In A
habit theory of civic morality, I explained political morality as an
extension of particular adaptive principles of personal integrity, so because an ethic featuring frugality
controls personal life, a passion for paying off the national debt inauspiciously
arises during this world depression. (See, also, The puzzling persistence of resistance to Keynes by Professor
Mike Dorf.) Here, I extend the explanation from civic morality to
ideologies, which I claim are determined by nonmoral
habits.
Occupations
are like politics in offering common kinds of issues and multifarious means of
resolving them, the issues and methods presenting at levels of abstraction
typical for a class of occupation, inducing habitual mental sets conducing to the corresponding ideology types. The diagram below (click to expand) depicts the association
between the four ideology types and occupations that foster the corresponding
habits of thought.
The
clearest example is in the Monomaniacalist quadrant,
with computer programming the
prototypical occupation. A programming task is Monomaniacalist
because the programmer faces issues construed abstractly (e.g., create
certain functionalities in a word processing program) but must find concrete
solutions (strings of symbols in a programming language). For programmers
currently, linkages to ideology are clearest: programmers are inclined to
libertarianism, the leading Monomaniacalist ideology, at least in the United
States.
Although
programmers are the purest Monomaniacalists, “knowledge work” generally
inclines to this ideology type, as with teachers, who manipulate concrete
prescribed lessons to achieve abstract educational goals. Science, in its ordinary practice, uses concepts largely reduced to
concrete operational definitions to reach abstract goals of incremental knowledge.
The expansion of the knowledge-worker occupational category may partly explain
the 20th century influence of another Monomaniacalist current, Stalinism.
An
occupation can influence ideology type in two ways: the work’s content or its
form. In some occupations, the work grips the mind, in which case the content
rather than the form is important, as in the occupations already discussed; in
others, the work is a means to an external end. For an example of an occupation
where its form is important, take the case where no real work is required: the
occupation of capitalist as pure “coupon
clipper,” who, like Bill Gates, remain the richest of the business class.
Capitalists must concern themselves with the concrete issues of maximizing
return on investment and the concrete method of manipulating the particulars of
their stock portfolios. Combining a concrete orientation toward issues and
method, capitalists incline to a Managerialist outlook.
The issue peasants face is the concrete
one of realizing maximum revenue from production. The peasantry meets the
concrete issues by sentimentalizing land ownership. The peasant becomes
emotionally attached to land and seeks to own more, and from this abstract
sentiment arises much of the motive to work the land and produce the most from
it. An abstract means is harnessed to a concrete issue, fitting the Demagogist pattern. The small businessman displays a dampened
version of the peasant’s ideological predilections and has a similar if less
flagrant attachment pattern to property.
Although
the unskilled manual worker is
engaged in concrete thinking at work, this is repetitious and automatized, the
details requiring minimal attention. The focus of attention controls. Workers
must concern themselves with their entire conditions of life. Unlike the
peasant, the worker cannot rely on a concrete measure based on amount earned,
since workers have surrendered hours of their very lives to control by their
bosses. Workers must enter in the balance even the psychological costs of
submitting to an arrogant boss. Workers sell their time to their bosses, and this
condition forces them to make the totality of their conditions the issue and to
fashion or embrace matching concepts to persist at dreary work. In long
historical perspective, the workers incline to Utopianism.
