What Is Ideology?

Josh Landy
Are ideologies always wrong?

Ray Briggs
Can you subscribe to one without even knowing it?

Josh Landy
Could we imagine a world without ideology?

Ray Briggs
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
…except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs, we’re coming to you via the studios of KALW San Francisco Bay Area.

Josh Landy
Continuing conversations that begin at philosophers corner on the Stanford campus where Ray teaches philosophy, and I direct the philosophy and literature initiative.

Ray Briggs
Today, we’re asking: what is ideology?

Josh Landy
Well, that’s easy, right? I mean, it’s a false system of beliefs that’s opposed to reason, you know, like, fascism or Scientology.

Ray Briggs
Wait, you shouldn’t tar all ideologies with the same brush. I mean, what about liberal democracy? That’s the belief that everybody deserves the same freedom and a say in their government and the protection of the law. What’s wrong with that ideology?

Josh Landy
Nothing wrong with that. But it’s not an ideology. It’s just the truth.

Ray Briggs
Well, believing in liberal democracy isn’t like believing in gravity. It’s all fine and good to say physical facts are true, but values aren’t like that. You and I value liberal democracy, sure, but that doesn’t make it objectively true.

Josh Landy
Hang on. A moment ago, you were agreeing that fascism is wrong.

Ray Briggs
Oh, yeah, wrong and false.

Josh Landy
But you just said ideologies can’t be true or false. So how can fascism be false according to you?

Ray Briggs
Well, I only said ideologies can’t be true. But they can be false because they can, you know, build in false assumptions. Fascists think that all problems are caused by foreigners, and that’s just objectively false.

Josh Landy
Okay, so let me see if I understand you. You’re saying that ideologies can have false assumptions. But even if all the assumptions are correct, the ideology is still just a belief.

Ray Briggs
That’s right.

Josh Landy
Okay, so that seems fair enough. But still, don’t we need a way to distinguish between bad ideologies like fascism, and good ideologies, like liberal democracy?

Ray Briggs
Oh, sure. One is dangerous and harmful, you know, the other is beneficial for all of society.

Josh Landy
So wait, are you saying it’s true that liberal democracy is good for society?

Ray Briggs
Hey, it sounds like you think I’m contradicting myself.

Josh Landy
Yeah, it definitely does sound that way. I mean, look, you said, ideologies are never true. So how can you say it’s true that liberal democracy is a good thing? Isn’t that just your ideology talking?

Ray Briggs
Oh well, yeah. But that’s okay. You can never get totally outside any ideology. It’s the thing you use to understand the world. Without an ideology, you couldn’t even think.

Josh Landy
Oh, that’s a bit depressing. I don’t want people to be wandering around trapped inside their ideologies, unable to see what’s really happening in the world. Wouldn’t we all be better off if we could ditch our distortions and get straight to grips with reality?

Ray Briggs
But ideology isn’t a distortion. It’s a framework; it helps you understand how all the little pieces fit together.

Josh Landy
I’m a big fan of frameworks, just not ideological ones. Look at all the damage that’s being done in the name of ideology these days. Everyone’s getting all their information from social media, lobbing hand grenades at each other from within their ideological bubbles, tearing the country apart.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, I agree that those are huge problems. But guess what? The only way to solve them is a better ideology.

Josh Landy
I knew you were gonna say that.

Ray Briggs
Because it’s true. There’s no escape from ideology. And you can’t do without it, if you want to understand the problems we’re all witnessing, like political partisanship, or racism or climate change. If you don’t have a theory, you’re never gonna have a solution.

Josh Landy
Well, I don’t know if that’s true, but I bet our guest does.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, it’s Marius Ostrowski, author of a new book called simply, “Ideology.”

Josh Landy
We’ll talk to him in a moment. But in the meantime, we sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Sarah Lai Stirland, to ask people what living in a different country made them realize about the ideology of their country of origin. She files this report.

Pancrazio Auteri
So one thing is the fact that here is common to talk about money, about personal finance, while in Italy is absolutely a taboo.

Sarah Lai Stirland
Pancrazio Auteri is an Italian who’s lived in the United States for more than a decade. Over time, he noticed that a big cultural difference between Americans and Italians is the way we approach finances.

Pancrazio Auteri
Nobody talks about personal income, and nobody asks about it. It’s considered a big invasion of privacy while in America it’s normal to talk about finance, about personal investments, how to ensure income in retirement. In Italy, it’s not really talked about, but that’s because government assumes more responsibility than individuals. And families take care of each other throughout life so that grandparents paying for the kindergarten or for buying the first house for young couples. And it’s enabled, I think, how the families stay together. So in America, it’s very common to talk to people that left home when they were 20 or 19, going to college, and never go back home. In Italy, the families, they keep in touch very often, the families are very connected. While in America, there is the student loan that really starts that financial madness in the wrongest way as possible. Don’t start with a debt.

