Popper On Dogma and Ideology

I have often stressed that the critical stage of human language must logically be preceded by a dogmatic stage. Only when a dogma is established as a kind of background can one begin to criticize, and only later can the dogma [...] itself be included in the criticism.¹

I wonder if one can say that there’s a next stage, when commonly accepted theories goes back to being similar to a dogma. Collective tacit knowledge. Popper writes in another essay in this book that science never stops. Thomas S. Kuhn’s paradigms are established after revolutions, and scientists then begin to focus their attention not directly on the theory, but to answering the questions that the theory/paradigm has revealed.

We are talking now of a deep inborn need to agree with the wishes and evaluations of other communicating members of the same species. Only [suggestibility] can explain the mass migration of herrings or the swarming of bees [...]. Human groups create myths, medicine-men, and priests. In due course an inner conflict arises that may reinforce [the strong need to discover the world around us], an unacknowledged feeling that we really know nothing or very little. [T]he need will also be strong to have a common dogma and to suggest the truth of the dogma to one another. It is a need for implicit guidance.²

At the end of the essay, Popper writes that “without ideology, no war.” His intention with the essay was to point out how “our evolutionary biology and the structure of knowledge, as well as [...] our language cause ideologies. As I read this, I was reminded of Yuri Lotman’s thesis that culture stabilizes as it describes itself earlier). According to what Popper writes in another essay, this mechanism enables us to develop self-consciousness as well:

I do not doubt that there is an innate disposition to develop self-consciousness or a self. But we need social interaction with others, and above all we need to learn a language and theories expressed in language, if we are to learn that we have a self.³

What I find interesting in this is the way dogma and ideology function as guiding principles for a group of people.

¹ Karl Popper, “Epistemology and the Problem of Peace,” All Life is Problem Solving.

² Ibid.

³ Karl Popper, “Notes of a Realist on the Body-Mind Problem”, All Life is Problem Solving.