In Defense of Ideology

Coherent and Logical Philosophical Thinking about the World Beats Going with One’s Gut

Photo by Gabriella Clare Marino on Unsplash

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“I mean, say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.” – Walter Sobchak in “The Big Lebowski” (1998)

I was trying to find a quotation from William F. Buckley Jr. on people who claim not to have an ideology, but Google failed me,¹ so I went with this quotation from the wacky Walter Sobchak instead. Sobchak says this in the course of comparing nihilists unfavorably with the Nazis, because at least the Nazis believed in something, unlike the nihilists.

The quotation from Buckley, if it exists, goes something like this, “A man who says he has no ideology is merely unaware of what his is, and is unable to think of an alternative.” That sums up my own feelings on the matter rather nicely. Everyone has an ideology. Some people are aware of what theirs is.

There is a very American strain of thought (and, yes, it is a strain of thought) that rejects ideology, and is summed up by the statement, “I have no ideology. I just go with what works.” In fact, there was a philosophical (ideological) school devoted to this principle, known as American Pragmatism, which included thinkers like Thomas Dewey and Charles Pearce. But the idea was around long before capital-p Pragmatism. And I would guess that a majority, or close or a majority, of Americans would agree with the statement, “I have no ideology.” Including more than a handful of doctrinaire progressives and conservatives.

Philosophical Pragmatism is most commonly associated with the left of Franklin Roosevelt’s day, although it has influenced thinkers on right and left. As with other names, there is a bit of a stolen base in the name “Pragmatism.” I don’t think philosophical pragmatism is necessarily pragmatic, just as I don’t think many self-styled foreign policy “realists” are necessarily realistic, nor that many who call themselves “liberals” are liberal,” nor that many who call themselves “conservative” or “libertarian” or “progressive” are necessarily conservative or libertarian or progressive. Indeed, as I have written in the past, there is something to be said for more accurate or more descriptive names (ex. the foreign policy “restraint” camp is indeed devoted to restraint in foreign policy, which makes “restrainer” a useful name). But I don’t want to get bogged down in an argument about naming conventions today, or even about philosophical pragmatism. There is something to be said for “going with the facts/data,” but the vast majority of people already believe they do that, whether they are communists, socialists, anarcho-libertarians, traditionalist Catholics, nationalists, corporatists, etc. If they didn’t believe their ideology was supported by the data, they wouldn’t believe it. They would believe something else.

So, it isn’t really a winning argument to claim that you only believe in “what works.” There is value to open-mindedness and looking at data and learning from real-world experience. There is value to not being blinded by ideology.

But every side thinks the facts are on their side. We live in a world of uncertainty, and we are faced with the problem of how to interpret facts and how to approach uncertainty. There are more and less coherent and logical ways of doing that. Properly understood, the best ideologies have coherent and logical ways of interpreting data and approaching uncertainty. The alternative is usually just going with one’s gut, which isn’t really the most reliable guide.

Given that no person or group of persons (even aided by AI), knows everything, everyone makes assumptions about the world. Given that many questions remain – even at this late date – unanswered, all of us have to make assumptions in order to come to conclusions about almost anything. Often, these assumptions are not made at the surface level, but at a very deep level – a level about which we often do not spend much time thinking.

But philosophers do spend time thinking about that level. Some of them gave rise to ideological movements. At its best, ideological thinking – on right and left and center and off the political spectrum – examines assumptions and attempts to reconcile contradictions. Many people who have never considered their most basic assumptions are unaware of the contradictions inherent in their own thinking.

One reason ideologies matter is that the vast majority of people, much as we might like to believe otherwise, are not original thinkers. An ideology which is the product of multiple great thinkers, spending time wrestling with important questions, which was developed through the complex interactions of many people over a period of decades or centuries, is more likely to have considered assumptions and examined contradictions that almost any individual who isn’t gifted with extraordinary intelligence and wisdom. Original thinking is very difficult and very rare. Therefore, there is nothing wrong with learning from the past and with identifying with a movement one believes most closely approximates the truth of how the world works. It’s highly unlikely that any of us, just looking at the world around us and deciding what we think “works” on the basis of gut feeling, is going to develop an accurate picture of the world, even though each of us is naturally inclined to think that we do.

This dovetails with what I said about religion. If you believe whatever you want to believe, you haven’t really accepted the world. You’re just trying to make the world more like you. If you accept that the world exists outside of you and that it doesn’t exist for your sake, you will necessarily need to accept that the most reliable guides to the world are not going to come from inside your head. Ideology, religious tradition, scientific principles – these things have been developed by human beings over long periods of time and have survived sustained challenges. They may still be incorrect. But they are more likely to be true than whatever you or I feel like believing at any given time.

Are Ideologies Dangerous?

One objection to ideology is that ideology is dangerous. Ideology, the narrative goes, gave us communism and fascism and produced the great wars of the twentieth century. Say what you like about the nihilists, Walter Sobchak, but they didn’t cause the greatest war in human history.