Sarah Lai Stirland
But why do Italians and Americans approach finances so differently in the first place? Could it be a difference between the American ethos of individualism and a European focus on community? Michelle Abene is a neighbor of mine in Los Gatos, California. She recalls being in Germany and feeling that it would be socially unacceptable to stick to an American habit.

Michelle Abene
I remember, there being no traffic on the roads, but people were standing waiting to cross the road. They wouldn’t cross unless there was a traffic sign that told them they could cross, and I thought as an American, it was the most bizarre thing we had to stand and wait. While there were no cars, until the light turned, that we would cross the street. In Germany, the culture is to not really question authority. In America, we question authority, we express our emotions and our beliefs a lot more readily.

Sarah Lai Stirland
For Maryam Scoble, it was a move to San Jose, California from her native Iran in the 1980s that upended everything she took for granted in her universe.

Maryam Scoble
My ideology changed in so many ways, one of which that I can exemplify was the way I thought about everyone from Iraq. I hated the Iraqis, they were bombing us, I lost cousins in war. My best friend’s brother’s, 16 year old brother, never came back. I always thought that if I ever meet someone from Iraq, that I’d want to kill them. That I just, you know, because they had taken away so much. And so when I came to the States, obviously, those feelings were really strong. I was in high school, and one of my teachers said to me, oh, there are two sisters that just joined our high school, and they’re from Iraq. And since you’re from the similar part of the world, I thought you should meet. And at first, I was like, I don’t want to meet these people, like I was just so upset. And then I got to meet them. And they were super sweet. And we had so many similarities than we had differences. They, of course, had lost family and friends, to the war. And I think if I’d grown up in Iran, I would have been a lot more conservative, a lot more close minded, and would have kept a lot of resentment towards and a lot of biases towards an array of people based on what I was being taught in school, based was I was experiencing every day and based on what the media was telling me. The travel, being outside of your comfort zone, having different experiences definitely opens your mind.

Sarah Lai Stirland
So perhaps the next time you disagree with someone, try to understand how they formed the ideology in the first place. Because after all, it’s only when we can see these assumptions that we can change them. For Philosophy Talk, I’m Sarah Lai Stirland.

Josh Landy
Thanks for that great report, Sara. It definitely makes me miss the old country. I’m Josh Landy, with me as my Stanford colleague Ray Briggs, and today we’re asking, what is ideology?

Ray Briggs
We’re joined now by Marius Ostrowski, he is a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, and author of a brand new book titled “Ideology.” Marius, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Marius Ostrowski
Thank you very much for inviting me. It’s an absolute pleasure to be with you.

Josh Landy
So, Marius, what first got you interested in ideology?

Marius Ostrowski
Well, I think the personal story for me here is that I used to be a very different ideology than I am now. I used to be quite a hardcore libertarian conservative. I will now describe myself as more of a Democratic socialist, which is quite a large turnaround. Some people, smaller turnarounds in their lives, but mine’s probably quite on the larger ones. And that kind of got me thinking that the things that I used to believe, I now dismiss, I think they’re quite weird. They don’t quite make sense to me anymore. The things I used to laugh at are ones I now believe. And that journey got me thinking about what it was, what are these frameworks that made me believe one thing, made me believe the other thing? Can they be held against each other? Can they be united in some kind of way? And that made me think to engage with the topic of ideology in a little bit more detail, hence the book.

Ray Briggs
So in the framing, Josh and I were arguing about whether ideologies always have to be false. What do you think about that?

Marius Ostrowski
I think it’s an excellent question. I think I fall on the side that ideologies are true as far as we are concerned, by which I mean that fundamentally, reality or truth or what is out there, what we’re operating in, is kind of unknowable to us, just because it’s quite complex, it is quite overwhelming. And we are fundamentally quite limited as human beings, we have quite limited senses and things like that. And what we have to try and do is build maps, build things that make what we come across make sense to us. And that means simplifying things, that means picking out things that we think are important, and neglecting things that are less important and building them into, for lack of a better word, a narrative, really, a telling of what’s going on. And that telling is something which we, which we use to orient ourselves in society, and it’s necessary. And until as you say, we get a better one, then we have to use the one that we’re given.

Ray Briggs
So this point about ideologies being narratives sort of makes me wonder about sort of the limits of what counts as an ideology. So an example that I thought of is, I think that all objects have edges. Like my computer monitor has edges that if I reach out, I can, like, touch its edges, and it sort of like lives between them. And that seems like a framework that I need to make sense of the world. And it seems like pretty complete, but it’s not usually what I think of when I think of an ideology. Is it an ideology?

Marius Ostrowski
So I think there’s kind of a broad and narrow way of approaching this, and in the sense that it’s a framework to help you make sense of the world, yeah, it is an ideology. But that’s not necessarily what we always mean when we use the word ideology, we tend to mean it in a more social sense. We mean, we’re dealing with interactions between people, between groups in society. So yeah, fine, it probably could be seen as that but it’s not perhaps the most pressing thing to be considered under that label.

