In Defense of Ideology

I have been thinking about this newsletter for a bit: We don't need political ideologies anymore. In it, the author claims that no one has a monopoly on the truth, that "both sides" have a point and that refusing to adhere to an ideology makes them a better thinker. I am not so certain that is the case.

It sounds good, of course, to claim to come at every issue with a completely open mind and to take the best from every conceivable thinker and therefor come up with the best solution to every problem. Why didn't anyone think of that before? Okay, so that comment is a little mean spirited, but this kind of posing is actually harmful. The writer has an ideology, they just refuse to acknowledge, and therefore is more likely to succumb, in my mind, to poor thinking.

Let us start with a question: what problem is the writer trying to solve? Which leads to another question: what is the definition of the solved state for that problem? Those are obviously ideological questions when you are dealing with human societies, but she seems to think that the questions and answers are self-evident and self-evidently nonideological. That simply cannot be true.

Here is an extreme example. A component of my ideology is that all people are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights blah blah blah -- you know the rest. My ideology tells me that human freedom and happiness is served by keeping all people, out of chains of all kinds -- political, economic, social. This is not a universal belief, even today. So, if I were to be presented with a solution to the problem of human happiness that required a tiny percentage of humans to be slaves so that the rest of us could live lives of techno communist hedonism and self-fulfillment, my answer, driven by my ideology, would be no. Others, drive by other ideologies, would not necessarily reach the same conclusions. If you remember your history, our very own country was torn apart by just such a conflict of ideologies on the 1860s.

Extreme, yes, but the principle applies. I, as I have stated, find capitalism to be immoral. It puts chains on people and, as you might have heard, I find that inappropriate. If presented with a solution to a problem that stems from the capitalist ideology, then, I am going to approach it very carefully. The question will not and cannot be does this solution solve the problem in front of me, but how does this solution advance the goals of the ideology? Will implementing this capitalist solution tend to make the work more or less capitalistic -- which is to say, will this solution make the world less free? (You, of course, are free to think that capitalism is the bee's knees. (Do bees, in fact, have nice knees?) But that is an ideological position.)

Without understanding the ideological underpinnings of your ultimate goals, you are much more likely to make mistakes. You are more liekly to settle for the quick win, the simple solutions, the choice that looks good today but in a week a month a year has significantly made things worse. Unless you think in terms of ideology, you aren't likely to be thinking in terms of systems. And systems are what matter in the end. Failing to move the system means inevitably you will fail to help people in anything other than a transitory fashion. And you are much more likely to make things worse.

I am an engineer by training and system architect by practice. I have an ideology in that role as well -- as way of thinking about creating systems that forces me to think about the systematic impact of my choices. Does that mean I strictly adhere all the time and under every condition to its precepts? Of course not -- we have rules so that we think about why we are breaking them. And in ensuring that we think, ideologies force us to understand the choices we are making and why we are making them. Anything else, really, isn't being thoughtful or deep.

It's just, in my opinion, a random walk.