To Escape Ideology, Give In to It

Succumbing to ideology, I put it to the test. It was an experiment, and even negative results are valid experimental findings on the way to wisdom.

I recently bought a bass guitar. After imagining, dreaming about, and lusting after a vintage instrument, I pulled the trigger. I could feel the dents and scratches in my mind, smell the aging wood, and sense the mojo of the object of my desire.

Within days, the instrument arrived. I plugged it in to an amplifier, and it sounded, well, alright. For a deep, dark, vintage bass, it sounded way too bright. I compared it to my previous bass; not that different. Don’t get me wrong; after a few tweaks and a good “set-up”, I’m a big fan of this vintage electric bass. But no object is quite as magnificent as we imagine when we desire it.

The Buddhists say that desire is based in ignorance. We idealize and fabricate the object of desire, imagining it to be without flaws. We imagine the experience of having the thing as a utopian eschaton of unending bliss. In fact, as short-form social media should have taught us, the euphoria ends with the unboxing.

I once thought that, when we feel the pull of desire, we should delay gratification. Resist the instant gratification of contemporary digital technology and the global economy. No longer.

My new method? Give in. Go to the end-state as quickly as possible. Burst that bubble. It sounds like giving in to temptation. But it’s actually the quickest strategy to undoing illusions.

Do you know what else is rooted in ignorance, and the idealization of a future end-state?

Ideology.

The Illusions of Ideology

Ideology, likewise, is based in ignorance: Ignorance of every problem apart from the one we were trying to solve, ignorance every solution except for the one we have latched onto.

Each ideology has a sense of The Problem with the world, and a sense of The Solution. But the problem with ideology itself is that each of these problems is not possibly the whole problem with the world. And each solution is not possibly the whole solution for the problems of the world.

One way to not be ideological is to be a “normie,” to try to return to that pre-ideological state where we just lived life and didn’t think about anything we didn’t have to. But for those of us who have had at least one ideology, that’s not very possible for us. We have seen something to be wrong with the world, and we’re looking for solutions. We can’t go back.

That’s why, last week, one of my strategies for escaping tribalism was, not to relinquish all tribal membership, but to become a member of multiple tribes. We have to work with our tribal, “political” nature as it is.

So here, my recommendation is not to relinquish all ideas, but to put them to the test of a rigorous experiment. Succumb to ideology. Exhaust it completely. Discover, as quickly as possible its limits, the illusions we suffer in giving in to it, the sins we commit when we are blinded by it.

Succumbing to ideology, it’s something I’ve been doing, and not always on purpose. Like when I was a techno-pessimist.

Example 1: My Techno-Pessimist Phase

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Techno-pessimism diagnoses the root of our ills as the inherent nature of technological change. Our former state was one of integration with ourselves and nature; technology inherently moves us toward alienation with nature and disintegration with ourselves, such as the disembodiment of digital technology. The solution of techno-pessimism is a species of reaction and return (RETVRN) to manual labor, to remaining offline, and to the real rather than the virtual.

There is a lot of truth in techno-pessimism. Much of the change that technology brings is unexpected and almost impossible to opt out of. It encourages us to view the world as mere material resources to be mined and ourselves as functionaries of The Machine. I did my best to articulate this in an academic essay on Heidegger’s and Eric Brende’s distinction between the tool and technology.

However, an ideological techno-pessimism ignores the place of technological benefits and of technology serving and facilitating real life. Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, mocked our replacements for the natural “power process” - the process of achieving an end through necessary physical labor - as “surrogate activities.” In fact, it is a relief to be secured against desperate necessity and be able to exercise manual power in more specific ways.

In the last several years, I’ve run several experiments in trying to do things the “old-fashioned way.” Roasting my own coffee for several years, having chickens, biking instead of driving, and having a dumb-phone. After all that, I find that the most satisfying activity for me that is physical and enjoyable is playing music. I know it’s not quite “a workout.” But it enmeshes me in the bodily and sensory, the unconscious, it is an exercise for me of the “power process.” Technology and the economy enable me to devote my energies to the labor that I choose (to some degree) instead of to subsistence activities.

I should also mention the very real (and physical) demands of being a father. This led to the realization that I don’t need to make caring for my children more difficult or to add to the number of living beings I need to care for. Life is real enough.

Today, I buy my coffee beans already roasted, we sold our chickens, and I have a smartphone.

