Five Strategies to Escape Ideology

Toward a Civilized Empiricism

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I’m deeply interested in the idea that most thinking follows narrow, ideological ruts and that it takes real effort to escape these ruts and allow one’s thought to be shaped by the complexity and multiplicity of empirical inputs, by the reality of how things are.

From several quarters, I receive pressure to hold that ideology, worldviews, presuppositions, socially-constructed conceptual systems, and so on, always color our vision such that the aspiration to empirical reception of the real is a modernist fantasy, even a hubristic one, a naïve realism and brute empiricism.

At the same time, many of the same people recognize that allowing one’s thought to be held captive by ideology, or failing to recognize the socially-constructed nature of one’s concepts, is itself naïve and the cause of much error in our thinking. Partisanship and tribalism seem like predominant errors of our day that sharply contrast with the idea that we have modernized, secularized, and reached the height of scientific, empirical thought. Resigning ourselves to ideological thinking and partisanship does not seem viable, yet the thought that we could or even should rise above it is often swatted down, like a poppy that has grown taller than those around it.

I want to argue that the aspiration to empirical, non-ideological thinking is one to which we must succumb. The risk of thinking that we have arrived is real, but that is the same as the risk of succumbing to ideology. Empiricism is not hubristic; it is rather the thesis that we do not know and cannot be certain but must endeavor perpetually to discover how wrong we are. Likewise, realism is not the thesis that we have a good grasp on reality but that reality remains, always, distinct from our thought and the standard by which it must be judged and tested. Seeking empirical apprehension of the real is a human obligation.

The Limits of Ideology

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Ideological thinking has several features. In the main, it involves shortcuts for thinking by adopting a raft of views of one’s tribe and seeking confirmation of those views, rather than disconfirmation.

It is quite understandable in the young, who have not had time to examine issues and topics on a case-by-case basis but must, on a practical level, make far-reaching decisions about how they will live and operate in the world. Our choices of religious and political affiliation, especially in high-school and college, almost inevitably operate in this way. Without time or capacity to exhaustively study each religious or political issue, we must rely on limited evidence and our gut to take the leap into one way of thinking or the other and to use it as a broad heuristic for a variety of issues.

However, these either-or and black-and-white framings must be seen, or come to be seen, as only rough approximations of the world. Otherwise, a kind of unjustified certainty sets in that precludes the gathering of further evidence, the testing of individual conclusions, and seeing the merits in the arguments and conclusions of “the other side.”

At some point, we also come to see the way in which these partisan, ideological framings are the result of considerations other than truth. In politics, the ability to mobilize masses to vote, especially in a two-party system, requires casting political questions as partisan in nature. There are two views, and to reject one is to adopt the other: It’s capitalism or socialism. There is nothing else. In religion, the need to offer the laity a clear set of beliefs that signify membership in the religious community - and the kingdom of heaven - requires simplifying and closing off certain questions that religious intellectuals might want to keep open. “The first chapters of the book of Genesis are literally true.” “Moses certainly wrote the Pentateuch.” “The four gospel accounts definitely harmonize.”

Once we recognize the ideological nature of the majority of human thought, it is tempting to conclude that, since we are all human and subject to the same kinds of cognitive distortion, that there is no escaping ideology, only a circumspect acceptance of this condition and adoption of a kind of agnosticism and skepticism that casts all truth-claims or pretensions to objective empirical thought as suspect.

But there is another way. Once we lose our epistemological naïveté, we can conclude, with writer Gurwinder Bhogal, that our starting point should be, “I am wrong.” Given my humanity and subjection to the cognitive distortions of human psychology, the forces of tribalism, partisanship, and ideology, I know that my current thinking has no chance of being adequate to how things are. The remaining questions are, “How wrong am I, and in what particular ways?” The attempt to answer those questions is what I call empirical thinking.

Five Strategies to Escape Ideology

Human psychology is not ordered to truth but to certain biological ends. If we are to overcome the forces of nature and direct our minds to truth, it will require effort and strategy. We cannot continue to seek truth in the way that we originally did, by the rough heuristics of ideological thinking. We cannot simply download truth from our senses either; the world is too complex, and we are aware of the biases and cognitive distortions by which we are tempted.

In fact, we will have, to a large degree, to utilize alternative heuristics and strategies, which are by no means infallible but which, rather, generally counteract the tendencies to black-and-white thinking, to tribalism, and to certainty.

1. Have Multiple Tribal Memberships

One of my strategies is to locate myself in multiple social and intellectual circles, in effect, to have multiple tribal memberships. (Not to be confused with multiple trial memberships, which one should curtail.) Recognizing that we tend to think in ways that justify our tribe, it is important to complicate one’s own tribal membership by locating oneself at the periphery of one tribe, and at its intersection with another tribe. For example, by being in academic philosophy, I feel the pull to belong to that tribe and to adopt its habits of thought and standards of intellectual respectability. Yet, as a member of the evangelical tribe, I have competing and conflicting allegiances which, I find, help me to filter out the tribal commitments of each group from the intellectually valid commitments and merits of each.

