Each of us has a lot of beliefs. So many. We pick them up throughout our lives by seeing things, hearing things, touching them, feeling them. Sometimes, perhaps by thinking them through. We have beliefs about simple, concrete, observable things. We have beliefs about tangible things and belefs about complex, abstract, imaginary things. We have beliefs that we can justify and others that we can’t.
We are all exposed to different things. If, like me, you were taken off to Sunday School most weekends through your school years, you may have heard what the good Methodists of Clintonville, Wisconsin thought fitting, or later what the proto-progressives of Parkrose Heights Methodist in Portland, Oregon thought would fortify your spirit. You might have accepted what they told you (I liked that “Jesus loves the little children”). You might have put a tack in it, or you might have decided to believe something completely different from what you were told. Or, you might believe some idea of your own without ever having decided to believe it. Could happen.
Perhaps no church or synagogue was part of your life as a kid, but the CBS Evening News or discussion around the table, or movies and television programming. Or Mad magazine. Alfred E. Neuman. We all watched our families, school-mates, and friends encounter and deal with the little riffles that develop among people. Perhaps we all ponder what we see and learn from it.
We accept some of the beliefs that are offered up to us and refuse others. I remember about age 12 I had a friend next door, Steve Keubel, who told me about the UFO that had hovered over him one day as he laid back in a lawn chair. I would have liked to believe his story but I couldn’t. Not sure I could say quite why. I like to believe that we choose our beliefs with some care both as to their truth and as to their consequences. Even if we generally do, there’s still a lot of opportunity for us to hold quite disparate beliefs, especially about the big things, those things that are abstract, much-encompassing, and potent.
I think it’s reasonable, as a general proposition, to suppose that our beliefs affect our actions. Some beliefs, like my twelve-year-old beliefs around UFOs, might reasonably act like filters affecting what we believe and even what we see and hear, from the time we accept them.
It can be demonstrated that there are only four kinds of beliefs. Two kinds are good. These are beliefs that something is true when it is indeed true, and beliefs that something is false when it indeed is false. Two kinds are bad. The belief that something which is true is really false is bad. The belief that something which is false is true is also bad. The good beliefs lead to good decisions, the bad beliefs tend to lead you away from the path of rightness.
I hear you objecting that some beliefs are neither right or wrong, or some may be both right and wrong. Let me say just three things about this. First, the previous paragraph is rhetorically dogmatic. Second, I consider a belief to be an assertion, which is in line with how beliefs are used. People act upon them. The cost of wrong beliefs is big when wrong beliefs lead to wrong actions. Therefore, a belief is wrong if any bit of it is not true. If it leads to wrong actions. Third, it seems to me useful to consider abstract assertions under the same light that we shine on assertions of simple fact. Ambiguity in this context is not a friend, nor is ambiguity necessitated by abstraction.
But my point is that we all believe false things to be true and true things to be false.
To get to business, what is an ideology?
In its general meaning, an ideology is a set of beliefs held by an individual or a group. In these essays I’ll use the term in a way that I find useful for thinking about political ideologies, those ideologies that individuals and groups use in thinking and talking about political questions:
An ideology is a shared model of social phenomena used for conceptualizing, discussing, and evaluating political issues.
By “political issues” I mean any issues that are of common interest to members of a group or community, that are not personal issues separate from common interests, but are considered by the group or its members to be of interest to them as members of the group.
A political ideology is a “model” in that it represents or stands in for the relevant social world. Language is always in this sense a model. It isn’t the same as what it represents. It’s a tool we use to talk about it and, to a great extent, it’s a tool that we use to think about it. Language is such an important tool for us that we tend to forget that saying doesn’t make it so, no matter what words we use.
We need a model to deal with our social world because the real world we are concerned about is much too big and complex for us to either understand or to manipulate directly. So we apprehend and manipulate words that imperfectly reflect reality. Political ideologies are made up largely of words, together with other symbols and actions.
In order to perform its function of representing political issues within a social context, a political ideology must represent the important features of this domain. A political ideology therefore should include representations of the existing world; of the political processes that exist in the social context; the people involved (we, our allies, opponents, other stakeholders, and what they are like); the claims that people have on one another, if any; of features that are held to be fixed or changeable; of outcomes or conditions that are desirable or undesirable; in the case of groups, of what constitutes group membership.
Any and all of these features may be disputed in political discussions. Any and all of them may be tailored or framed in light of political goals, whether consciously and deliberately or not. Aspects of the world can be emphasized, passed over, exalted, or neglected as seems expedient to the actors. Since the ideological model is only words, it can be molded and remolded as circumstances seem to require.^
An ideology is a social construction, even if it is personal. As individuals we learn from our own experiences and come to our own conclusions, but this happens in an environment in which beliefs, attitudes, and interpretations are constantly offered up from multiple sources ranging from parents and friends to film producers and commercial writers. An ideology is a social tool for discussing social issues. It’s there whenever social matters are discussed.
A person’s political ideology, by this definition, isn’t the sum of his beliefs. Although quite a broad swath of personal beliefs can be engaged over different political issues, in general the personal political ideology will be less than the totality of the person’s beliefs. Beyond this, since ideology is about social issues, and is called to use in social contexts, it must rely not just on common beliefs but also on common language. Hence a political ideology will tend to utilize ideological language that is shared within a group.
