The central theme of our work this week is an understanding of ideology, of both the concept itself and of the construction, nurturing, perpetuating and adjusting of the webs of social, economic, political, personal, national and international relationships we might identify as ideologies. To the ideas of Berger, Zerubavel, Satris and Geertz, we add Kavanagh's incisive exploration of ideology first as the concept is commonly (mis)used, and second, in its meaning, the identification of a pervasive system of dominance which robs the individual of autonomy while perpetuating the illusion that s/he is free.

An understanding of ideology enables us to dissect the social world around us by asking and answering fundamental questions. For example, we might ask, "What is natural?" Or "What does good mean and what does evil mean, and how does distance in time and space influence those meanings?" Or, more practically, we might ask, "How do social organizations (a church, the family, a television network, for example) exert their control over the individual?" Or "Why do we obey the prohibitions that stop us from driving on the wrong side of the road or not paying our taxes."

For, as the breakdown of the taxation system in contemporary Russia shows, if enough people do not pay their taxes, a state cannot accumulate enough money to pay the administrators, bureaucrats and ultimately, the legal actors (lawyers, judges & police) who can enforce such payment. In this case, we might ask, "Is power a consensual illusion of the rulers and the ruled?"

We investigate these ideas through a focus on two different aspects of our global social world. In the first, we look at the relationships between the ideological systems we call religions and the questing mind, initially through two readings from Plato, then through an examination of the historical moment when one of the politically and socially subversive mystery religions of the Roman Empire, Christianity, succumbed to the prevailing social prescriptions (and proscriptions) which, as Elaine Pagels notes at the end of her chapter, dominate it still.

In the second, we apply what we have learned about the discovery and interpretation of evidence from Natalie Zemon Davis and Elaine Pagels to investigate the dispute between Palestinians and Israelis over the ownership of the geographical territory called Israel. We interrogate different kinds of evidence (the essential raw materials of reaching conclusions for ourselves, and not relying on those of others) -- primary documents, journalism, historical analysis, literature and art -- and attempt to understand the complex human histories that lie behind such easy clichés as the "problems in the Middle East."

Both these areas of study arouse strong emotions and opinions in many people. In the case of religions, for example, some of us (whatever our faith) may feel, with Tertullian, that we have no need of further knowledge when we have the revealed word of our God to guide us. Others of us may feel, like Valentinus, that only through the perpetual search for knowledge, wherever that search takes us, can we approach God.

Some of us may feel, like Socrates, that religion short-circuits thought. Others of us may, like Euthryphro 'know what we know,' even if we cannot put it clearly into words or defend it successfully. Or, perhaps, some of us may reject all religions as illusions designed to enslave the individual intellect, without perhaps realizing that the rejection of religions is as socially constructed as its acceptance.

What is important during this week is not the answers that we reach (individually or collectively) but our willingness to interrogate without pre-judgment the processes by which we reach our answers, to understand both the visible and invisible inheritances that might limit our understanding of our own (and others') decision-making, and to enjoy (very important!) an intellectual debate about a concept which we, as educated members of the world's richest nation, cannot ignore.

Online Texts

Theodor Hertzl: The Jewish State (Introduction)

Negib Azouri: Program of the League of the Arab Fatherland

Minute of conversation: Adolf Hitler and Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini (extract)

UN Security Council Resolution 242

Palestinian National Charter

Timeline of the Palestinian Israeli History and the Israel-Palestine Conflict