Ideologies

 I do not claim to have much of an ideology. When I was a teenager, my mother asked me what I believed and I confess to being evasive with her. Even then I was not sure what I believe in any categorical way. I just wanted to see what there was. At my second job, there was a waiter who criticized people wanting to put things in pigeonholes. That fit within my my own thinking. I have spent, probably, more time undermining what people thought of me - their pigeonholes - as I did in working out my own ideas.

Unfortunately, that turned out not be a very good game plan as I got older and I found myself contending with depression. Despondency brings with it not just a doubt about the worth of the world and its meaning, but also a raging anger at the world and a disbelief in any possible meanings.

What I had learned from philosophy, I turned my back upon: Willaim James' pragmatism, Albert Camus' revolt against the absurb, Nietzsche's revaluation of values, David Hume's skepticism, and Montaigne's humility.

History taught me enough about the church to give up on orgainzed religion.

Then I had my arrest that was supposed to give me the impetus to finally go through with suicide. Then I was faced with the possibility of harming someone else, and found my plans changed. Then came my breakdown. The only way to keep going was for me to go back, and put together pieces from my past. David Hume helped with his essay on suicide, Camus pointed me toward writing, Aristotle gave me ideas on how to live, and James reminded me about the will to believe.

I decided to let death take its own course (one I assumed back then would be short, considering my COPD). That I would make up what did matter to me. There was no little amount of Henry David Thoreau in that decision. When I decided to live in Muncie after my release, a close friend was worried about me getting back in with my druggie friends. I had not even thought about that - the risk-taking that had been an antidote (albeit a false one) to my depression had not been so profitable, so why return to it? Nor had I found taking drugs a pleasant experience - dullness, and sluggishness are not my favorite states of being. There was, is, no profit in going back to my old life or my old ways of living.

Instead, I joined the Orthodox Church. Its history is not as odious as the Western church. Its teachings emphasize life; that is a challenge to me. I do not claim to be a good Orthodox Christian; I am far from one. However, here I stay until the church proves itself false. I expect to be with it until I die.

With politics, I stand with the Declaration and its promise of equality for all. This fits with the Orthodox teaching that all people are icons of Christ. Democracy has its flaws, and so does anything on this earth. Its flaws do not entail the death or destruction of people who do not look like me, pray like me, or who do not live like me. 

All this leads me to note Malloy Owen's A Call for Epistemic Humility from The Hedgehog Review. Which reviews a book on ideology, Lost in Ideology: Interpreting Modern Political Life by Jason Blakely. Some points that got me thinking and inspired my preface.

Blakely, however, wants to do more than teach a history lesson. In an age of unreasoning political animus, Lost In Ideology models the search for reasons, the interpretive excavation of the fundamental beliefs about the world that underlie practical politics. Blakely’s faith in reasons should not be confused with strict rationalism; in fact, he thinks ideologies that claim to embody a pure objective reason have already discredited themselves. But his method resists the assumption, common among ideologues, that some people act out of pure malice or pure stupidity. All the major ideologies, he shows, are motivated by comprehensive and more or less internally coherent visions of the world and the human good.

This is not to say that popular ideologies never rely on false claims or contain internal contradictions, or that they all rest on equally noble premises. Blakely’s charity has its limits, as it should. However, he does labor to show, through careful reconstruction, that ideologies are grounded in understandable if not always laudable human motives. Even his chapter on fascism has room for a few lines considering the lofty experiences some people seek in far-right politics.

The following would find favor with both William James and Nietzsche. Pragmatism prizes the value of an idea for life - and advocates change when the idea no longer benefits life. Nietzsche viewed everything as an interpretation.

Accordingly, Blakely proposes that we can evaluate an ideology in part on whether it renounces the claim to being an immortal science and instead “self-narrates” as a system of interpretation. Ideologies that regard themselves as nothing more than straightforward descriptions of empirical reality are automatically “negated” and “invalidated.” This call for epistemic humility fits with Blakely’s project: Ideologues who understand that they are consulting human-made maps will be more open to alternative interpretations when their maps conflict with reality. 

The reviewer makes a critical point in the following, which outside of the context of the book being reviewed, I think is not quite as insurmountable as I interpret it:

Rather than admit that their views are the products of creative interpretations of the world, most ideologues will, explicitly or implicitly, invoke a category that is missing from Blakely’s analysis: moral facts. Even if claims about right and wrong cannot be decisively verified or falsified through appeals to experience, they may—some would say they must—still be either true or false. Ideologues typically have strong, definite beliefs about certain matters of moral fact. Often they think that moral facts have been somehow revealed to them, through a holy book, intuition, a particular tradition, or the common sense of a community. They even claim that others are at fault for failing to apprehend the same truths about value. But ideologues concede that moral facts cannot be known scientifically. They simply deny that this diminishes the truth-value of such facts.

Moral facts are not beyond criticism. Nietzsche did it continuously. In Hume, there are standards for judging morality. Pragmatism has a standard, too. For all, it is what benefits life. White supremacy may claim a religious basis for its ideology; only to fall down in the face of Christ's message to do good to your neighbor. Yes, this is not science. However, science is not the only measure of human behavior.

 

sch 8/25