Just like any sea, life is impossible to navigate without tools and knowledge. There are the things we use to make our way about the world and there is the sense we have of what that direction is, which way we’re trying to go and how the behavioral patterns of the wind and water will likely help or hinder us. And despite how Kantian that sounds, I’m not proposing any transcendental dialectic—just an analogy. One that recognizes the state of humans as, not lost per se, but certainly thrown into a difficult journey that can seem, at times, to have no meaningful end in sight or even in mind. This article is about that state of being and some of our natural tendencies for coping with it. And it is, above all, about prayer—and about its opposite: Ideology.
Slavoj Žižek, a Slovenian philosopher and social critic, has famously argued that ideology appears “precisely where you don’t think you will find it[i].” His example is, get ready for this, toilets. Žižek cites the varying structures of toilets in France, Germany, and England, and proceeds to illuminate how each structure somehow mirrors a simplified version of its nation’s life-style an politics. Now, I wish I could repeat the whole demonstration here, but I doubt it is entirely appropriate. Click the link if you’re interested. It is enough to note that ideology appears where we least expect it.
I will offer my own example, one I have been working on for quite a while. I believe that the way people use Google, and the way people think about using Google, is a perfect example of the way ideology shapes our common experiences and perceptions. And, of course, you are probably thinking, what is he talking about? Google is simple. And that, of course, beautifully demonstrates my point. People do not use Google because they have looked up the statistics and have found, objectively, that Google is the most reliable source of information when compared to libraries or encyclopedias or grandmothers; no, rather, they use Google because they believe that the kind of culture that produces and is produced by Google is the kind of culture which can be relied on for knowledge and information. But where did that belief come from? One scholar put it this way: It is as if Google’s search algorithms “had somehow designed themselves[ii].”
I can hear you now. OK, OK, But what’s the big deal? Who cares? Ideology is always going to be a part of everyone’s everyday lives. It is impossible to live without natural filters—prejudices and biases, etc. As long as we’re nice people, why don’t you social philosophers just get off our backs? Good. This is a wonderful question. I will answer with a thought experiment. Imagine there is a group of young elementary school children who are picking teams for a game of neighborhood basketball. Two kids are chosen as team captains and they begin to select kids from the group, one-by-one. At the end of the selection process, there is only one kid left, an obese child who is also very dirty and not considered handsome at all. Now, anyone can guess that if you were to ask the kids why they left this one child out, their answer would be simple and confident. “He just isn’t good at basketball.” But no one would think for a moment this decision was made purely on the basis of a rational calculation. Neighborhood basketball isn’t played that way. We routinely choose kids because they are our friends or because we admire them—even if they aren’t good at basketball. So although the children’s answer may be true, it does not mean that there wasn’t some form of ideology behind their exclusion.
The difference is that adults are naïve enough to truly believe their “rational calculation.” Children know well they are lying. They know well they excluded the kid because he was ugly and fat. The danger, then, is obvious. When ideologies are simply ignored, their power over us is even stronger. Sexism, racism, ableism, and so on—these then become the organizing principles of society, despite and in the midst of all of our rational calculations. If only we were to become like children again.
That, not incidentally, is the purpose of a good liberal arts education—to become aware once again of our own motives and our own ideological biases, not that we would overcome them by power of will or anything like that, but that they would lose some amount of the power they have over us. Prayer, also not incidentally, returns us to a state of childhood by placing us in the presence of God—or, rather, by reminding us that we were always already in His presence. It is in this sense that prayer is anti-ideological.
Because in the presence of God, there is no other organizing principle than love. Any ideological motivation is made to address itself to a God who loves, unconditionally, the outsider, the abject, the lonely—the excluded kid in the neighborhood basketball game. Love, as an organizing principle, is profoundly disorienting for humans. It is natural for us to adopt simplified views of the world. It makes things easier. It takes less effort. Ideologies are coping mechanisms, in other words. They allow us to cope with the complexity of the world, the complexity of ourselves and the complexity of others. But ideologies are necessarily incomplete and distorted views of the world. When we artificially reduce the complexity of the world by distilling it into some kind of short story where we are the good guys and we know what is right and good and so on, we simultaneously reduce the potential of the world—only that potential that we allow into our “short story,” our ideology, is available to us.
But prayer opens the world up again, reminds us of the complexity of our situation, reminds us that we simplify things and lose sight of love. It reminds us there is much more to the world than we make of it and our hopelessness is the result of our coping mechanism—ideology.
One last thought: I am not saying that, in the metaphor of the sea, we simply lose sight of God and that prayer redirects our sight towards God and somehow that is all it takes to live well. No. In the boat, there is no God to look at. Because God is not out there...He’s not beckoning us as though we were on our way to Him. He is with us in the boat. Virtually every Mesopotamian creation myth includes a section where the god-figure conquers the ocean. And in each, the waters are symbolic of chaos, disorder—complexity. If we listen to Him, He is probably telling us that, yes, the world is complex, but He knows the waters well. And it is not our own knowledge, our own ability to understand, or our own tools that will get us through, but only an unceasing dialogue with the one who knows the waters.
[i] If one merely types "Zizek toilets" into the YouTube search box, one will find a number of videos in which he makes this point.
[ii] Page 5 of Google and the Culture of Search
