Greg Lukianoff
My whole point is that generally believing in free speech, for example, preferring representative democracy under most conditions, or believing in checks and balances is not an “ideology”. They are all contingent, they are all limited, and they are all flexible depending on what the situation requires. Historicism is, in my view, one of the most fatal intellectual missteps we ever made. After centuries of slowly learning to extol the values of reason, skepticism, and imperfect knowledge, we decided—profoundly stupidly, in my opinion, and due in no small part to the poisonous influence of that charlatan Hegel—that history itself was a story with a beginning, middle, and end. That beneath the apparent complexity of events there was some grand logic to history, some underlying direction that could be discovered and explained. It was the battle of nations, the battle of classes, or, as in Nazism, the battle of races. And here, on the rare point where I agree with Foucault, history does not have a plot. It does not have an author, an inevitable destination, or one master explanatory key. Human history is contingent, chaotic, path-dependent, and far too complicated to be reduced to a single story about what is really going on. This is a child’s satisfaction: the belief that the bewildering complexity of human history can be reduced to one great story that explains it all. And it led to dogmatic and limited understandings that were correctly and derisively called ideology. But history’s simpletons, unfortunately, tend to do well in influential positions if their simplistic explanation of history sounds seductive. So, time after time, people started saying things like, “Well, just like communism or fascism, liberalism is a way of life too.” No. Saying that free markets are generally beneficial is not an ideology. If you go the extra mile and say that free markets are always best under all circumstances, then sure, you’re in the cartoon world of historicism and ideology. But classical liberals generally don’t think anything so silly. And if you immediately thought, “But what about the Irish famine? What about the famines in India?”—cases that have been blamed on a kind of free-market fundamentalism even by historians I deeply admire, like Simon Schama (@simon_schama)—I don’t actually agree that “free markets caused the famine” is a particularly good explanation. I tend to agree more with Matt Ridley (@mattwridley) here. If you look more closely, particularly in India, another doctrine was doing a lot of work: Malthusianism. A potentially useful theory—that population can grow faster than the available food supply—hardened into an explanation of how the world simply works. Famine became a natural check on excess population, and attempts to relieve it could therefore be dismissed as merely postponing the inevitable or even making the underlying problem worse. That is almost exactly what I mean by the difference between a theory and an ideology. Malthus had a theory. It might be right, it might be wrong, it might be right under some circumstances and wrong under others. It has to answer to reality. Malthusianism turned it into a worldview. So yes, I am revolting against the common usage of “ideology” to mean anything you believe, because I think it is silly and destructive. Communism, fascism, a lot of the isms, and, for that matter, intersectionality are oversimplified explanations of reality. They are not ideology if taken merely as one possible way of understanding part of reality, but they are absolutely ideology in the bad sense if used to explain all of reality—or even the dominant story of reality or history. That’s just not the way it works. Belief in complexity is not an ideology; it is a recognition of reality. Belief in a simple explanation for reality that applies in almost all circumstances is ideology, and it is poison.
Nathaniel Powell
It's pretty hilarious when people seem to believe that the only people who have ideology are those they disagree with.