Josh Landy
Right, I mean, when I think of ideology, I think of things like fascism, progressivism, liberalism, conservatism, socialism.

Marius Ostrowski
That’s exactly right.

Josh Landy
Yeah, -ism’s.

Marius Ostrowski
The ones that we tend to think of in these terms. Yeah, shorthand, an ism is an ideology. Obviously not in all cases, I mean, ageism, alcoholism, witticism, those aren’t those ideologies as such but, generally speaking, as a shorthand.

Josh Landy
But the other thing I often think of it, I think of Marx’s statement, you know, in all ideology, men in their circumstances appear upside down as in a camera obscura. So Marx had this idea that it was false, right? That part of the definition of an ideology is that it’s an illusion. But it sounds like you don’t agree with that.

Marius Ostrowski
I don’t agree with that. I mean, I think there’s a lot of value to be found in a lot of Marxist theory. But actually, if you simply look at that comparison, what he’s trying to say is, look, you have ideology which is driven by capitalist class interests, and then you have socialism, let’s be clear about it, which is a scientific theory. Now under like understanding, that’s simply one ideology, thinking that it’s come up with a better way of describing reality than another ideology. To my mind, that’s one ideology versus another, and we can have that argument about which one works better. But fundamentally, those are ideological positions all the same.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about ideology with Marius Ostrowski from the European University Institute in Florence.

Ray Briggs
What explains the deep polarization we see around the world? Are ideological differences to blame? Does ideology get people to believe a bunch of lies?

Josh Landy
How fictions breed factions, along with your comments and questions when Philosophy Talk continues.

When ideologies are clashing, what can we do about it? I’m Josh Landy. And this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs, and we’re asking what is ideology with Marius Ostrowski, author of a new book called “Ideology.”

Josh Landy
We’re pre-recording this episode, so unfortunately, we can’t take your phone calls. But you can always email us at comments@philosophytalk.org, or you can comment on our website. And while you’re there, you can also become a subscriber and gain access to our library of more than 500 episodes.

Ray Briggs
So I think we can all agree that there’s more polarization today than there has been in recent memory. Marius, is ideology to blame for that?

Marius Ostrowski
So what I find very interesting about out this is that we’ve got times in our history when we’ve been less polarized, I would think that’s a fairly uncontroversial thing to say. But we haven’t been less ideological at that point. Simply what we’ve had is if you think about all these different issues where we have binaries or, let’s say, for argument’s sake, abortion or gay marriage or anything along those lines. Previously, you’d find people who fall into groups that would cross cut each other. So you could have one position, one issue and another position, another issue, and it wouldn’t necessarily correlate that much with each other. What we have now is a situation where you have all these binaries that correlate very strongly with each other. So where the polarization part comes in is that if basically, you believe one thing on one issue, you can probably predict what you’re going to believe in all these other issues as well. And you have these ideological frameworks which have responded to that. They’ve partly created, but I think they’ve mostly responded to that by integrating it. A good example of that would be how the ideology of conservatism in the United States has actually responded to the Trumpist emergence, and the particular issues that the Tea Party first raised. Everything since then has has evolved in that direction. It’s not necessarily been the driver. It’s definitely captured it. It’s definitely integrated. It’s definitely systematized, and probably, if you’d like, made it worse. But that’s also true. That’s not necessarily a criticism of conservatism as such, that’s typically how ideology works, it makes things into comprehensive frameworks. So, that’s how the kind of polarization has come about.

Josh Landy
Yeah, it’s really interesting. I remember reading one study from 2014 that showed that, you know, in 2004, 8% of Democrats were basically Democrats across the board, but that had gone up to 38%. And the Republicans that went from 10% to 33%, I assume that today, the numbers are even higher. So you know, it used to be the case, for example, that a Catholic might be anti abortion, but also anti death penalty, which would place that individual a little bit between the two major parties in the United States.

Marius Ostrowski
That’s exactly right. And I think—

Josh Landy
And so, what happened?

Marius Ostrowski
Well, there’s a very simple answer in the sense that the party system and the ideological system kind of mapped onto each other. And I think, a good illustration of where situations where that isn’t the case, if you look at, well, Britain, for example, you have a much, I would say, a less extreme mapping in that kind of sense. I mean, yeah, there’s probably polarizing tendencies there as well. But you also have people who sit in different parties who would actually sit very close together on the actual spectrum, go across the continent of Europe, you have an even more extreme case, obviously, the electoral system helps on that front. And we can argue at length about why the electoral system makes polarization more of a thing, perhaps in the United States, than it does in other countries. But certainly you have people who hold positions, which are, they may fall into any party, really. But if their placed in a ideological space, they could actually be quite close to one another.

