be contented with so much liberty against each other men as he would allow other men against himself [sic]… This is that law of the Gospel. (1601)

It is in the case that he was an atheist (Menhennet 636-7); moreover, his theories do not meet what the Bible says, such as “Love Your Enemies” (Luke 6:27), or “whatever you would have people do for you, do the same for them” (Matthew 7:12). Even in following Hobbes’ contradictions, Bush did not fall short: he pioneered faith-based welfare programs by extending funds and support for religious organizations that provided social services such as reduction of domestic violence, though millions in grants went to the churches operated by political proponents of his administration (Kirkpatrick A1; “God and Government”). As mentioned earlier, we keep in mind the desecration of the Quran in the detention camps, yet beforehand he had said that we would take the side of Muslims who advocate values around the world (President). Despite so many historical documents approving Palestine to be a country as ancient as at least twenty-six centuries (Rainey 57-63), the people of which has elected Hamas as their government (Erlanger “U.S.” A1), the President repudiated the democratic result and announced his support for Israel (“Narrow”), with its skill in terrorism. This means that he declared war on terrorism in his Address, but put it aflame by the advocation of Israel. This is in a line with another point of paradoxicality in Hobbes, who assumed “peace” and “defence” as a state’s responsibilities to its citizens. Once more, to repeat Chomsky’s question, how do war and peace match each other?

Here, in order to emphasize the antithetical perspectives, the researcher deems it necessary to pose a question: were the two countries, Afghanistan and Iraq, more powerful and dangerous than Russia, Israel, France, and the U. K. with 16000, 200 (Aftergood and Kristensen), 350 (“Table”), and 200 (Robertson pt. 64) nuclear warheads respectively?, since Hobbes, as indicated above, taught that the operation should last up to the time the ruler “see[s] no other power great enough to endanger him”. Possibly, Bush had just read the anterior part: “by force or wiles to master the persons of all men he can” (emphasis added), which highlights the fact that he could not take action against the mentioned countries.



At the end, the researcher is of the opinion that we can keep the trace of other Bushist strategies in other literary books; to propose one, Orwell’s 1984 might have taught the American neocon president how to keep surveillance on his people’s domestic actions, the job that he did during his presidency (Risen and Lichtblau A1).

3. Conclusion

Hobbes’ opinions as a royalist, supporting Charles I and so dictatorship, were best featured in this utterance: “the definition of injustice is no other than the not performance of covenant” (1602), which is made “if every man should say to every man, ‘I authorize and give up my right of governing myself to this man’ … And he that carries this person is called sovereign … and everyone besides, his subject” (1605). This is in opposition to the democracy of Milton’s The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. Both Hobbes and Milton wrote down about governance in the same epoch, yet Milton’s commonwealth is ascertained when people by their rationality, not a “sovereign”, control their own country that is devoid of hierarchical orders. His work is actually best depicted as “defenses of tyrannicide, and development of a republican political theory derived from classical and contemporary sources, and the Bible” (Lewalski 230).

Back to “ideology”, if the first Marxists trusted in the assumption as a bilateral relationship that literature makes the thought system and vice versa, we see that neither Hobbes’ text destined the day of Britain nor the then state, the Commonwealth or Protectorate, incited him to put such words in ink in 1651. This is not to deny the mutual influence of literature and political governance, but to imply that the affect is chosen freely. Simply put, the political system of a period may influence one’s writing, yet it does not thwart the author’s free will and thought. If Marxists believe that the history or the date of the literary work is not important (Althusser 171) as now we see the text’s probable influence on Bush’s system after some centuries, one may easily bear in mind that the universality of literature has caused such a similarity. On the contrary, it is to signify the “national interest”, the notion often mistaken with “universality”, as in Culler (37), since the latter is defined as what remains absolutely true everywhere, all times, and under any condition, yet the anticipatory attack does not apply to most countries in the world.

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ideology an interdisciplinary study in literature and politics

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