Taking life philosophically.
13 April 2010
Some time ago I overheard a part of a conversation at the university cafeteria. Four girls talked about politics and how it is strange how politicians are so dedicated to the ideology and the values of their party. One of the girls said along the lines that all the ideologies that have been tried have failed, and therefore it makes no sense to subscribe to any of them.
It seems an interesting question if ideologies can fail. Many ideologies are certainly treated as though they were failures, but does it make sense? Is there and can there be historical proof that an ideology is doomed to fail?
Obviously an ideology can only fail through the failure of a political regime that represents that ideology. By this I mean that ideologies can fail conclusively only in practice, not in theory. I want to limit the discussion to ideologies that are at least minimally plausible, in the sense that they are not in direct contradiction with what we know about the world. An ideology should not deny such truths that people need food and water to live, for example.
A failure of an ideology would have to be caused by at least one of its core features. A regime can fail for many reasons that have nothing to do with the ideology it represents, such as being overthrown by another regime, and this does not mean the ideology has failed. The failure of an ideology would have to be a failure to sustain a stable regime.
Is stability enough, or in other words, does a moral failing constitute a failure of the ideology? Imagine an ideology that guides a stable regime that practices slavery for ideological reasons. Slavery is of course immoral. Is such an ideology therefore a failure, even if it manages to keep things going without significant instabilities? I do not think this should be considered a failure. It would make the concept of ideological failure too broad, because almost any ideology can be questioned from some plausible moral standpoint. Failure is different from immorality, and it seems better to say that an ideology that endorses slavery is an immoral ideology but not necessarily a failed one.
It seems unlikely that any reasonable ideology can fail conclusively. Ideologies are necessarily abstract, and because they are so abstract, it is never obvious how they should be implemented in practice. The failure of a regime can usually be explained away as a problem in the implementation and not a problem in the ideology itself.
This does not mean that no differences can be found between ideologies in what level of stability they typically achieve. Certainly some ideologies are more robust than others. But if ultimately no reasonable ideology can fail, it seems more fruitful to compare ideologies in moral terms.
The journal of Timo Laine (contact information). Cultural commentary from the perspective of a philosophy student in Helsinki.