Ray Briggs
So this might be naive of me. But I like to think that some of the questions that people are polarized on have correct answers, like either the death penalty is a good thing, or it’s a bad thing. Either we should keep it or do away with it. And the idea that your opinions about all of these questions ought to line up together seems a little bit worrying, if you think that you’re trying to get the right answer, and that neither of the two factions has a monopoly on right answers. Is that a sensible worry on polarization? Like, are there right answers? Is there a reason that we should expect them to cluster the way that like political factions happen to cluster?

Marius Ostrowski
I think it’s a fair question. I think, ideology would resist the idea of right and wrong answers, you know, prima facie, but I think we can be a bit more ambitious in that respect, in the sense that we want to be able to say that there’s something which is unambiguous, really. And I suppose what it comes down to is what works. And we have certain priorities, which mainly involve staying alive, the world not ending and things like that, in a catastrophic sense, but there’s also more, more basic ones, like is your situation, okay? Are you in pain? Or are you not in pain? Are you experiencing, if you’d like, for lack of better word, pleasure? So these are kind of very human, very material, almost very physical aspects of our existence. And in that sense, ideology should really be trying to serve that. And the question is, then, is it or is it not doing that? I mean, I’ve wrestled quite a lot for a long time with the idea of, is there something else which can be safely placed outside ideology? I’m not even convinced that the stuff I’ve said can be, but I think it’s the best chance that we have in that sense. And, yeah, I think the problem of evidence is that evidence is always gathered in a way which is inherently already value-based, it’s never value-free. So really, the question becomes, what evidence are you gathering for what conclusion? And where is the line that you draw where the evidence of outcome ends? And as far as the death penalty, for example, goes, the question is less about whether or not it dissuades, which is one side’s argument about it. It’s not, it’s not a deterrent. It doesn’t work. It’s highly racist in certain systems, the other side is simply, we don’t care about that. We care about punishment. And then there again, you have different priorities leading to different evidence being gathered. And as a result, different yes’s and no’s, different rights and wrongs, different trues and falses.

Josh Landy
But it sounds like for some questions you think maybe we could do without ideology, if I’m understanding you correctly, let’s just look at whether a given way of thinking about things and the policies that go along with that way of thinking about things, make more people have a better life, a standard utilitarian way of thinking about things, is the result that more people are living flourishing lives free of pain, or is it the opposite? Is that right? Is there a space where we could actually be free of ideology, and just be sort of looking at looking at the science and looking at the facts and and making the best decision we can?

Marius Ostrowski
I’d like to say that, yes, we simply can. But it’s very, very hard to get to that position without in turn adopting an ideological position of your own. And ultimately what we’re trying to do is make sense of reality. That’s really what it comes down to. There’s not many points in our lives, when we are outside ideology, the points when we realize that we are, if you’d like, inside and trying to step out of it, is when something weird happens, something that we don’t expect, something that makes absolutely no sense from the position from which we’re approaching it. Another point is our early years, if you’d like, our neonatal years, before we’ve been formed, socialized into the person that we become, we’re never born complete, are we? We become the person that we grow into, and we have no recollection of that. We remember the childish fantasies that we have, we remember playing in this limitless reality, everything seems possible, every possible monster or fairy or whatever, could possibly manifest. And then eventually, we learn to constrain that into a more boring, bluntly, reality, a more boring understanding of reality. So if we want to step outside it, we have to recapture that slightly joyful, playful element, perhaps not the answer we might think. But I think it’s that element, mixing with looking for the weirdnesses that leads us to the point where we kind of go hmm, I now realize where the limits this ideology are and how we can step outside them.

Ray Briggs
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about ideology with Marius Ostrowski from the Robert Schumann Center in Florence. So Marius, I’m still sort of trying to sort out this like truth and falsity question. So one thing that I might think is like, even if I can’t retreat to a place where I’m able to think without ideology, still, some ideologies are better, at least for some purposes. And some of them are worse, like anti vaccine sentiment, which I guess used to be a thing for the left wing in the US and now is a thing for the right wing in the US, seems bad from the standpoint of public health. And so I want to say like, there’s a serious error there, and whatever ideology doesn’t have an anti vaccine component, that one’s better. Can I say that even if I can’t say like ideologies, are wholesale sort of evaluatable as true or false from some outside standpoint?

Marius Ostrowski
Well, I think fundamentally, what makes an ideology effective — it is it allows us to navigate the world as an ideology which tells us the viruses don’t matter, and that we don’t need to worry about vaccines, has a higher chance of leading to us dying of, in this case COVID. That doesn’t really count to me as navigating the world very well. So it’s a map that takes us somewhere, but it has a greater chance of running into problems. So I think that’s the kind of distinguishing factor, yes, we probably can make judgments about that. But it’s not a judgment that we can make from any kind of external position. It’s kind of run with it and see how far you can go type of position, which, again, is a matter of comparing being inside different ideological positions. But yeah, I think we can make judgments like that.

Josh Landy
So Marius, we’ve got a comment on our website from Mira. Mira asks, how do privately held ideologies play into our present global situation, given that the views of average citizens have little to no connection with policy decisions made by their political representatives?

