The Foggy Filter of Ideology

Most of us subscribe to a set of ideals, ideas about the best ways to understand and accomplish things. We need ideas about the world, conceptions that help us map things out and understand the way they relate to each other. At some point, however, ideology often becomes just another way to steer clear of the difficult thinking that's required for understanding a rapidly changing, complex world. In this light, ideology can and often does function like stereotyping and prejudice.

If ideals always did what they said they were going to do, generating no unintended consequences, and no destructive clashes with other ideals, they might be more likely to produce the better world their adherents claim for them. But many if not most idealists just seem to want to rid the world of other people whose ideals conflict with their own. They're going for ideological purity, as they see it. All the world's people must become Chrisitans, atheists, humanists, capitalists, socialists, rationalists, pacifists, militarists--the list could go on indefinitely.

But it's varied human experience that goes on indefinitely, generating myriad ways of seeing the world. Every cultural variation and every historical moment contributes to a distinctiveness of individuals and groups that's really beyond the ability of individuals to comprehend. That kind of variety and its associated complexity seems to alarm a lot of people.

"The meaning of any proposition can always be brought down to some particular consequence in our future practical experience, whether passive or active." That's William James's formulation of the "pragmatic maxim," an American contribution to philosophy first articulated by Charles Sanders Peirce. In other words, the meaning of a notion is the effect it produces in the world.

Even when an ideal is clearly just, as in the abolition of slavery in the U. S. during the time of our Civil War, one can see human action begun in a morally clear ideal spilling through the unintended ravages of ideology and into moral ambiguity.

In Civil War poetry, Whitman is widely remembered and still widely read, at least in schools. Melville, who also wrote compelling poems about the war, gets little attention for his contributions to what the experience of that war was like.

Robert Penn Warren, a writer of uncommon insight in the arena of history, edited a collection of Melville's poems (Selected Poems of Herman Melville: A Reader's Edition, NYC, Random House, 1970). In his introduction, Warren notes: "Even if an ethical distinction is to be made at the level of the cause for which war is being waged, at another level such a distinction is irrelevant" and then quotes from Melville's "Conflict of Convictions":

Warred one for Right, and one for Wrong?

So be it; but they both were young--

Each grape to his cluster clung,

All their elegies are sung.

Warren's commentary continues:

Each was doomed to cling to his cluster, and in this fact is implicit the polarity of "ideology" ("Law," "Right," or even "Destiny") against human values, human suffering, human aspiration, and qualities of personality and spirit.

The human bond may be as important as the bond of ideology. . . .

A recognition of the human as distinguished from the ideological makes magnanimity possible . . .

As regards "the polarity of ideology and human values" Warren is careful to point out:

We cannot be too schematic about such polarities as we have been discussing. One pair shades into another. One pole does not cancel out its opposite. All belong to the complex texture of life as lived, to the density and equivocalness of experience. But to live in any full sense demands the effort to comprehend this complexity of texture, this density and equivocalness of experience, and yet not forfeit the ability to act. The man who "sees through it," but who, at the same time, can act, who has a sense of tragedy of the human plight--that is the hero for Melville. . . .

In many poems this idea of the ever-presence of evil--evil, shall we say, as the cost of good?--appears: for instance in [Melville's] "Commemorative of a Naval Victory," a poem which one is tempted to call great:

But seldom the laurel wreath is seen

Unmixed with pensive pansies dark:

There's a light and a shadow on every man

Who at last attains his lifted mark--

Nursing through night the ethereal spark.

Elate he never can be;

He feels that spirits which glad had hailed his worth,

Sleep in oblivion.--The shark

Glides white through the phosphorous sea.

As I read Warren and Melville here, they both recognize a kind of bad faith (or maybe just ignorance) in the sanctimonious, uncomplicated comfort that comes with seeing yourself perfectly aligned with the Right Ideals, no matter who gets killed and maimed (physically, emotionally, or spiritually) in the process. The heroes, as noted, are those who recognize the multivalent flux of reality, and understand that efforts to "fix" things have mixed results, yet act in the world anyway, guarding against the insistent need for facile self-congratulation.

Common humanity is already a fact, and has been since humanity's appearance. Ways of seeing and interpreting the world, however, have never been held in common across groups dispersed in time and space, and they never will, unless humans become automatons. Ways of seeing and interpreting the world are not even common in the same workplace, the same religious group, or the same family.

Maybe this failure of agreement is so hard for people to accept because our belief systems are so integral to our identities. We need to recognize this, but we also need to understand that it's all right to adjust belief systems when their actual effects on the world (see the pragmatic maxim above) are not what our ideals lead us to think they will be.

The claims of human dignity and compassion are simply not always served by what so many people regard as "high ideals." It's time to evaluate claims to truth not by the abstractions of ideologues, but by what happens when the ideas are forced on the world.

Getting government "off the backs" of businesses in the U.S. has not led to a stronger, more stable economy through miraculous innovations like derivatives and credit default swaps. The U. S. healthcare system costs more per capita or as a percentage of GDP than any system in the world, and by a large margin. Yet life expectancies are lower here, and infant mortality higher, than in nations that are our economic peers. Where does the "best healthcare system in the world" mentality come from? It can only come from ideology, since it doesn't conform to what happens in the world. The forces of the U.S. military were not "welcomed as liberators" in Iraq, as the panglossian silliness of the neocons predicted. They were welcomed with IEDs.

Such examples of ideas failing in application are certainly not confined to any spot on the ideological spectrum. The years of planned economies did not create a worker's paradise in the Soviet Union or Maoist China. Instead, the "people" on the ideological pedestal got widespread famine and mass murder. Court-ordered busing to achieve racial integration in U.S. schools is highly correlated with the resegregation of those schools, and that effect is not confined to the South. The War on Poverty, as it was known in the 60s, has turned out to be a little more complicated than its proponents in those days believed.

It may be that our ideas often fail us, or at least fall far short of our expectations, because our ability to control the flow of events in the world is more limited than we like to think. Our actions often produce effects, but we don't like to admit how mixed those effects can be.

"I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one. . . . And from what I can see it bends toward justice." This observation is from the 19th century Unitarian minister and fervent abolitionist Theodore Parker, though it was made known in the late 20th century by Martin Luther King, Jr. It may be a true observation, and certainly has been true of improvements in racial justice in the past 150 years, though the work of justice, of course, goes on.

But human history is indeed a long arc, and in its long course things have sometimes improved for hundreds of years at a time, then decayed. We don't know what's coming. But whatever it is, we can do better at addressing universally shared human values. One value we might consider more seriously is the notion that relationships are more important that propositions. Most people, I believe, prefer to be treated like they themselves are more important than ideas.