IDEOLOGY & IDEOLOGUES

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Ideology and Ideologues

By James Keye

September 03, 2010 "Dissident Voice" -- No one can go through life without believing in some general principles, even if most of us act on those principles regularly without giving them much, if any, thought. But, if you stop a moment in your daily hunt for living your life with some success and dignity; just stop a moment, lift your head up from that ‘walking into a strong wind’ position and widen out that tunnel vision to see more broadly than a specific ambition, job or encounter, then you just might begin to see what humanity is up against.

People are presented with millions of pieces of information every day, from the chemistry of your liver to the latest political outrage, from which they can only select a small percentage to recognize and overtly respond – thus, in part, the head down, tunnel vision push through life hoping for the best. Most people accept this state of affairs, stay at least a little light on their feet, even as they try to find some reasonable and reliable pattern so as not to start each day from scratch, set upon with overwhelming sensation and information.

Karl Marx made the argument that different classes in the same society can have quite different ideas and beliefs about what is real. He called this ‘ideology’ – like styles of clothing and an accent might identify someone in the mid 1800s in England as belonging to a certain class, so would their ideas and beliefs – and these would form the possibilities for their lives. Marx also assumed that such class-based ideologies were inherently untrue in their details measured against human potential and a reality larger than prescriptions of a particular society and its classes.

Ludwig von Mises dismisses this seemingly sound bit of thinking by suggesting, in what sounds to my ear like a “best of all possible worlds” sophistry, that these are beliefs adapted to reality, functionally true beliefs, and thus are not ideological in the sense that Marx means. Why or even how, he asks, could people function from a set of belief principles that are untrue. He argues that mechanical devices depend on correct theory and application and that there could not be an ideological (false) science of mechanics; and by implication that if societies function, then the principles that underlie them cannot be ideologies since they must be ‘true’ working principles.

A larger reality, I would note, can be thought of as a rocky ground that we can cushion with adapted beliefs in good times, but that delivers its full discomfort, demonstrating the narrowness and failures of those beliefs, in bad times. A whole social design can be ultimately mal-adjusted to biophysical reality – a condition that might not critically show itself for some generations.

Some people are not so disposed to the ambiguities of a general ideology. Such people construct an internal system of ideas bulwarked and buttressed against all bending and flexing – prepared to go through life like an ice-breaker ship, crushing out a path in a hostile environment – and even thinking, because they can allow themselves to see only what they wish to see, that the narrow channel created is really the whole ocean. These are the ideologues.

Ideologues are confident, certain and claim to be in complete possession of THE truth. They use the language of reality and truth just as if they possessed them. Actually humanity has been deciding between the Real (what would be functioning in the universe if people were not present) and realities that are local in a time, a place and a belief system for a very long time. Add to this difficulty what I will call ‘highly adaptive individuals’ who use existing ideas, confusions, beliefs and desires without regard to their connection to Reality, as social and political devices for their own ends.

But remember the analogy to an ice-breaker; the world of their competence is very narrow and often fleeting. One of the signs that a person is an ideologue is an unwillingness to consider anything beyond their narrow path as being part of the actual world (the rejection of consideration does not prevent the ideologue from claiming wide, forthright examination of all opinion). Such a test is useful, though not fool-proof: the ideologue can claim that a refusal to accept their reality is the true act of narrow exclusion.

If we stir together a large number of regular people with a few hard-core ideologues, many of the regular folks end up sticking to the ideologues; drawn by the crushing power of their certainty and the way that certainty appears to ease the path through life.

Religions are good examples of ideology-based systems and the role of ideologues (though once religions were local environmentally-based belief systems that organized complex highly adaptable human behavior to function ecologically in the environment). Religious people, for the most part regular folks stuck to ideological institutions, believe that their way of making observance to their image of a higher power is the correct way and that other ways range from misguided to dangerous. It is necessary for religious (regular) people to gather in sufficient number that their local individual realities are mutually supported in the face of inevitable contrary evidence; and often they require a true ideologue (or ‘highly adaptive person’ to play one) to act as the prow on the ice-breaker.

An issue of greatest concern is how to measure notions of truth, accuracy, honesty, reality, effective adaptation, environmental fit – the actions of our human world that are answerable to biophysical reality – in a social/political world in which ideologies are the standards of truth and ideologues can seem like honest brokers.

Now everything cannot be true. It has become our habit these days to assume that there is “some truth in everything.” At least it is the habit among the least ideological. But that is just foolishness. The atomic mass of chlorine is about 35.46 atomic mass units. This is not open to argument; you can’t pick an atomic mass that you like for chlorine. Why this mass and not another is more open to opinion, but that opinion needs to be informed; the theoretical foundations for atomic structure are pretty solid these days. While it is clearly, and unarguably sound, to have “true” answers for the nature of chlorine, would it not be very useful to have testable and measured answers to many questions that, today, we leave to typical ideologues?

What is believed depends on how those beliefs are arrived at. If it is our dominant social habit to believe in authority, beliefs will come from established institutions and adapt in the self-referenced way that they have for thousands of years. It was the great contribution of the Enlightenment that knowing should come from direct experience and that there had to be epistemological principles to properly use that experience; an understanding of understanding that seems to be weakening just as we need it the most.

More than ever humans are confronted with new and surprising experiences: many a day whether we realize it or not. What belief system, what ideology, would be best for a world in which two conditions, previously not a primary concern, have become essential to respond to; (1) huge amounts of rapidly changing information and (2) an immediate need for our actions to comport very closely with biophysical reality. Would you select an ideology that is confident in an existing set of answers even as new information is conflicting or would you select an ideology that doesn’t base its beliefs on unchallengeable facts, but on a method to evaluate new information and with a track record of discovering the ‘truths’ that underlie our understanding of the physical and biological worlds?

This is not a new observation. How to discover the truth of things and make an understanding of what is true into appropriate and meaningful lives is one of the oldest questions on the books. You’d think that an animal that can build the Large Hadron Collider and produce energies approaching those of the origin of the universe might spend an effective moment or two getting clear how not to destroy the world it lives in through the madness of its political and economic actions… you’d think!

What if part of a belief system is the demand that the specific content of belief be put to test? What if the ideology – the belief system – required testing and replication of basic data from which testable hypotheses are organized into theories about the general form and function of the stuff that happens in the world? Is it not possible that an ideology of process, scientific method and epistemological philosophy, would more accurately and consistently discover ways of thinking and behaving that are closer to capital ‘R’ Reality than the local adaptation of idea to form, ad hoc, in the service of the immediate and the self-interested?

This would demand a great deal of people, to learn about these things, to develop a clear understanding and reasoned use of scientific method, have a basic comprehension of statistical probability and epistemology, but what the hell! It was demanding for 4 or 5 guys to kill a mammoth; it was difficult and demanding to sail in a little tub of a wooden ship around the world; it was demanding to march across Europe in 1944 -45.

I am talking about a critical mass of humanity developing the critical understandings and using processes that have demonstrably attached our human technical reality to the physical reality. It is time that we attach our human reality to the biophysical reality – there is just no choice. Now how is that for an ideological statement?