Marius Ostrowski
That’s a fascinating question. And I think we shouldn’t fall into the trap — but I’m not saying that Mira has done this as anything wrong here — we shouldn’t fall into the trap of merely thinking of ideology as to do with policy preferences. It’s also to do with things we wouldn’t necessarily think of as ideological. So the choice is when we go to the supermarket, you know, what food we buy, what food we don’t buy, what TV programs we watch, when we’re on Hinge or Bumble or Tinder, whether we swipe right or left, these are all choices that have, if we pair away the layers of, if you’d like, normality, actually come down to some quite profound ideological choices about what’s right and wrong, what’s true and false, what’s good and bad, good and evil and things like that. So, privately held ideologies are the personal, if you’d like, constellation of the different influences from different ideological sources, which people have imbibed, and sorted out into their own personal worldview, I would not say just to be absolutely clear about this, someone who votes a certain way or considers themselves to have a certain worldview or certain part [unintelligible] view almost is perfectly one ideology, or perfectly another, it’s very unlikely. We’re all so involved in different areas of life, inn our families, we have our jobs, we live in certain areas, we have a certain nationality, all these different things mesh together to create a personal worldview, which will have strong ideological content, and might make us more one than another. But it doesn’t make us perfectly ever an -ist, if you’d like, to join with a certain -ism, if that make sense.

Josh Landy
Yeah, but I still wonder, you know, whether somebody is a perfect -ist or a half that -ist or whatever ratio they are, whatever degree they are, I’m really curious how people ended up adopting the particular ideology they do, or in the case of someone like you, changing the ideology they have. I mean, you could think based on things that Jonathan Haidt has said, for example, that ideologies differentially satisfy certain kinds of value that people have, you know, everyone has a range of values and each of us consider some values more important than other values. And so you might think, oh, I look around at the options in front of me. And I instinctively pick the one that seems to maximize my, my highest values. Or you might think, yeah, it’s whatever my parents told me, or whatever my church told me, or what my peers told me in school, or what the television tells me or what, you know, what sitcoms seem to take for granted. And that’s the most insidious stuff, right? People aren’t even telling you to believe it. They’re just taking it for granted. That’s really sticky. So is it one of those? Is it all of those? Where do people- how do people make those decisions about which ideology to subscribe to?

Marius Ostrowski
I think it’s a very important question. I think there’s- I would contend that it’s not in such a way that they have certain important values, which they then convert into ideologies, the values of themselves already pretty ideological. The point is more that we’re surrounded by all these different influences, you’ve listed them all, I won’t repeat them again, but these are all things that are important in our lives. And it’ll be a combination of disagreements, whether or something essentially runs into problems as far as our own person is concerned. So a classic example of this would be beauty standards. So somewhat the person of color, for example, when confronted with quite aggressive advertising based on essentially white dominated, white supremacist, I mean even say, beauty standards, will at some point, say, but I don’t have that. I am not that. I am the bit of reality which blocks off against the universal truth that this ideology is offering. And it’ll be things like that which make people either can go one way or the other. Let’s be clear, it can either be someone who then desperately tries to conform to the ideological standard that’s being sold to them, or resists. And it’s that moment of resistance, where you suddenly go, hang on, I need to do something different. You’ve detached from whatever ideology you’ve had beforehand. And then what do you do? Are you in a non-ideological position, perhaps very briefly, but it’s quite a disorienting position to be in, you then try and latch on to a new ideological position. If there isn’t one there, you make one. But it’s very, very clear that there’s moments of subjecting yourself and resisting, but the subjection comes first, and then the resistance can always come afterwards. And it’s often to do with essentially, when you yourself, realize that the ideology isn’t doing everything that it needs to, it claims to be doing for you.

Ray Briggs
So Daniel has left a comment on our website asking about the difference between ideology and dogma. And he suggested that political platforms might be dogma rather than ideology. He says the difference is that ideology is a product of thinking, but dogma requires only conformity to some external authority. So where is the line between ideology and dogma, and how critical do you have to have been before it sort of counts as ideology rather than just dogma?

Marius Ostrowski
I think it’s a very astute comparison, because a lazy way of putting it is that ideology is dogma. And there’s no more to it than that. I think certainly, there are dogmatic forms of ideologies where, if you like, the thinking part has been quashed and all you’re doing is parroting, replicating, repeating, simply manifesting the ideas without really reconsidering them. But ideology captures the critical path as well, it very much captures the reconsidering. And arguably, anytime when you have uncritically applied ideas is dogmatic. But I think ideology as a category just sits in a much bigger space than that, and the development of theory, and also the application of it, is absolutely part of what ideology and should be.

Ray Briggs
So your beauty standards example from a little while ago is another question for me, which is, how conscious does it have to be to count as ideology? So if I just think, look, I’d be better looking if I had straight hair and a smaller nose, but I don’t ever think about why, or I just tried to straighten my hair without like having a rationale for it — does that count as ideology?