But this belief is belied by numerous examples of wars throughout history which had nothing to do with ideology, including many started by dangerous dictators who eschewed ideology in favor of their own will to power (Napoleon, Genghis Khan, Caesar, Kaiser Wilhelm, etc.).² This belief also contains within it some unexamined assumptions which create contradictions I view as irreconcilable.

The most important assumption goes like this: the more ideological one gets, the further one gets from the center, where the moderate people reside, and the closer one gets to extremism, which leads to terrorism and dictatorship and totalitarianism. (This is itself an ideological belief, stemming from a mid-twentieth-century theory about the “vital center,” which had some merit, but which was mostly an attempt to define everyone who disagreed with Arthur Schlesinger as sympathetic to totalitarianism.)³

But what if someone comes along who has no ideology, but who is either a terrorist or a politician dedicated to overthrowing the government and installing a dictatorship, do we also call that person extreme? He or she may be at the “center” of every important political issue. He or she may appeal most to the disaffected moderate voters in the middle who dislike the major parties and dislike politicians and ideologies. He or she may change tone and position wildly on any number of issues. But if we follow the logic of this assumption to its conclusion, there is no alternative except to say that this politician is “far-right” or “far-left.”

I would argue that history shows that the majority of dictators and terrorists (and extremist politicians who fetishize dictators and terrorists) fit that description.⁴ It seems contradictory both to say that ideology makes someone far-left or far-right, and to say that extremist tactics and rhetoric without any commitment to any ideology at all, also make someone far-left or far-right. In fact, it doesn’t make much logical sense.

This is one reason I think ideologies, properly understood, often lead to clearer thinking on many political issues. Few ideologically sound individuals would fail to see the impossible contradiction in the previous paragraphs. Only people who are committed both to the idea that ideology is bad, and to the idea that all the sane and reasonable people are in the “centrist, moderate middle,” would insist that it makes sense.

Perhaps we can better think of ideologies as lenses through which to interpret the world. The world looks very different depending on which lens you use, although some will fit more neatly than others. Just as different explanatory physical theories come closer to, or move further from, the truth, different ideologies do as well.

For example, the theory of the vital center makes sense from one standpoint. To give a short version of the argument which necessarily does injustice to it, classical liberalism (Enlightenment liberalism, not progressivism) represents a kind of pinnacle. As Calvin Coolidge told us, it is the height of progress, and there is nowhere to go from it except down. All new alternatives are in fact rehashes of very old ideas about groups and tribes. This is what Jonah Goldberg argues in Suicide of the West,⁵ and it is similar to what anti-totalitarians argued in the 1950s. Every alternative to American-style democratic republicanism is tribalism or totalitarianism.

Horseshoe theory, which holds that the ends of the ideological spectrum bend towards each other (i.e., that fascism and communism are more similar than they are different), is related to each other. At the extremes, there is more crossover. It is true that the brownshirts and redshirts in Germany often switched sides. It’s true that members of antifa and right-wing militias which do battle out in Oregon change teams more often than some people think. It is true that many people outside the mainstream are more similar than they are dissimilar and are often united in their hatred of the mainstream.

But this is only one lens with which to view the world and like all lenses it has its blind-spots. I don’t find horseshoe theory convincing, although it has its merits.

There are those who argue that while ideologies may not necessarily be always dangerous, ideological politics has made governance more difficult and problematic. Nineteenth-century American debates often involved members of the same party at odds with one another on issues such as tariffs or civil service reform.

However, nineteenth-century American politics also saw the country polarized not along ideological lines, but along sectional (regional) lines, and that polarization led to the most destructive war this country has ever known.

The Problem with Ideologies:

The problem with ideologies is the problem with most ideas: while the original theory may be interesting and complex and enlightening (and perhaps even correct),⁶ this original theory often becomes so diluted and distorted by new adherents that it becomes dull, simplistic, and perhaps even totally at odds with its original version. Many ideas are too complex for all but the best minds, and the inevitable process of simplifying and relaying these ideas can corrupt them to such an extent as to alter their character entirely or render them meaningless. Put simply, the average person will know only the CliffNotes, or ChatGPT, version of an ideology, and (despite all the assurances of Kool-Aid-drinking AI researchers that the AI summary of a book is “just as good if not better” than the real thing) this will fall short of the real thing in the way that a crayon drawing of a yellow circle falls short of the Sun.⁷

Sometimes, knowing a distorted or simplified version of an idea is worse than knowing nothing at all. That distorted, simplified version may be entirely opposite to the original idea. Or it may be so simplified as to be bland, unremarkable, and useless.

It is true that the twentieth century saw horrors caused by mass movements inspired by radical ideologies. It is true that there is a danger in societies which are too motivated by, or inspired by, ideologies. But this is true of societies which are too motivated by and inspired by religion – as anyone familiar with the European wars of religion, or Islamic terrorism, will know. And yet the problem is not religion, but rather Big Ideas, which then become simultaneously simplified for and radicalizing to the masses.

Many philosophers, from ancient Greeks to Edmund Burke,⁸ have been wary of societies overly inspired by political ideologies. And yet they did not believe that the danger lay in political philosophy per se, but in the mass adoption of a dumbed-down version of political philosophy. Ideas were fine for those minds capable of understanding them, but dangerous when retrofitted for the masses.

