The Death of Ideology

Let's kill ideology, well, at least at one level of description. Otherwise: All Hail the Master Ideology.

Greetings from the post-ideological era. It’s early still, but what innovators are creating today will reorganize society tomorrow. The unfolding paradigm should prompt us to question the entire enterprise of ideology—which I have called the pursuit of The One True Way.

Pointy-headed scholars in academic guilds will have to adapt or find other work. Policy analysts will have to write whitepapers for investors, as opposed to tossing them over a moat at corrupt politicians or sending newsletters to powerless nerds. Political theorists will have to become community practitioners. Put your sweat where your theory is and criticize by creating.

I realize these are some pretty audacious claims, and I’ll come back to them. But first, how did we get to this point?

This is your periodic reminder that liberalism here does not refer to leftism or to the progressive left. It is a doctrine of freedom, as in Libertas perfundet omnia luce.

Trickle-Down Ideology

It used to be that humanity practiced trickle-down ideology. That is, some Pillar Saint would set out a theory about how society ought to be organized. That theory would trickle down, like a combustible liquid, into the minds of those who would eventually become evangelists or adherents. The evangelists would evangelize, until the theory would trickle further down to revolutionaries holding lit matches.

With fires in their minds—fueled by ideology—mass movements burned like wildfires. Revolutionary leaders would be rewarded with power. In many cases, Boy Pharaohs would come along and purge society of the Old Guard and their OLDTHINK. Those in power would then set about to put into practice what had been theory, with massive stakes, imperfect implementation, and enormous consequences.

Whether in the Bolshevik Revolution as a culmination of Marx, the French Revolution as a culmination of Rousseau, or the American Revolution as a continuation of Locke, trickle-down ideology had more or less been the driving process of political paradigm change. Perfectionist theories animated imperfect people to replace imperfect social orders with other imperfect social orders.

Where ideology is rationalistic and totalizing, idealism is hopeful yet humbler.

After all the horrors and violence of the twentieth century, academic ideologues still dream of setting minds ablaze with ideology. Many theorists fail to anticipate the hard work of implementation, usually because they fail to account for at least one of the following constraints on theory:

• Human Nature—People are not what your ideal theory assumes; they are more, and they are less.

• Incentives—Restructuring society creates perverse incentives and effects.

• Knowledge—The knowledge required to design or manage a complex society would fry the neural circuitry of any one person or committee.

• Feedback—Big, hierarchical power structures can’t readily process information or respond to feedback.

• Pluralism—People differ from one to the next so they have different ideas about the good.

But those who would have been yesterday’s revolutionary vanguards can become tomorrow’s innovators—as long as they are prepared to be disciplined by a new kind of socio-political landscape.

The Age of Exit

The post-ideological era is the age of exit.

I first heard about social thinker Albert O. Hirshman from the thinking-economist

Arnold Kling

. Hirschman’s idea of exit, voice, and loyalty stuck with me—so much so that we later named an annual conference-festival in Austin after it, then renamed it later because it was too obscure. The idea is so simple and powerful that once you appreciate it, you can see it all around you. Take any human system, whether a product, business, or political arrangement. Now, suppose you want to change it.

Do you exercise voice, exit, or loyalty?

• Voice—Use expression to persuade others to change the system.

• Exit—Leave the system to join another system or start something new.

• Loyalty—Stick by the system even if you’ve tried voice and it failed.

Loosely speaking, we could say that as we have moved forward in time in the West, the primary cultural emphasis has changed. First came the era of loyalty (God and Country), then the era of voice (Ballots over Bullets). We sit at the cusp of the Age of Exit (Governance by Choice).

And the Age of Exit requires a rebooted liberalism.

Liberalism Redux: Long Live Ideology!

Ah ha! says the interlocutor. Ideology isn’t dead. You’re just sneaking it in through the back door!

The interlocutor ain’t wrong, exactly. It’s just that it clicked up a level of description. You see, upgraded liberalism—integral liberalism—like its forebear, is ambiguous and open about one’s individual conception of the good—within limits. In other words, following Mill, liberals tolerate and make room for different “experiments in living,” which comport with different value systems.

Of course, there will be deal breakers. You can’t create micronations that dictate all teenagers must engage in ritual sex with a priest class. You can’t require cruel and unusual punishment for offenders—even politicians. But within the bounds of basic morality and the law of torts, people can self-organize in various ways.

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Remember: Liberalism is the only doctrine that builds in true diversity—pluralism—as a core value. (Not identitarian “diversity,” I’m talking about cultural, social, and ideological diversity.) Such is why all competing doctrines must be subservient to upgraded liberalism. In other words, to enjoy peace, freedom, and abundance on earth, we must all learn to hold at least two doctrines in juxtaposition without contradiction. So, one can be a conservative, but she must also be a liberal. One can be a progressive, but she must be a liberal. And so on.

The idea of a startup society is one in which you think of a macro-level liberal legal doctrine as the social operating system. Your secondary ideology becomes a startup mentality—a will to a social experiment. Any subordinate technology, law, and culture clusters become apps that can be run on the wider liberal social OS.

I can hear the yowls from the national conservatives to the right and the social-justice egalitarians to the left. But neither can deny that to implement their particular conception of the good, they cannot leave room for yours. This fundamental asymmetry—that liberalism leaves room for conservatives, progressives, and everything in between—is what sets liberalism apart.

It is, without reference to colonialism or slavery, the Master Ideology.

And to the extent possible, it should colonize the world.

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