By Paul Seaton, Public Discourse. (Photo: Hennie Stander/Unsplash)
“Reason and revelation,” “God’s creation and the natural order of things,” “the biological nature of human beings,” and “Natural Law”: these are Mahoney’s lodestars and the criteria by which he judges not just ideology’s falsehood but its destructive evil.
There is no better guide writing today to the nature and works of the ideological mind and the totalitarian soul than Daniel J. Mahoney, Assumption University professor emeritus of political science and author or editor of nearly twenty books and hundreds of articles and reviews. His latest compact book, The Persistence of the Ideological Lie: The Totalitarian Impulse Then and Now, distills and packs to overflowing a lifetime of study, reflection, and writing on the titular subjects.
Because of the complex nature of the phenomena in question (ideology as a form of thought; totalitarianism as an impulse to reengineer the entirety of society in view of such thought; the persistence of both beyond the demise of Soviet Communism), Mahoney has to consider a number of dimensions and levels. In so doing, he employs what one could call “analytic” and “empirical” methods. They mutually illuminate one another: what appears to ordinary consciousness to be destructive madness “makes sense” when seen in its ideological framework. To a considerable extent, by their fruits you shall know them. So far, the fruits have been uniformly bitter. Critical analysis explains why. Ideology is at war with reality and reason, both philosophical and prudential.
Three Dimensions, Three Chief Guides
Analytically, the core dimensions to consider are the intellectual, the moral, and the spiritual, as ideology monstrously perverts all three. To help in this endeavor, Mahoney chooses three chief guides, one for each dimension, while bringing in others as need be. The great anti-totalitarian Russian writer and author of the monumental Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, helps us grasp the essential character of Ideology, which is based on a Manichean division of humanity that denies a common humanity and justifies the liquidation of entire segments of humanity because they stand in the way of Progress. Subsequent ideologies may displace the division and the historically culpable group, but they follow the template created earlier.