For most contemporary Americans, this belief will seem elitist, condescending, and obviously wrong. After all, we live in a society which places great faith in the average citizen. But I would invite my readers to consider their own presuppositions about ideology. Especially those readers who believe that ideology is dangerous, or that it gets in the way of clear thinking. Is the problem not in the ideology but in the lack of clear thinking? Is the problem generally not in any particular set of ideas per se, but in the wholesale adoption of some oversimplified form of them?

In other words, is the problem not in ideas or ideologies, but in unexamined ideas and ideologies? Indeed, throughout this essay, I have been criticizing the rejection of ideology. But is this not an idea itself? And might it not cross over into its own form of ideology at times – the ideology that all systematic ideologies are to be rejected for the world is not systematic and ideologies are mostly dangerous?

There are men and women of great intelligence and clear thinking, who have studied deeply the questions of political philosophy, who do not have any ideology and for whom this lack of an ideology is not characterized by the utter know-nothingness I have been railing against. But in the final regard, it must be said that the attitude I have been describing throughout is the exact same thing I have said is the problem with ideologies: an original idea was simplified for the masses and bastardized to such an extent that it has become an unexamined assumption, characterized by the statement, “I have no ideology,” or “all ideologies are bankrupt.” Most speakers of such statements have not thought long and hard about what is actually meant by “all ideologies” or “bankrupt.”

The problem then is the unexamined attitude, the dismissive attitude. It is a problem with those who adhere to an ideology, and with those who claim not to. And it is an intractable one. I tend to subscribe to the school of thought which says that some problems are inherent in the world and in human beings and have no solution in this life. We will never solve them. So, it is here. Not technology, not education, not social progress will alleviate this situation. The best that we can hope for is to do what little we can to ameliorate some of its worst effects a small amount in the part of the world we inhabit. There will always be large numbers of people who misinterpret ideas in dangerous ways (or interpret them correctly in dangerous ways). Perhaps it is elitist to suggest that the mass of human beings will never fully understand all of their unexamined assumptions, but it is true.

In the past, it was possible for societies to insulate ideas from the world and the people from ideas, but in modern open societies replete with information technology, this genie cannot be replaced in the bottle. Ideas are out there, and cannot be hidden away.

What are we to do? I am tempted to say, “Nothing. There is nothing we can do,” but I don’t really believe this. I suppose I believe that it is possible to try to make the world a little better, even if one’s efforts will often fail. In which case, what is to be done is this: those who can make the world even a little clearer for the few who will listen, can and should. They should do their best to persuade the rest, but should know that this is mostly in vain.

Coda: Systematizing

Some will say that the problem with ideology is that it systematizes a complex world and the world isn’t that neat. It can’t be systematized. It’s messy.

That may be so, but ideology also systematizes the mind. A messy world may be difficult to understand. But a messy mind is incapable of understanding even a piece of the world, whereas a systematic mind can begin to make a little headway.

1. Perhaps you’ve noticed this, too (I know I’m not the only one), but Google got very bad starting around 2016-2018 when its algorithm developed a recency bias (the more recent a website, the more likely Google is to show it) and a tendency to downplay certain types of results. I refuse to use AI to find the quotation, and I don’t have time to pursue more exhaustive research methods just to find a quotation which may be apocryphal anyway.

2. There are those who will argue, “But the wars of the 20^th century were so much worse than the wars of antiquity. Clearly, ideology is to blame for the destructiveness of modern war.” No, technology is to blame. If the Romans had had ballistic missiles and machine guns, the wars of antiquity and the wars of the Middle Ages would have been much more destructive than they were. It’s difficult to kill 20 million Russians with bows and arrows.

3. Admittedly, Schlesinger rejected the “middle of the road” interpretation most people developed of his argument.

4. Which isn’t to say that all dictators were opportunists who didn’t believe their own theories. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Lenin, Mao, and Castro were all true believers. Stalin slept on a cot. He didn’t care about using his power to enrich himself.

5. Neither Goldberg, nor Coolidge, was arguing for vital center theory. Both are (in the case of Coolidge, were) conservatives. However, the version of the theory which makes the most sense is not all that dissimilar from the story about classical liberalism the two of them tell.

6. Some ideas are harmful in their own right (not merely in their corrupted form), just as some ideologies are dangerous in their own right. There are those who insist that nobody was ever corrupted by a book (or an idea). But what about a book like Mein Kampf? Or The Protocols of the Elders of Zion? Not every reader of those works became a murderous antisemite. But some did.

7. Technology has not really changed this basic fact of human life, which was known to Socrates (as readers familiar with the Cave Allegory will know) and C.S. Lewis. (as readers of The Last Battle will know). Technically, Lewis was more focused on the difference between the world we inhabit and Heaven, whereas Socrates had something else in mind, but both agreed that what we know is but a facsimile of the deeper and more satisfying reality.

8. Burke himself, of course, gave rise to an ideology, even if he did not set out to do so nor anticipated all of the forms it would eventually take.