Post-ideology, or why your favorite team sucks

I’ve finally given up arguing politics. The way the game seems to be played is indistinguishable from arguing whose football team is better. If I were slightly more cynical, I’d develop a market for jerseys with elephants and donkeys on them and make a killing. It’s even better here in Europe, where most political parties have nice, bright colors, so much the better for mascotry.

But, alas, the colors are irrelevant. What matters are your policies, and the results these policies lead to. If your policies have desirable results, they are good policies, whether your reasons behind them are clothed in the right color or not. If your policies have bad results, the fact that Messiah revealed them to you in a grilled cheese sandwich or that they will serve to glorify the memory of the Great Revolutionaries of the Proletariat won’t make them any better, will they? No? Okay.

Ideology gives you idiot jihadists who don’t want to use AES to encrypt their messages to each other because they couldn’t possibly believe that a system built by nonbelievers could be trusted. Does AES work? Yes, if you do it right. Does it care who you pray to? While the algorithm itself is complicated in ways I don’t really understand, I feel pretty safe in saying: No. Most of the bloodier wars in human history have an ideological basis, as well, as it allows the dehumanization of one’s opponents: the guys in the next village don’t believe in the same invisible superhero that we do (may Its name be ever whispered in trembling fear), so it’s totally cool to march in and take their stuff and do what you like to them. There is of course a great body of work on the results produced by ideological revolutions: the Renaissance, the Reformation, post-mercantalism, and so on. This is sort of my point, though: let’s set aside ideology for its own sake (realizing of course that such positions as “war is bad” may themselves be seen as ideological) and evaluate it based upon its results.

Alas, in the great tradition of solutions leading to larger problems, this answer to the argument gives us two other points to argue: what is the difference between a desirable result and an undesirable result, and how can you predict the results that will emerge from a given policy?

I spent more time in the 1990s than I’d like to admit trying to come up with a rational answer to the first question, and I eventually convinced myself of this: there is no logically self-consistent hierarchy of desirability, so the desirability of a result is an essentially arbitrary function of human universals, cultural norms, and personal taste, which leaves us with a Potter Stewart situation: I know what’s desirable when I see it. But at least this gets us from “X is bad because Y is AWESOME GO TEAM!” to “X is bad because it will lead to a bad result (as determined by Y which is AWESOME GO TEAM!)” Which would at least be one step in the right direction, which is better than nothing.

But that’s not, for the most part, what we have right now. I’m referring to American politics here, and by American politics I refer to a style, not to a place (cf. [I’ve finally given up arguing politics. The way the game seems to be played is indistinguishable from arguing whose football team is better. If I were slightly more cynical, I’d develop a market for jerseys with elephants and donkeys on them and make a killing. It’s even better here in Europe, where most political parties have nice, bright colors, so much the better for mascotry.

But, alas, the colors are irrelevant. What matters are your policies, and the results these policies lead to. If your policies have desirable results, they are good policies, whether your reasons behind them are clothed in the right color or not. If your policies have bad results, the fact that Messiah revealed them to you in a grilled cheese sandwich or that they will serve to glorify the memory of the Great Revolutionaries of the Proletariat won’t make them any better, will they? No? Okay.

Ideology gives you idiot jihadists who don’t want to use AES to encrypt their messages to each other because they couldn’t possibly believe that a system built by nonbelievers could be trusted. Does AES work? Yes, if you do it right. Does it care who you pray to? While the algorithm itself is complicated in ways I don’t really understand, I feel pretty safe in saying: No. Most of the bloodier wars in human history have an ideological basis, as well, as it allows the dehumanization of one’s opponents: the guys in the next village don’t believe in the same invisible superhero that we do (may Its name be ever whispered in trembling fear), so it’s totally cool to march in and take their stuff and do what you like to them. There is of course a great body of work on the results produced by ideological revolutions: the Renaissance, the Reformation, post-mercantalism, and so on. This is sort of my point, though: let’s set aside ideology for its own sake (realizing of course that such positions as “war is bad” may themselves be seen as ideological) and evaluate it based upon its results.

Alas, in the great tradition of solutions leading to larger problems, this answer to the argument gives us two other points to argue: what is the difference between a desirable result and an undesirable result, and how can you predict the results that will emerge from a given policy?

I spent more time in the 1990s than I’d like to admit trying to come up with a rational answer to the first question, and I eventually convinced myself of this: there is no logically self-consistent hierarchy of desirability, so the desirability of a result is an essentially arbitrary function of human universals, cultural norms, and personal taste, which leaves us with a Potter Stewart situation: I know what’s desirable when I see it. But at least this gets us from “X is bad because Y is AWESOME GO TEAM!” to “X is bad because it will lead to a bad result (as determined by Y which is AWESOME GO TEAM!)” Which would at least be one step in the right direction, which is better than nothing.

But that’s not, for the most part, what we have right now. I’m referring to American politics here, and by American politics I refer to a style, not to a place (cf.]2 rants against the looming tone in Switzerland)… To the extent that results are discussed at all, they show up as negative outcomes from opposing viewpoints: “Do X, because Y is the opposite of X, and Y will lead to bad thing Z.” (More troubling is the common subtext of this: “Incidentally, X is brought to you by Team W, while Y is a nefarious idea cooked up by Team V, who according to unconfirmed reports wouldn’t mind if a whole bunch of A marched across the B and C’d your D, just saying.” To date this sort of thing seems primarily to be the province of Rupert Murdoch media properties, and those media organizations trying to compete with him on his terms.)

In most such scenarios, the link between Y and bad thing Z is generally tenuous at best, as is the degree of actual opposition between X and Y: since the choice is an ideological one, the desirability of the results and the evaluation of the policies in terms of the results are necessarily skewed, often ridiculously so. Bad thing Z often doesn’t even really happen apart from a few anecdotes. Results come into the picture not to evaluate a policy, or even to justify it after it has been chosen, but to motivate support for it through fear of the alternative. This is good politics, maybe, especially with an uneducated electorate, but it leads to terrible policy: if you’re always trying to govern yourself away from the looming (but probably nonexistent) disaster, you’re going to make bad decisions in the medium term about the management of (actual) mundane problems. (Incidentally, watch this space for a long-winded article on energy policy.)

Better, then, not to dignify the argument with participation. (If any of you want to go halfsies on selling party jerseys, though, let me know.)

Brian Trammell
Brian Trammell
Scientist, Synthesist, Cyclist, SRE

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