Naivete is the great taboo for all intellectuals. At all costs avoid the appearance of it, especially in this era during which the hermeneutics of suspicion legitimates or delegitimates most of our high-level discourse. But this hermeneutics of suspicion traces back to Golden Age Athens, the Age of the Sophists there, prominnent among whom was Socrates. The Sophists' project was to call into question the validity of all received conventional wisdom, myth, customs, and norms–and because the citizens of Athens saw Socrates doing just that, and in doing so corrupting the youth of Athens, he was condemned to death.

Although, naive consciousness is just as prevalent a condition among most humans today as it was in Socrates' day, the naive consciousness from which we must be liberated falls under the general category of 'ideology'. Ideology is the ethos of a society that in most cases operates as the superstructure of values that legitimates what are the appropriate attitudes and behaviors that determine right or wrong, heroes and villains, what's central or peripheral, what's honorable or what's shameful, what's valued and what's taboo. In other words, it's superego, the inner voice of Big Daddy. I argued in a post last month that superego is the voice that we must be liberated from and that we must replace it with the voice of 'conscience', which is completely different. Rousseau gets it when in Emile he says–

Conscience! Conscience! Divine instinct, immortal voice from heaven; sure guide for a creature ignorant and finite indeed, yet intelligent and free; infallible judge of good and evil, making man like to God! In thee consists the excellence of man’s nature and the morality of his actions; apart from thee, I find nothing in myself to raise me above the beasts— nothing but the sad privilege of wandering from one error to another, by the help of an unbridled understanding and a reason which knows no principle. (p. 254 in Foxley translation)

Rousseau is pointing to an experience that all of us have but we secularists are reluctant to name for what it is–a deep sense or the rightness and wrongness of things. While on the one hand we expect everyone to behave well, we get uncomfortable when someone tries to suggest that there is a something that transcends or subjective idea of right and wrong or our cultural ideas of them. So while I recognize that all our value judgments are culturally mediated, I want to insist that there is something that transcends the concrete cultural manifestation of it. There is written in the hearts of every human being, more accessible to those with supple hearts than to those whose hearts are hardened for whatever reason, what is lawful and what is not. I'll follow what Lewis in The Abolition of Man calls the Tao, which points to its transcultural reality in post-Axial societies. 

In early Hinduism that conduct in men which can be called good consists in conformity to, or almost participation in, the Rta— that great ritual or pattern of nature and supernature which is revealed alike in the cosmic order, the moral virtues, and the ceremonial of the temple. Righteousness, correctness, order, the Rta, is constantly identified with satya or truth, correspondence to reality. As Plato said that the Good was ‘beyond existence’ and Wordsworth that through virtue the stars were strong, so the Indian masters say that the gods themselves are born of the Rta and obey it. 16 The Chinese also speak of a great thing (the greatest thing) called the Tao. It is the reality beyond all predicates, the abyss that was before the Creator Himself. It is Nature, it is the Way, the Road. It is the Way in which the universe goes on, the Way in which things everlastingly emerge, stilly and tranquilly, into space and time. It is also the Way which every man should tread in imitation of that cosmic and supercosmic progression, conforming all activities to that great exemplar.  ‘In ritual’, say the Analects, ‘it is harmony with Nature that is prized.’  The ancient Jews likewise praise the Law as being ‘true’.(pp. 18-19)

This sense of the transcendent source for law was recognized in all the the great post-Axial societies, from Taoist China to Golden Age Greece. For Christians, the Tao is the Logos, and Jesus's saying in Matthew 5 that he has not come to abolish the law and the prophets but to fulfill it I take to mean the transposition of the law from something that is imposed from without (extrinsic law and superego) to something that is discovered within (intrinsic law and conscience). The Tao/Logos defines justice. The just man or woman lives according to the Tao; the just society's laws and ideology are aligned with or are at least aspiring toward alignment with the Tao. I don't think you need to be a Christian to "get" this. I think most people who don't have a thought-out metaphysics already believe it in some vague sense. 

Because our lives and our societies are never completely aligned with the Tao, we must always be striving individually and collectively to move individually and collectively toward greater alignment with it. The Tao should therefore be understood as a dynamic rather than static reality; and as such something that is disruptive to all individual habits and social forms that are unjust. How do we know this? The voice of conscience tells us. The Tao for which conscience is the voice is therefore anti-ideological when ideologies serve merely to prop up social systems that are unjust, but we humans cannot operate in an ideological vacuum. We need an ideology that justifies and reinforces just customs and practices, so the challenge is to develop an ideology that embraces the Tao. So what's called for now is an ideology of progressive transformation. It is in this sense that an ideology that embraces the idea that the arc of history bends toward Justice is justified.

This is not something that we should expect to develop from the cultural Right which is so deeply and naively implicated in current structures of injustice. But is it something that we can expect to come from the secular left?  Clearly not insofar as any idea of the Tao is incomprehensible to it or dismissed as 'naive'.