Ideological Survival

  Bell suggested that the ideologies that were current in the nineteenth centuries would disappear in favour of a technocratic approach. He called himself an economist and argued that approaches at characterizing and applying party directives and philosophy had come to an end; technological advancements would be lead the populace instead. The post war status quo was defended and functionaries would through technological advancements advance the system, instead of debating over political directives and designs but because of the ensuing discontent among youth movements, extremist policies rose in certain countries. Their motives may have been to discredit the status quo established by former colonial powers. Countries with questionable leadership policies in the seventies, affecting the civil flights of other nations were reason to suspect that political ideologies had not been exhausted.

By ideology, the design of a Utopian state or society was intended. If ideology was not needed then one could assume that only cosmetic changes would occur to change government directives slightly. Critics state that this was an attempt to rule out agreements favouring political change; that those in power would love to see a continuity of laws favouring an influx of resources to feed industrial commitments.

The end of ideology had been in some way predicted by Karl Marx who referred to a classless society emerging from a capitalistic one once the state had reached advancement. Burnham, a journalist suggested that social and political change would be the product of scientific advancements in a computer, space-flight age. One only has to look at the creation of NASA and it quest for life in space program, that does not need a particular ideology, the program will likely continue no matter what the nature of American domestic policies are.

Perhaps Bell’s pessimism was what probably prompted him to negate an ideological search, saying in his book the End of Ideology, that his generation found wisdom in pessimism and despair, that there were few true heroes for change left. His generation had after all experienced the desecration of millions of innocent lives. He doubted that an ebb in causes and drives occurred for the lack of knowing who to fight like Gramsci who fought the bourgeois economic model and others fought the threat of the spread of fascism and Stalinism in post war Europe.