As the current financial meltdown continues this week (Black Monday, Lehman Brothers, AIG -- they seem to come almost daily now), our explanatory narratives are wobbling.  I even heard a local libertarian blowhard on the radio the other day admit that champions of an unfettered, unregulated market (people like himself) have to step up to the plate and admit that they bear much of the blame for current conditions.  The more serious this economic situation becomes, the less time we have to dink around with the usual campaign crap about pig cosmetics and flag lapel pins.

But there is no actual solution to these problems within our present mainstream worldview, what can be called the Ideology of Optimism.  In this worldview, there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the building blocks of the socioeconomic order.  For both conservatives and liberals, a uniform set of assumptions is in place: economic growth is good, public education is good, higher education is even better, one person/one job is the norm, single family dwellings are the highest form of living, free markets and consumption are the purest forms of economic interaction, etc.  We all know the general contours of this worldview, because it is the template and timeline of our lives, embedded in all of our institutions from cradle to grave.  Kids grown up in single family dwellings, surrounded by commodities and nurtured on consumption.  Early on, they are shipped off to day care, pre-school, and then school, where they spend decades in age-segregated cohorts, learning how to compete and jealousy covet their neighbors' loot.  If kids are lucky enough to make it to college, they are thus quickly rushed on to a career path, which then blossoms in young adulthood, where most settle down into couplehood and family life.  As adults, people are subject to the usual institutions: home ownership, employment for some sort of company, consumer spending and debt.  Eventually, older adults have to sock away prodigious sums of money for retirement, and hopefully achieve quiet comfort in their elderly years, in some sort of senior home or small independent dwelling.  

All along the way, the skids are greased for this way of life to seem normal.  Schools, businesses, media, churches, politics; all of these arenas shout out the correctness of our current social form.  Indeed, our institutions and values literally create the social form and are the substance of it.  This is essentially the robust, sociological meaning of ideology: the full set of economic and social institutions, and their accompanying values.  The places in which we grow up and mature (schools, churches, jobs, marketplaces) literally create and then become our worldview.  In looking at things in this way, we can see how profoundly conservative ideology is.  This is the problem that confronted Marx, Karl Mannheim, and other social philosophers.  If our institutional conditions create our worldview, then where can purposeful social change come from?  How can we actually get outside of our ideologies to envision some sort of meaningful future beyond blind chance? If we're always trapped inside our ideologies, is there no way out, no way of seeing a more objective truth?  This is the postmodern problem of relative truth: can anyone truly get "outside" their subjective frame of reference to critique things from a neutral place?

As far as our discussion goes, we can see the straitjacket of ideology in the panicked reactions to current conditions.  As various major meta-systems enter simultaneous states of decline (finance, climate, biodiversity, suburbia), mainstream politicians flail around for "solutions," which always tend to look like more of the same stuff that caused the problems in the first place.  So six decades of economic growth have brought us crippling inequality and ecological destruction?  Ah, well, it must have just been the wrong kind -- we'll just need to transition over to a different kind of growth.  So half a century of propagating the education/career/family-home social form has resulted in community collapse, economic emptiness, psychological crippling, and cultural bankruptcy?  Ah, well, then we just need to make sure that more people have more education, so they can get more and better jobs, and then pay more taxes to create more schools for more education, etc., ad infinitum. 

The correctness of the whole system itself is taken for granted, and all of the solutions floated come from within the system itself.  With all of the talk about "change" in the current election, what are the candidates really proposing?  Obama is touting market, government, and social mechanisms to jump start a green economy, with green jobs, lots of new education, etc.  He wants to reignite the promise of the American Dream, where if people work hard and fly right, they can support their families and provide a better future for their children.  And McCain wants roughly the same thing, only with more emphasis on the free market to spark entrepreneurial activity, economic growth, sustainable energy and the like.  McCain just wants more money to go to fighting Islamic extremism, and more money for offshore oil drilling.  But none of their policy platforms question the overall downward trajectory of the American Algorithm.  They do not see that our myriad system failures come from the faulty nature of the basic social form itself.  

More education, greener jobs, better health care, the American Dream, hard work, economic growth -- these things are all part of the system that has brought us to the brink of destruction.  Why would we try more of these same things, hoping that they'll produce different results this time around? Because we're caught inside that Ideology of Optimism, that complex of institutions and values that tells us that our general way of life is good, and will get better.  How can single family dwellings be dysfunctional when everyone lives in one?  How can education and careerism be a bad thing when the very models of success all around us are either highly educated, great at their jobs, or both?  What's that, legal and illegal drug use is on the rise, and millions of people live in parallel lives of fantasy and escape, medicating and dreaming their way out of epidemic levels of depression and loneliness?  Ah, that's not a problem.  I'm sure people have always been like that, and it's only now that they have the freedom and market mechanisms to address their personal problems.  I'm sure it has nothing to do with the profoundly non-human places and institutions we've created.

