John Robson: Why People Should Stop Using ‘Ideology’ as an Insult

Here’s why everyone doesn’t accept my political opinions as soon as I state them: I am principled, you are stubborn, and that guy over there is an ideologue. And if you don’t believe me, ask anyone. Except that guy over there who calls me an ideologue. Hey, wait a minute…
The insult is everywhere. But it’s vacuous. When a long-forgotten crucial report on Canadian health care was hailed as non-ideological by one commentator and pilloried as ideological by another, it told you nothing about the report or even why the former liked it and the latter didn’t. If one had praised it as socialist and the other condemned it ditto, you’d have gotten some sense of it, and them. By contrast, “you’re an ideologue, no you are” disquietingly recalls a mindless schoolyard taunt.
Here let me recommend Thomas Kuhn’s “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” a college text that launched my lifelong study of the infuriatingly intractable problem that even once the rogues and fools are excused from the room, legitimate disagreements remain, yet there must be truth or there’d be nothing to disagree about. Kuhn’s book, obviously, is about how scientists think. But it’s also about how people think, especially how they handle evidence.
Kuhn’s key paradigm was the paradigm itself. He challenged the older view of science as a slow pushing forward of more accurate facts and more complete laws against dogmatic superstition. Rather, it was an enterprise that started with bold new assumptions about what basic sorts of objects and forces exist, applied them to solving complex problems with dramatic success, and then ground to a halt even on apparently simple issues, prompting a fresh revolution.
It wasn’t a relativist view. But you cannot think without a conceptual framework; as Goethe wrote, “every fact is already a theory.” And since no theory can explain everything effortlessly (or there’d be nothing for scientists to do unless they were Galileo), the hard part is deciding when a paradigm still shows promise and when it has broken down. For instance, some economists believe in mathematical modelling and some don’t. And there’s no simple “gotcha” about what the limits of model predictions tell us about the underlying enterprise.
As philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine put it, our understanding of any field is an internally consistent system “which impinges on experience only along the edges” and “the total field is so underdetermined by its boundary conditions, experience, that there is much latitude of choice as to what statements to reevaluate in the light of any single contrary experience.”
It was not a silly view. It was a powerful paradigm reaching back to Aristotle’s “Golden Mean.” But it broke down because it could never decide whether totalitarians were liars or psychos, couldn’t classify too many ugly political regimes, including Stalin’s successors, and could never define ideologue better than “someone who insists on maintaining their opinion even after hearing mine.” And it doesn’t help to involve “evidence-based decision-making” while arguing about which key evidence tells us what about, say, Canada’s state-monopoly health system.
Instead we must debate, thoughtfully, our differing readings of the evidence. As with a philosophy, it’s not bad to have an ideology. Just be careful which you choose, and know why.
Only an ideologue could disagree… with me.