Marius Ostrowski
I would say it’s even more ideological than if it’s more explicit. One of the most ideological things that you can do is to say that you’re being non-ideological, apolitical, anything along those lines, or neutral or just factual, all these different things that is, what you’re trying to do is to shut out the existence of any other truth. Which means that if you allow for the existence, say, oh, well, there’s one party, there’s another party, perfectly fine, we can argue about tax levels, or you know, rights and whatever else. But if you are saying no, there’s no alternative, then what you’re saying is, my ideology is the truth. And you’re disguising the fact that it’s ideological. That is one of the most manipulative things you can do. And obviously, ideology specializes in that. So the more unconscious it is, the more interesting it is, for an ideological perspective.

Ray Briggs
So then I might not even know that I’m doing it, how do I get myself out of that situation?

Marius Ostrowski
I think, a certain measure of, if you like, counterexample is quite I mean, we heard from the Roving Reporter earlier of the shift between one context and other context. I think that is exactly the kind of thing which gets people to think about the ideology they have. I mean, speaking as a Brit, now going in Italy, and yeah, having been to America in the past, you can tell ideological differences, which doesn’t mean that you are in some way outside ideology, but where you are is a different ideology, and you see how these contrasts exist. So really, what it comes down to is meeting someone who goes, hang on, that doesn’t make any sense. Hang on. That’s a bit odd. Hang on, why’d you do that? And it’s that part, when you kind of go, why do I do that? Why haven’t I questioned this before? And that’s the part when you start becoming more conscious of the ideological levels going on.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re asking what is ideology with Marius Ostrowski from the European University Institute.

Ray Briggs
Would the world be a better place with less ideology? Or is the best way to fight ideology, better ideology? What can we do to stop bad ideologies from taking over?

Josh Landy
Ideas, ideals and ideologies, plus a question from our community of thinkers, when Philosophy Talk continues.

If you’re knee deep in ideology, how can you know what’s real? I’m Josh Landy, and this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs. Our guest is Marius Ostrowski from the European University Institute. And we’re asking, what is ideology?

Josh Landy
So Marius, we were talking in the last section about the damage that bad ideology can do to democracy. So what do you think we can do about it?

Marius Ostrowski
So I think this is a quite interesting question, because the idea of democracy itself sits within an ideological framework as well, naturally, there’s different definitions of democracy, depending on whether you ask a liberal or conservative, a socialist and so on. But of course, the democraticism, if you want to give it that name, is an ideology in its own right. And it’s committed to certain views of what society should be structured like, what stations should be, and so on. At the same time, we also have to ask about different versions of what badness and dangerousness is, it’s also an ideological claim to say those things about any ideology. And it would be no surprise to know that the fascist would strongly disagree about their badness or their dangerousness. In fact, they would say the opposite is true, they would say that it’s the liberal, it’s the socialist, the communist, who’s the bad or the dangerous person. But I think one of the things to go back to is, what is ideology doing for people? Is it leading to, if you like, our better ability to engage with reality to make sense of it, to navigate it? Or is it worsening it? Is it making it less effective, and there’s catastrophic ways of doing that, so I would categorize ideologies that embrace climate destruction or nihilism in that sense as absolutely bad, because they will destroy the reality we try to engage with or at least destroy us in our engagement with it. So that’s quite hard to justify as a good ideology in that sort of sense. But we really have to be careful when we throw these terms around. Ultimately, it’s a matter of good and bad for whom, dangerous and helpful for whom. But within that context, we can still make a judgment about, how good are these forms of thought? How good are these pattern at helping us get on with our lives effectively?

Ray Briggs
So some ideologies are going to disagree with each other about who the relevant people are, whose welfare matters. So if I’m a nationalist, I might think only people from my country matter, you know, screw the rest of the world. If I’m really aligned with my economic class, I might not mind stomping on the people below me. If I’m a humanist, I might think all humans matter, but I might or might not like care about non human animals. Is there a way to resolve those disagreements…I mean, among ourselves, within ourselves?

Marius Ostrowski
Yeah, I mean, I think it’s, in many ways, ideologies do. So for example, the creation of ideologies like social democracy and Christian democracy were kind of attempts to resolve differences between conservatives and socialists, between and liberals and socialists, and a way to sort of think, well hang on a minute, we’ve got ultimately contesting claims about what certain values mean, which ones are more important. Well, let’s try and find a way of bridging these. And actually, pretty briefly putting my academic hat on, that’s what got me interested. You know, I worked on social democracy as an ideology, which went from absolutely nowhere to the dominant form of progressive ideology. How did that happen? Well, because it very successfully managed to actually resolve some of these disagreements in a way that persuaded people, in a way that worked. I mean, the classic claim there was only revolution will overturn the bad things about society and make a good society come about versus the society we have right now is perfectly fine. And in that context, social democracy, well hang on a minute, we can combine these, we don’t have to overturn everything, we can reform within it. And it turns out, that worked, it turns out, it made people’s lives better. So that’s- the proof is in the pudding is almost the way of framing how ideologies can solve these issues.