2. Seek Out Disagreement

Another strategy is to seek out disagreement. I have found this most effectively through writing, both academic and online. Views that you formulate in private and keep private never undergo testing. At the same time, in order to find disagreement, you have to avoid writing and speaking to an echo-chamber. Once again, having multiple tribal memberships or distancing oneself from one’s tribe in certain ways can cultivate a readership that is willing and able to offer pushback and critique.

3. Non-Ideological Content Consumption

Yet another strategy is to take in content primarily from thinkers who do not share your prior ideological and religious commitments. While, as a Christian theologian, I have indeed read deeply in the tradition and community of which I am a part, having come to embody the tradition, I rarely consult it anymore. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I don’t need to consult works of Christian theology frequently because I have read widely in that area and am capable of writing such works myself. When I read and listen to learn more about the world, I seek out sources that do not share my ideological predilections, even if I find them, as I often do, confirming some of my priors.

4. Cultivate Your Capacity for Empirical Thought

Another strategy is to cultivate one’s own capacity for empirical and, specifically, scientific thought. In response to my initial description of the contrast between empirical and ideological thought, my friend Mason Bruza raised the objection that the attempt to think scientifically often reduces down to deciding which tribe of scientists or people citing scientific studies to believe. While I would maintain that scientific and empirical disagreement does not undermine the validity of the scientific process, nevertheless I do think that the state of affairs obligates individuals to become capable in empirical and scientific thinking themselves.

As an example, I treated scientific matters most thoroughly in my series on the science of evolution. When I received pushback that cited a scientific response to Michael Behe’s Darwin Devolves, I felt momentarily daunted by the task of reading and responding to a scientific paper as a philosopher-theologian. However, as I read the paper, I found the empirical and scientific portion of my brain testing and responding to the empirical claims of the scientists. Instead of their claims going beyond my expertise and intellectual capacity, I found that, as in other forms of discourse, when the scientists made a claim, I was able to bring my reasoning powers to bear on that claim. I did not feel the need to defer to their intellectual authority but rather to join them in the process of empirical reasoning.

5. Look at Yourself Like One of Your Ideological Opponents

In addition to these strategies, there are heuristics to test one’s own thinking for biases and cognitive distortions. Gurwinder Bhogal describes the heuristic of writing a claim and then considering it as if it had been written by one’s ideological opponents. All of a sudden, our minds are able to recognize flaws and errors as we are prone to do when considering other people’s positions, but much less prone when considering our own.

At the core of each of these strategies and heuristics is Bhogal’s and my original recommendation of starting from, “I am wrong.” “I am tribal in my thinking.” “I tend to judge matters ideologically.” If you start from those premises, then you are less likely to impose your ideology on new evidence. You are more likely to cultivate intellectual habits and attitudes that lead to learning new things, seeking moments of surprise, rather than confirmation of one’s prior commitments.

Toward a Civilized Empiricism

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In this posture, I do not see naïveté or dogmatism, two of the chief errors of realists and objectivists. There is no insistence that I know the objective truth of the real world. Rather, there is a keen sense that the real world and objectivity are the standard by which thought must be evaluated. This leads to an earnest attempt to discern where our thinking is controlled by subjective factors, and the aspiration to have it be shaped instead by the object of thought, how things are.

In this way, reality serves as the object and endpoint of empirical inquiry, not something we claim to have already within our grasp. The postmodern mood which denies this endpoint loses the standard by which our subjective and ideological ways of thinking are judged wanting. Thereby, they leave us open to the forces of tribalism, ideology, and atavism.

Likewise, empiricism is a process, not an accomplishment. Empiricism is not evidenced in rigid, doctrinaire holding to the claims of “Science,” but by engaging in the methods and means of empirical and scientific inquiry.

Elsewhere, contrary to the characterization of realism as “naïve,” I have argued for a sophisticated realism. Here, contrary to the characterization of empiricism as “brute,” I urge a civilized empiricism, one which recognizes the dependence of empirical inquiry on habits and virtues of social and moral life. It depends on the social achievement of academic and scientific cultures of inquiry and experiment. It depends on the cultivation of a kind of republican virtue that seeks to advocate for and to understand the many tribes within the polis, rather than to give voice to the rumblings of a single tribe. It also depends on the few who desire, have the capacity, and have the resources to devote themselves to this task to take it seriously as a noble calling.

Here’s to the cultivation of a civilized empiricism.