The Pattern of Ideological Ignorance

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Let’s observe the pattern. In adopting techno-pessimism, I saw a problem in the world, the alienation from the physical that results from the progress of modern technology. While it wasn’t the only ideology I held, I did see it as far-reaching. Significantly, I thought that it possibly indicated that in any arena of life, the more technological way was the worse way. In this way, I saw it as a sort of panacea. Technology is always a problem; less technology is always the solution.

This led me to ignore exceptions to my rule, and to fall into the other problems of ideology. I probably sounded at moments like a cult member or an eccentric. I appreciated the advice I received from one “normie” Catholic friend after I had him read The Benedict Option: “Don’t be weird.”

However, I want to highlight the positives. I tested how far-reaching the techno-pessimist thesis was in a way I couldn’t have if I wasn’t “taken in.” I learned what technology could explain and what I couldn’t. I learned where having less technology was a boon, and where it was a hindrance. It was ultimately an experiment, and even negative results are valid experimental findings.

Could I have run the experiment without being taken in? Yes, I think so. I might have tried individual activities in a less technological way to see if they were better. Instead of holding myself to the standard of adopting a demanding anti-technological life, I might have lightened up a bit. But either way, I needed to try out some anti-technological behaviors, and run the experiment. That is what you need to do to really put ideology to the test.

The alternative would be to have the ideas for a long time, and gradually aspire to live up to them, only to find out much later that it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Some people work for years to be able to quit and job and try home-steading. Our limited experiment in suburban home-steading showed us that it wasn’t for us.

Example 2: Plugging in to Politics

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Now what about political ideology? For several years, I paid close attention to politics through the lens of political commentary podcasts. While I would say that I succumbed to a political ideology to a degree during that time, it is important that I ran that experiment. I saw what life was like while paying close attention to contemporary political events, plugging in to “the discourse,” and seeing the world through the lens of a political ideology.

One of the reasons I no longer do that is that I found that events mostly just repeat themselves. Political commentators are not really in the business of having and refining their ideas. Their goal is to have ideas at a relatively young age and to stay true to them while applying them to every contemporary happening for decades.

This doesn’t seem like the best use of time. If you already know what you think in broad outlines, you will just say the same things for decades. But the events of the day are less interesting than the political ideas themselves: Which political philosophy should the left or the right adopt? Is there a way to bridge the two? What is the truth that libertarians are getting at, the truth liberals are getting at,  the truth progressives are getting at, the truth conservatives are getting at? Is there a full-orbed, non-ideological political philosophy?

What’s more, I found that listening to the world through one ideological perspective was also very tribal. You begin to see the problems of the world to be only those that your party or team has identified and the solutions to be only those that have already been proposed. What if we assume that different political groups are attentive to different problems? Incorporating the other side’s concerns will be important even if you ultimately disagree with their solutions. I began to see people with the other leanings as evil, opponents of all that is good. This is partly because you assume that everyone who votes the other way is ideological about it, as opposed to mostly uninterested in politics but just voting out of a gut instinct or tribal membership. And those who are especially ideological, we can’t ignore the motives and psychological reasons why they are so impassioned.

Having followed that path, I no longer listen to commentators who hold my priors, who represent the point-of-view that I broadly agree with. I’m interested in incorporating insights from the other side of the political aisle into my own thinking. Learning that political affiliation was correlated with personality also led me to question tribalism. I don’t want to hold ideas that can only be appealing to people of a certain naturally-occurring temperament. I want an expansive political and moral philosophy that appeals even to people of the opposite temperament to me.

Experimenting without Being Ideological

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Going forward, I plan to be much more self-conscious about the risk of ideology and tribalism. I want to keep running experiments on ideas, but without the narrowness of the ideological mindset.

As I shared aloud the thoughts that led to this essay, my wife asked if I had given up on ideas. I responded, “I love philosophy!” So the answer is that, of course, I still love ideas, thinking, figuring things out.

Philosophy does have a reputation of being a priori and ideological, conceptualizing the world from an armchair without any experimental findings. I think instead it should be empirical in a way, a seeking after wisdom that incorporates the complexity of life and cannot come to a judgment too soon; it requires age and maturity.

Philosophy must seek general truths, but we must be careful not to generalize. Philosophy does seek for the broadest possible observations and explanations; but, at the risk of falling into ideology, it needs to be based on careful testing, in thought and life, of the limits of our proposed solutions to the world’s ills.

To be non-ideologues, we need to cultivate a sense of what we don’t know and a continuing curiosity. This makes black-and-white thinking undesirable. As one reader commented last week, we must recognize that the world is not “black and white” but “greyish … with very small black and white pixels.”