Every Ideology Explains Less Than the One Before It, and That Is the Point

I want to use the word "ideology" more broadly than it is usually used, and then look at what history has done with the things it covers.

Under the broad definition an ideology is any system of ideas that offers you a settled position on a class of questions before you have looked at the particular question. Religion is one. So are liberalism, capitalism, communism, socialism, environmentalism, feminism, and representative democracy itself. What they share is not a political direction but a shape: a package that answers in advance.

Line them up in the order they appeared, and one thing about them changes monotonically.

The Range Keeps Narrowing

Religion came first, and it was total. It explained the origin of the universe, the origin of life, the weather, disease, the correct way to eat, whom to marry, how to govern, what happens after death, and why your neighbour's cattle died. There was no question it declined to answer.

It failed, in the specific sense that on every one of those questions where an independent check became available, it turned out to be wrong.

The ideologies that came after it are noticeably more modest. Liberalism has an account of the political person and says nothing about the origin of species. Capitalism is a theory of production and exchange and has no view on the afterlife. Communism, for all its total ambitions in practice, was at bottom a theory of economic history. Feminism addresses the relations between the sexes and does not pretend to cosmology.

Each successive ideology tried to explain a smaller slice of existence than its predecessor. That is not a coincidence, and it is not a decline. It is what happens when a class of ideas is repeatedly checked against the world: the parts that fail get amputated, and the survivors are the ones that claimed less.

Why Physics Fits on a T-Shirt and Ideologies Do Not

There is an objection available here. Physics also aims at everything. Its practitioners talk openly about putting the laws of the universe on a t-shirt, and they have made real progress toward it. If total ambition is the disease, why is physics healthy?

The difference is in the direction of construction. Physics started small, with falling bodies and inclined planes, and earned each extension of its range by prediction. The t-shirt is the end of the process, if it ever comes, and every line on it will have been paid for. Ideologies start with the t-shirt. They begin by announcing a complete account and then spend their history defending the parts that do not fit.

So the two are not the same ambition. One is a range that grew by passing tests. The other is a range that was asserted and has been shrinking ever since under the pressure of tests it did not pass. The shrinking is the sign that the checking works.

Extrapolate

If the range of what ideologies claim has been contracting for three thousand years, and if the contraction is the mechanism by which they got less wrong, then the natural question is where the process ends.

It ends at zero. An ideology that explains nothing in advance is not an ideology; it is the practice of looking at each question on its own terms, with whatever evidence bears on it, and reaching a conclusion that does not have to agree with your conclusion on any other question.

This is not a call for moderation or centrism. Those are positions on the existing axes, and the axes are the problem. It is a claim that the axes themselves are late-stage ideologies, and that they will go the way of the earlier ones.

The Institution That Cannot Let Go

There is one large obstacle, and it is structural rather than intellectual.

Representative government needs ideologies. It has to present you with a small number of voting options, and since it does not consult you issue by issue, each option has to be a manifesto from which every future decision can be derived. But a manifesto from which all answers can be derived is precisely an ideology under the definition above. The representative system is ideological by construction, and it will keep manufacturing ideologies as long as it exists, regardless of how badly they fit.

This explains something otherwise puzzling. People believe the party platforms less and less, election after election, and yet the platforms do not go away. They cannot. The system has no other way to ask the question.

So the historical trend toward less ideology has two possible continuations. Either trust in the political process keeps falling as people notice the mismatch between how they have learned to think and how they are asked to vote, or the system of government changes to one that can take an answer per question. I know which I would prefer. I also notice that the first is already happening.