In the smothering Ideology of Optimism, the overall way of things is not questioned.  A profound conservatism holds.  And it could hardly be otherwise.  There is very little slack built into the system for the vast majority of regular people living out their lives on the ground.  And once people enter the grinding treadmill of mortgage payments, grocery bills, tuition, loan repayments and the like, it is all but impossible to entertain notions of a different way of life.  What's the point? We have to live in reality.  But that's the exact point.  Ideology is the sum total of institutions and their matching behaviors and values.  Institutions lay out the path for correct living, and deviation from that results in failure or irrelevancy or both.  The whole thing is a self-referential and self-reinforcing complex.  The rightness of it all seems ordained by God.  

This goes to the heart of the first two posts on this blog, The Conservative Story and the Liberal Story.  Because the rightness of the system itself is taken for granted, the utter failure of processes across the socioeconomic and ecological spectrums cannot be any intrinsic flaw.  Our problems must be caused by some nefarious third party, some apostate group that has ruined the American Dream.  Conservatives thus lash out at liberals for their traitorous, atheistic, and murderous (i.e., abortion) turning away from the American Way of Life.  And liberals bash conservatives as an unholy alliance of rich corporate fatcats who have looted the public coffers and backward looking religious fanatics bent on destroying science and forcing their medieval beliefs on a hugely diverse nation.  We thus struggle back and forth with these bogus narratives, laying the blame for systemic failure at the doorsteps of our fellow citizens. This is a dangerous way to run a society, because declining overall conditions can quickly change heated partisan rhetoric over to outright persecution, violence, and mass murder.  Scapegoating is the slipperiest of slopes.

So how can we get outside of the Ideology of Optimism, the straitjacket that prevents us from seeing solutions from a neutral perspective?  Can we really instigate any meaningful social change that is not just more of the same?  Or are we completely locked into the institutions we have now, hoping against hope that more education, new tax policies, or green technology will finally reverse all of the damage that these very things have cause in the past?  Many philosophers and social theorists have attacked this problem, with various "neutral" vantage points proposed.  Marxists saw the working classes themselves as able to stand outside the capitalist system, creating a new reality through their concrete praxis.  Some saw science as that disembodied, neutral place from which to critique society and propose new directions free from ideology. But the consensus in the end was that almost all proposals for social change were too embedded in existing institutions, and thus still trapped inside the cocoon of ideology itself.  Science exists in university and corporate settings, which are completely shot through with conventional notions of progress and profit.  The working classes are never able to drive novel collective change, especially in the hyper-modern form of American capitalism which has relentlessly funneled money and power upwards to a small financial elite and crushed any vestiges of widespread unionization.  

So where is there to stand, where would meaningful change come from and what would drive it?  It is here that we encounter Paul Ricoeur's masterful notion.  In his seminal work Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, Ricoeur reviews all of the previous discussions on the ideology trap and its relation to social change.  Much of the discussion above has been cribbed from Ricoeur's work, which is needless to say, much better than mine.  But after winding through all of the great discussions on ideology and social change, covering Marx, Mannheim, Weber, Geertz, and others, Ricoeur reaches the conclusion that only the device of Utopia is able to shatter the cocoon of ideology and present real options for social change.  In Ricoeur's description, only Utopia is able to "shatter" the present order by completely bypassing all existing institutions and values.  Utopia is the dynamic part of the social imagination, whereas ideology is the formative, structural part.  In this model, ideology is indeed important and "good," in the sense that it lays down pathways without which life would prove unlivable.  But it is only the utopian element that drives society forward to truly new vistas of existence.  And while utopia is essentially a literary device, and can be seen as just pie-in-the-sky dreaming, that is precisely the point.  Utopia is the social form of hoping for and imagining a better life, and without it we are doomed to our ideological straitjacket.

Using this model of ideology and utopia as complimentary parts of the social imagination, we can see the problem with the current lack of vision in mainstream discourse.  The utopian element has been completely lost from our public discussions.  All dreaming has become private, driven by the essentially inward-looking nature of the individual and the family.  The better life we want is not social but personal.  We all dream private utopias, of winning the lottery and moving to a tropical island.  The element of hope has been banished from the social sphere, with any collective leaning seen as dirty socialism or communism.  With the collapse of the Soviet Union, all communal dreaming was seen a forever consigned to the dustbin of history.  Going forward, all desire was shunted to self, family, church, and nation.  (I should note here that I do not consider "nation" to be a truly collective idea, at least as currently conceived.  The patriotic idea of the nation is actually a community-crusher, a bludgeon used to tell people to sacrifice their lives for some totemic idea of the whole.  But the patriotic whole is not really a community-minded idea at all, and in fact is used to shout down the actual diversity and complexity that comes in any real community, subsuming it under a uniform code of belief and behavior.)

We must recover the utopian element in America.  We must dream big again, with large ideas of an imagined future that shatters all forms of the current Ideology of Optimism.  In this sense, utopia is not optimistic but pessimistic, as it relates to current conditions.  Our way of life has no future, as James Howard Kunstler likes to say, and a Utopian Pessimism makes it possible to radically negate our present arrangements without becoming completely disillusioned.  Utopia can provide that model of truly social hope, one that is not simply an amalgam of individual desires.  And unlike Ricoeur's analysis, which stayed close to the literary nature of utopia, we need to move beyond and actually create embodied utopias, new collective social forms that shatter the existing institutional assumptions of the Ideology of Optimism.  In this sense, real social change will come from the bottom up, with community living providing a radical different template and timeline for people's lives.