Taking life philosophically.
19 June 2010
Previously I argued that ideologies cannot fail, given certain simple presuppositions. An ideology has to be at least minimally plausible, meaning that it should not be in direct contradiction with what we know about the world. An ideology could fail only in practice, as being unable to sustain a stable political regime. To fail, the ideology must have one or more core features that cause a regime representing the ideology to fail. Moral failure does not constitute failure in the sense I am talking about.
In “The Ideal and the Actual”,1 Robert Nozick argues that a “wise ideal will take account of the way it will get followed”: “if time after time an ideal gets institutionalized and operates in the world in a certain way, then that is what it comes to in the world”.2 This means that you cannot go on excusing an ideal if following the ideal has had the same bad effects every time. The ugly consequences of any ideal are not the whole story about that ideal, but they are part of that story.3
Nozick talks about ideals instead of ideologies, but I think his point becomes even stronger when we talk about political ideologies, because ideologies are more concrete and therefore leave less room for mistaken interpretations. Ideologies include ideals as well, however. I will talk as if Nozick was talking about ideologies, although naturally he might object to this.
I want to extract two ideas from Nozick’s short book chapter. The first is that an ideology that on the surface appears plausible is ultimately found to be incompatible with human nature. The idea is familiar enough: it means that something may be good in principle but does not work in practice.
I do not think the concept of human nature is useful in this respect, and Nozick does not seem to think so either. What human nature is is a matter of endless and perhaps mostly pointless debate. It is too difficult to determine exactly the absolutes involved, because (as Nozick himself acknowledges4) human nature is quite flexible and has been shown to permit many kinds of social organization, although some require more effort to maintain.
The second idea I take from Nozick is that an ideology may leave too much room for vulgarizations.5 Mistaken interpretations can then lead to disastrous consequences as people try to apply the ideology in practice. Nozick is right if he means to say that any good ideology in its explicit formulations has to minimize the unintended, harmful consequences that result from people trying to implement it in practice. A bad ideology leaves too much room for interpretations that cause significant harm. It might therefore be argued that this is a way for an ideology to fail: not being specific enough to rule out dangerously mistaken interpretations.
I need to reconsider what I wrote in the earlier entry. Although ideologies are abstract, as I wrote, I have to grant that they are not so abstract as to be innocent of the atrocities that take place under their banner. However, I am still not convinced that a serious ideology can conclusively fail. A problem with Nozick’s reasoning is that it seems that according to him, not just some but all ideologies fail: only some are more grave failures than others.
When Nozick implies that a political theorist should try to minimize the possibility of misinterpretations, I agree, but I would add that it is impossible even to come close to eliminating them entirely. And in this sense, all ideologies fail. The whole point in believing that ideologies can fail is that some of them do not fail: if all of them fail, then the criteria we use are too strict and ultimately meaningless.
I think any serious ideology is generally developed further to tackle the problems that become apparent in applying the ideology in practice. This has happened with both communism and capitalism, for example: communism (or socialism) became social democracy in Europe and capitalism became the New Deal in the US. The ideologies did not fail but adapted. Of course, after a few of such adaptations there is little left of the original ideology, which might be part of what Nozick is saying. In this sense, ideologies do not fail—but they do fade away, evolve, or get transformed into parts of new ideologies.
It is no easy thing to determine “what an ideal comes to in the world” (in Nozick’s words). Although I was too hasty in some of my earlier formulations, I still stand by my conclusion that it is more fruitful to compare ideologies in moral terms. I need to make that conclusion sharper by adding that the moral terms that I am talking about are deontological terms such as rights and obligations, since consequences are sometimes morally significant too.
The journal of Timo Laine (contact information). Cultural commentary from the perspective of a philosophy student in Helsinki.