Chris has used my recent post on false consciousness as a springboard for discussing aspects of the idea which interest him. That is his right. I post a brief two-part riposte here, all the same.
Without linking to my post, Chris has me as representing one of two sides of an argument, with neither of which is he happy; and my side looks to him like this:
Norm says false consciousness has acquired a bad name because of the way it has been used politically in defence of authoritarian politics. This is true, but irrelevant. We should judge ideas by their empirical validity, not by their consequences.
(1) I appear, then, to be a simple opponent of the idea of false consciousness, whereas a quick perusal of my post will show that I start out my discussion of false consciousness with examples indicating why I think the idea can be used in unproblematic ways, ways that aren’t ‘either arrogant or sinister’. Only then do I go on to say why it has acquired a bad name. Chris may not himself have any time for this other side of things, but he shouldn’t present it as being the only side of what I say.
(2) I move on from this point of interpretative self-defence to a rather more important matter: when Chris says it ‘is true, but irrelevant’ that the idea of false consciousness came to be discredited, my inclination is to respond (loosely speaking), ‘Good God!’ The use of the idea that some people can know the interests of others better than they themselves do and impose severe privations and oppressions on account of that claim is only tied up with some of the most terrible political experiences of the 20th century. From where does Chris get it that the empirical validity of ideas is all that counts? It may be all that counted in his blogging preoccupations yesterday, but there are other and wider canons of relevance. The empirical validity (or otherwise) of an idea is indeed important. But a political idea can be a complex thing, with more than one component. Historically, ‘false consciousness’ has denoted not only the claim – which may be true or false – that someone doesn’t know what is good for them, but also the rather unhappy thesis that a vanguard of some kind is in possession of THE truth on this score, and may legitimately impose the most egregious forms of repression because it is. I think that thesis is bang-on relevant in a discussion of the historical meanings of false consciousness.