I am happy to say that my suspicions, if not exactly unfounded or false, were drastic exaggerations. Balkin suffers from the French Disease, but a benign form which causes him to appeal to Derrida and Foucault as he defends motherhood, apple pie and even the flag. His heart and even most of his head is in the right place, and Cultural Software is actually a very good book, though it is likely to frustrate most of its readers. Let me try to explain his core ideas, before coming to why they and/or their presentation will annoy almost everyone.
Balkin's main problem is that of shared cultural meaning --- how it is that multiple people can share pieces of culture, and how this shared culture can change over time. Many proposed solutions have invoked supra-individual entities --- traditions, collective consciousnesses, Zeitgeisten, social totalities, cultures-as-such. Balkin rejects them all. He is too polite to their proposers to put it this way, but as explanations for collective phenomena, they are on all fours with saying that opium puts people to sleep because of its dormative virtue. Rather, as he puts it, the true solution is to be found below the level of the individual, rather than above it. It consists in taking his title quite literally. Computer software is information that instructs computers on how to process information. Cultural software is information that changes how people process information. Balkin has various cognitive skills and schemata especially in mind, but pretty much everything that people can learn from each other --- beliefs, prejudices, manual skills, stories, and so forth --- qualifies.
I think Balkin is right, and that this does solve the problem. The required objects --- the pieces of cultural software --- clearly exist. Unlike the supposed collective entities, they raise no more ontological problems than any other sort of mental entity. (Those problems are knotty enough, but the supra-individual theories all agree there are things in individual minds, too, so economy argues against them.) Shared cultural understanding is possible because many people can have highly similar cultural software instantiated in their brains. And it is unproblematic that this can affect individual behavior, and that it can be acquired through ordinary, garden-variety processes of learning.
It is also unproblematic that it can change, which is something of a problem for many supra-individualist theories. Not all members of a population need to have exactly the same software for them to be members of a common culture, and there are obvious processes by which their software will spread differentially and produce new variations. Indeed, Balkin is very taken with the way that some pieces of cultural software --- some ``tools of understanding'' --- can be used to modify others, to produce new ideas and even new tools of understanding. He is also, however, quite happy to recognize that there are innate, pre-cultural cognitive capacities, and rightly says that, without them, culture couldn't get started, either in the individual or the species. (The recognition of this is very old: Spinoza, for instance, makes this point at the beginning of his Treatise on the Emmendation of the Intellect, which Balkin oddly does not mention.)
A corollary to this view of cultural evolution, which Balkin particularly emphasizes, is that all our tools of understanding are imperfect, but that they can only be modified by using other, still imperfect, tools. Balkin is concerned both to convince his readers of this, and to convince them that it does not open the doors to cognitive relativism. We shall return to this point.
Part I of Balkin's book is mostly devoted to filling out these notions. Part II attempts to explain the notion of ``ideology'' using them. Originally, ``ideology'' referred to the doctrine of a group of liberal associationist psychologists in revolutionary France. They regarded their work as a theory of ``ideas,'' in the sense of Locke, Hume, and Condillac.
Ideological effects of cultural software = tending to cause injustice
Obviously this raises the question of what is justice. Balkin argues that (a) some kind of longing or sense of ``normative order'' is universal in humanity, but that (b) this is ``incohate'' and (c) it is articulated in elaborated norms, values, etc. developed as cultural software, and revisable by appeal to each other and to the incohate longing. Moral relativism is disposed of as incoherent (and not just incohate). Saying ``You can't judge us, because our norms our different'' implies that, could we but understand their norms, we would see the justification, and approve, i.e., that there is some kind of transcendant, if not fully articulable, standard involved. In other words, ``it is wrong to judge others by your own standards'' is incoherent (since it involves judging those who judge).
The possibility of amoral relativism is not considered. This would include (for instance) the position that morals are really just expressions of approval or disapproval, mediated by cultural software, but really not meaning anything more. It avoids condemning judging others by your own standards, and contents itself with saying that
Insists on the need for normative evaluation in ideological analysis. But this is a truism, given his definition of ideology as including injustice, and the normative character of injustice. One could perfectly well separate the enquiry into two parts: what is the effect on the social structure of these pieces of cultural software, and, are these effects just? Now, I suspect that, in practice, we will find very few people able to carry about an inquiry into the ideology of (say) landlords in Tokugawa Japan, or for that matter Alabama during Reconstruction, without holding some normative views about it.
Those coming to it from the humanities or the interpretative branches of the social sciences will think they are seeing rampant scientism. Balkin is serious when he talks about software and evolution.
Nothing on economics, no analytical philosophy except Davidson, nothing about Hayek, half of his strictures are out of Popper (for ``risk of understanding,'' compare Popper's definition of the rational attitude as the possibility of getting closer to the truth via discussion), doesn't give due weight to Sperber, entirely too credulous about "structuralism".
Despite his talk about variation, and recognition of variation, is too credulous to accept claims that, say, every American lawyer has the same schema about juries and judges in his head. This is a client-server view of cultural software, which of course he rejects.
Re law, does not really advance beyond, say, Cass Sunstein's Legal Reasoning and Political Conflict, or even Levi's Introduction to Legal Reasoning.
Does not consider the possibility that one tool for thought might be more accurate, in all circumstances, than all other applicable tools; i.e., that employing it might be a dominating strategy. This is true even if it is limited.
Does not distinguish clearly between two very different limitations on tools of understanding. One is limitation in range of applicability; the other is limitation in accuracy within their range. Indeed, it could well be that one tool of understanding is superior to another in both respects: it is more widely applicable, and within the common domain of application, it is always more reliable. Well-conceived methodology is alive to such distinctions; much of theoretical statistics is precisely about checking this. Say something about Turner's social theory of practices, which Balkin cites, but doesn't credit enough (I think).