Josh Landy
That’s really interesting because I’m really curious about how people get swept up in ideology, how people’s minds get changed. And obviously, this is a really pressing question. In a moment, when a lot of people seem to be going down some pretty scary rabbit holes, how do we get them out of those rabbit holes? You know, what kind of, I don’t know, trying to continue the metaphor, kind of carrot do you have to hold up above the hole? Because, you know, on the one hand, you’re saying, look, some ideologies are actually persuasive. It may contempt people towards things that seem actually to map on better, to the way the world actually is. But I sort of worry, for a couple of reasons. One is that ideologies very often tend to be implicit, we were saying that before, we’re not aware of them until maybe we traveled to a different country or something like that. Fish don’t know the water they’re swimming in. And the other reason is, ideology is often very well defended. So if you bring up contrary evidence, people say, oh, that’s just false consciousness, if they’re a Marxist, or that’s just denial, if they’re a Freudian, or that’s just the deep state, alright? So very often they’re not falsifiable, as Karl Popper would say, they’re very well defended. They can account for anything that goes against them. How do we get people into what you were saying earlier- I love what you said earlier about the weirdnesses. When you notice the weirdnesses of your own ideology, that’s a kind of productive moment, but how do we get people there if the ideologies are so defended?

Marius Ostrowski
Well, a simple answer, in a sense, is ideological pluralism. And it’s simply to have, well, one of the most powerful theoretical concepts is what’s called essential contestation. And that’s a very long winded way of saying you have a concept, we argue about what it means. So the idea of freedom, let’s take that, for example, for a Socialist or a Communist or perhaps a Social Democrat, freedom means emancipation. For a conservative or libertarian, it means free enterprise, for example; today, it might also mean free speech. And you argue about the limits and parameters of this particular concept, which ones matter, which ones don’t, which ones should be prioritized, and so on. And the argument there is to use these conceptual debates. Now I’m not saying these are debates in a debating society type sense. These are fundamental, very practical arguments, which are often done through demonstration, as I said, proof is in the pudding as it were. That’s how you convince people. Don’t merely psychologically persuade them even emotionally persuade them, you physically prove that what you’re saying and doing actually works and make sense. In that context, having a pluralistic system means that an ideology can shine very specific laser-like lights on the areas where its enemy ideologies or its rival ideologies are a bit less robust. All ideologies are well defended, there’s obviously institutions and often very powerful thinkers defending all of them. But no one’s armor is perfect. Why? Because reality is changing the whole time. Ideologies can be superseded. And it’s often the subtle changes that are going on underneath, bubbling underneath the surface, that lead to ideologies becoming weaker, because they are- they’re thinking of reality in terms that no longer apply. And that’s where these arguments essentially come into. That’s where these arguments become ideological. We’re not just arguing over definitions of values, we’re arguing over what systems that realize these values have to be set up in order to work, basically.

Josh Landy
That makes sense. And of course, it’s a tall order to ask somebody to abandon an ideological position entirely. But I’m sort of wondering whether we could make any headway getting people just a little bit less, you know, tenaciously clinging to the entire package deal of an ideology. And, you know, I can see why ideologies are, in that strong sense, tempting, because first of all, they give you a group identity, sometimes a national identity, some people want that. And secondly, you know, they explain everything, right. They’re a key to all mythologies, and you look at any phenomenon. If you’re a good Marxist, you’re like, ah, I understand that, you know, so how can you- how can we tempt people to just turn down the volume a little bit and say, yeah, you know, I tend to see it in this way, but I can also understand other points of view, and here’s the part I’m really committed to, but here’s the part that I’m not totally sure about.

Marius Ostrowski
I think that’s kind of where if a sort of slightly critically minded ideology theorist has anything to contribute, I think it’s probably that. It’s encouraging people to actually be honest about how little we do know about what’s going on around us. So I think it’s quite important to be intellectually humble, especially so for academics, of course, but I mean, everyone should be in that kind of position. And it’s okay to not be sure. It’s essentially the message we want to impress on people, that by all means, be committed to the position that you have, you can be fervently committed to it. But just be aware, and remember in the back of your head, that you may eventually be proved wrong. And even if you aren’t proved wrong, at some point, your position might just change, because situation requires it. So no idea is forever. No ideology is forever. And I think that kind of message has to be the one that we send to people.

Josh Landy
I totally agree with you. I think that it is absolutely true and entirely non-ideological. On that note, I want to thank you so much for joining us today.

Marius Ostrowski
Thank you so much for inviting me, it’s been a pleasure talking to you.

Josh Landy
Our guest has been Marius Ostrowski, Max Vabre Fellow at the Robert Schumann Center in Florence, and author of the brand new book “Ideology.” So Ray, what are you thinking?

