On the Significance of a Non-ideological Approach to Social Commentary

I've written comments on my personal blog about my feelings about the feminist movement. Those comments appeared there and not on this overtly political blog because to a large extent, the approach that one takes to social issues is deeply informed by personal experience. The feminist penchant "the personal is political" is quite aptly inverted. In social issues, the political is very personal.

On principle, libertarians disagree with state intervention into social life as I have noted briefly on this blog before. However, there is another epistemic dimension to the libertarian approach to social issues that deserves elaboration as well. For just as the stultifying uniformity of the state is the enemy of the dynamism of civil society in political matters, so ideology is the enemy of conrete personal experience in matters of social knowledge. One may even go as far as to say that ideology is the expression of statism in the realm of epistemology.

The tale of political correctness on college campuses and its various bleedings into the broader public discourse has been widely told ad nauseum. Classical readings of Shakespeare are chucked for analyses of Hamlet's supposed Oedipal complex or Shakespeare's own class position in 16th century England. It is quite easy to make literary criticism that is based on a prefigured ideological paradigm, and there has been no shortage of 20th century American "intellectuals" that have come out of the woodwork to do so. One of the main reasons this seems problematic is that it reduces the complexity or even mystery of social life to an easily applicable formula. Moveover, it runs the risk of shutting out what we know we really know about social life because it does not conform to the adopted ideological schema. When compelled to conform to this schema and restrained from acting on what we otherwise know, we move down the road to authoritarianism.

Hence, as I move forward with this blog and attempt to tackle cultural issues, it will be important to take account of the assumptions with which I examine said issues. Simply fitting events into a narrative about gender or class oppression will not do. There must be a thoughtful and even sometimes superficial arbitrary approach to opining on social phenomena, and an admission that it is an expression of personal disposition as much or even in compliment with a conception of The Good for society.