Ideology: do we need it?
Ilya Somin wrote an important piece, replying Jerry Taylor’s demise of “ideology”. Taylor calls for abandoning ideologies because of their well-known downsides: they tend to box you, so to say, in a set of policies, ideas, viewpoints that may blind you to reality.
Implicit reliance on unarticulated ideology by those who think of themselves as nonideological pragmatists is often actually more dangerous than more conventional ideological thinking. A self-conscious advocate of some ideology at least knows he has certain commitments and, therefore, can potentially take account of possible biases associated with them (even though many actual ideologues fail to do so). By contrast, the person who believes he is above ideology may think of his political commitments as just obvious truths – perhaps the result of simple common sense. He cannot even begin to curb potential ideological bias on his part, because he believes himself to be above such things, by definition.
I have a lot of sympathy for Ilya’s position. The dangerous option is not self-consciously embracing a certain set of ideas (libertarianism, conservatism, social-democracy, socialism, etc) but being biased in a direction or another without fully understanding why.