Ray Briggs
So I have a book to recommend to our listeners, which is Cailin O’Connor and Jim Weatherall’s book, The Misinformation Age: How False Belief Spread,” which sort of tracks the social dynamic of alternative facts in recent years.

Josh Landy
Sadly timely and extremely important. We’re gonna put links to everything we’ve mentioned today on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you can also become a subscriber and gain access to our library of more than 500 episodes.

And if you have a question that wasn’t addressed in today’s show, we’d love to hear from you. Send it to us at comments@philosophytalk.org, and we may feature it on the blog, or answer it at the end of the show.

Thinking of which, here’s a great question we got from one of our listeners, it’s time for a question from the community.

Sesame Street
Who are the people in your neighborhood? In your neighborhood, in your neighborhood.

Josh Landy
Mira asks about the geometry of the classroom. So in a standard classroom, there’s a front and middle and a back, and that affects the way teaching goes. Do you have thoughts about that, Ray?

Ray Briggs
Yeah, that’s a really good observation, Josh, I think it does affect the way that teaching goes. And I think if you’re not careful, the education research actually shows that there are about six or eight students who will participate in class all the time, and then everybody else will be like, alright, it’s their responsibility to ask questions and won’t get the chance to ask a question, won’t get to practice that. And as a teacher, you kind of have to make active choices to stop that from happening.

Josh Landy
And is that about the geography? I mean, are they the ones who are sitting at the front or the side, or how does that intersect?

Ray Briggs
Yeah, so I think I’m actually unclear, like I know that if I just go with my impulses, I will call on students who are sitting not to the left or to the right, but to the center, because I see them first. So whoever is in my direct line of vision, I’m more likely to call on, if left to my own devices. I think some people sit in the back of the classroom because they don’t want to talk, and some people sit in the front because they do want to talk. But that’s not always, like sometimes the kid who wants to talk is sitting like in the middle or off to the side or in the back.

Josh Landy
It’s something that was very interesting in the era of online teaching. I mean, I didn’t love it, but that was one silver lining, was a certain democratization of the teaching space. That everyone- there’s no one at the front, there’s no one at the back. Everyone’s square is exactly the same size, the professor’s square is the same size as everybody else’s. Is that how it felt to you too?

Ray Briggs
It did, I really liked that it made it easy to keep track of what everybody’s name was, and who had a question, and whose question was first and last in the queue.

Josh Landy
Do you feel like it encouraged people to speak?

Ray Briggs
No, I feel like it discouraged people from speaking because they were speaking into a camera and I had to do things to work to encourage them to speak and participate.

Josh Landy
Of course, if it’s a seminar, the geography of the classroom, presumably is our friend, because very often, we sit in a circle, or at worst, around a table. And yeah, maybe the professor’s at the head of the table, that’s not the worst thing in the world. But everyone else hopefully feels very much, you know, on an equal footing with everybody else.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, I love the sitting in a circle, and I’m just thinking of another trick that I’ve seen our former co-host, Ken Taylor, use, that was wonderful in one of his classes. So he would do this thing, I forget what he called it, it was like volleyball or something. And he would say something, and he would like, toss the question to a student, I don’t think he had a physical volleyball, it was like an imaginary volleyball that he would toss to a student. And the only rule was, the student had to respond to something that he said, and then toss the volleyball to a different student, you’re supposed to spread it around. And then that student had to respond to what the previous person said, and toss the ball to the next student. And I think it took a lot of the pressure off, like there wasn’t really a sense of getting it wrong. It was like, I heard you, I had a thought, who is the next person, and it got people talking.

Josh Landy
Oh, that’s lovely. So then the students are encouraged to echo a little bit, the last thing that they heard, right, so it’s not just a series of monologues. But people are listening and people are co-creating some thought or set of thoughts that’s bigger than the sum of its parts. I think this is lovely. And it’s sort of a form of cold calling, but less tyrannical, right? Because it’s not the professor who’s throwing the imaginary volleyball, it’s the Student A or B or C, throwing, passing the ball along and everyone gets a turn and, and hopefully it’s not quite as scary for people who are not as big on contributing. And to get back to the thing you were saying earlier, that one person who wants to spend the entire class talking, they don’t get to do that. They don’t get the ball.

Ray Briggs
It’s super important. That person is valuable, but they’re not more valuable than everybody else in the class.

Josh Landy
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW San Francisco Bay Area and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2022.

Ray Briggs
Our executive producer is Ben Trefny. The senior producer is Devon Strolovitch. Laura Maguire is our Director of Research.

Josh Landy
Thanks also to Merle Kessler and Angela Johnston.

Ray Briggs
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from various groups at Stanford University, and from subscribers to our online community of thinkers.

Josh Landy
The views expressed or misexpressed on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders…

Ray Briggs
…not even when they’re true and reasonable.

Josh Landy
The conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you can become a subscriber and gain access to our library of more than 500 episodes. I’m Josh Landy…

Ray Briggs
…and I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.

The Big Lewbowski
Say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism — at least it’s an ethos!