Motivation

This week’s readings were refreshing—not the sort of thing one typically says when studying ideology, but nonetheless true for me at least. They addressed a long-felt need in our course, most recently and eloquently described by Jonathan in his post last week: how does ideology shape our understanding of 1) the literature we’ve been reading and 2) motivation generally?

Given the placement of these readings within the structure of our course, I found the short section in Geertz on the relationship between science and ideology particularly helpful (230-33). Geertz sets up several binaries in this section, but the most interesting is that science is critical whereas ideology is justificatory. This maps onto something Jeff said last week quite well: when the science tells you precisely the story you expected to hear beforehand, you question the validity of the science. Indeed, our collective negative reactions to science have largely tracked the extent to which the studies have reinforced accepted wisdom. When we learned that men enjoy punishment while women are empathetic, or that men want to have many sexual partners while women want one long-term mate, we felt “boxed-in.” This was not the case when we read the counterintuitive game theory literature early on.

Given Geertz’s definition, it’s hard to call last week’s reading science rather than ideology. Geertz’s description of Hitler’s Nazism fits Buss’s findings a bit too well: “he was merely objectifying [the German conscience]—transforming a prevalent personal neurosis into a powerful social force.” (232) I think the problem with Buss’s science is precisely that it is justificatory, which is why I was most annoyed by the implied reasoning from the adaptive to the natural to the good. You might say that Buss justified the status quo by turning folk psychology into evolutionary advantage.