How ‘Ideology’ Can Hold Us Stuck in Place

“What it means is that when we begin to coordinate our lives according to an ideological worldview, it begins to generate a social world that can look a lot like the image presented by the ideology.”

Introduction

The term “ideology” or “ideologue” is among the most readily-available pejoratives in political discourse. Often when we call someone an ideologue, we are lumping them into the same kinds of groups as “fundamentalists” or “dogmatists,” making it shorthand for someone who lacks the intelligence or integrity to question their views sufficiently. Yet, at the same time, we often invoke the term ideology in a more neutral sense. Sometimes, we draw on the rhetoric of post-modern culture and suggest that “everyone has their own ideology,” which is a nice way of suggesting that there is no way of getting past one’s own intellectual and moral limitations. At other points, we simply use ideology as a term to describe any collection of plausible (or implausible) ideas about how the world does—or better yet—should operate. Indeed, the sheer number of ways the term can be used can seem overwhelming; in his fantastic book Ideology, Terry Eagleton lists six possible meanings in the opening chapter alone.

In this article and in its subsequent, companion piece, I want to interrogate the concept of ideology in more detail to help clarify its parameters. Because I do not think the neutral interpretation of the term is very interesting, I will largely ignore it; examining what it means to adopt an ideological worldview in the descriptive sense is a topic for another article. More importantly, I want to examine the apparent contradiction between our post-modern tendency to be ever more cynical on the one hand and more dogmatic on the other (already discussed briefly in an earlier piece for Arc Digital). My argument will be that the retreat from complexity I described in the earlier piece can be understood as the entrenching of ideology in our lives.