It isn’t a simple matter to find, record, and examine an ideology as defined here. You can find clues to it in speech or writing, and sometimes you can find political party platforms or other organized group doctrine. But ideologies are never complete, and of course they’re never final as new situations are met and new statements are made. Even if you can find a written version of group-endorsed beliefs, each individual has his private version. Ideologies need not exist in an explicit form, and normally don’t. An ideology is really an abstraction of an abstraction (a model of “society” or “our group“ or “the economy,” all of which are abstractions), and isn’t necessarily either comprehensive, consistent, or accurate.
In these essays I discus what in my view are the important features of conservative ideology rather than try to develop a comprehensive compendium of conservative actions and utterances. Such analyses have been done by researchers. You will see in other essays that social-psychological researchers have worked out a basic list of features that they believe are characteristic of conservatism, and the beliefs that I’ve selected to comment on are consistent with those.
In his chapter from “The Oxford Handbook of Ideologies,” Alan Finlayson starts his case for the importance of ideological rhetoric by saying that “...the political theory of ideologies is concerned not only with the internal organization of political thinking but also with its external face—with the ways in which political ideas are presented in public, communicated to varied audiences and made ‘persuasive.’” [Finlayson 2013, p. 197]
Ideologies certainly include concepts, and they can be appraised from that perspective. What are the important concepts, what are their meanings, and how do they fit together? “What Conservatism Is” and “The Claims” delve into the conceptual aspects of American conservatism.
But ideologies are also tools for communication, and from this perspective their use in convincing, recruiting, persuading, and motivating comes into view. A common idea among students of ideology is that ideology is crafted by political elites primarily as a tool for communicating with the political non-elites. In that view, a popular political ideology must meet certain functional requirements:
Ideology exists as a tool in a fight for commitment. As Finlayson further states, “[t]he argumentative form of ideologies is not a surface element, nor simply a secondary or subsequent (merely strategic or instrumental) addition.” [Finlayson 2013, p. 199] Ideology provides argumentative resources; ways of forming questions and of understanding and explaining events. Of responding to challenges. An ideology includes values and ways of analyzing issues in light of values. To some extent, ideologies attempt to define what a good political reason is. They also define to some extent what the political process is and how the political contest should be conducted. A liberal ideology, for example, which embraces the rationality of its adherents, is somewhat constrained thereby in the types of arguments it can make. Similarly a conservative ideology which puts weight on certain types of authority may need to avoid certain modes of argument, such as utilitarian or scientific arguments.
For reasons such as these, an ideology isn’t a set of concepts and beliefs tied together by the logic of ideas, like a thesis argument or a scientific theory. It includes or entails concepts, but it wraps them together not with logic but with rhetoric.
The conception of “rhetoric” used by analysts of ideology has expanded and grown more sophisticated than the classic rhetorician’s view of rhetoric. Traditional rhetoric, as formulated by Aristotle some 2300 years ago, recognized three forms of argumentation, ethos, logos, and pathos.
The argument from ethos is an argument based on the character, authority, or trustworthiness of the advocate. There are many possible types of authority which might be considered legitimate, and examining what type of authority is seen as legitimate reveals something about the ideology. Liberals tend to value scientific authority. Many conservatives favor authorities such as ‘traditional values’ or Holy Writ. Populist like the "common" touch. The persona of the political leader can increase their authority if it is congruent with the values underlying the ideology.
Argument from pathos is argument from emotion. Emotion is present where motivation is, and so emotion seems to be an essential part of ideology. It frequently appears in the foreground of ideological argumentation. Ideologies differ not only on what emotions are dominant, but also on what issues, positions, groups and individuals are the targets of emotion.
The argument from logos is an argument from reason, but logos in political disputation is not what it is in a courtroom or a scientific journal. Political logos is built using the blocks we’re discussing here; ideological models of the world, namings specific to the ideology (following), concepts of authority. Political arguments that are used in public venues tend to be simple and rely heavily on analogy or metaphor. There is a strong tendency for issues to be framed in whatever way makes the preferred conclusion seem self-evident to believers.
Political arguments are often made using a “quasi-logic” that tries to frame issues in terms that ‘everyone knows’ are true of the world, “inviting people to consider things and to see them as ‘like this’ rather than ‘like that’ and thus to infer or deduce particular conclusions.” This of course tends to attract political discourse toward the ideological terms that are preferred by the party that is speaking, leading to the sense that each party is talking past the other’s terms.
As an example, consider "assisted suicide," which was a hot-button issue some thirty years ago. “Euthanasia” or “assisted suicide” can evoke much different responses than “institutionalized murder” or “mercy killing.” Thus, some of the contest isn’t about policy options and their consequences but about naming. The selected name is put into a narrative form, at which point “common sense” can be applied. (“No one is in favor of institutionalized murder, not even our opponents.”) Such strategies make issues emotionally evocative to broad swathes of people, avoiding the analytical inspection of alternative courses of action. [Finlayson 2013, p. 198-9]
The big words in an ideology, those heavily laden with affect, such as “freedom” or “rights,” often have shades of meaning within the ideological context that aren’t evident on the surface. These meanings may never be explicitly explained, but may be communicated implicitly and be well understood by adherents.
Analysts of ideological language have identified and labeled many categories of rhetorical word use which at best tend to mislead. “Catachresis” is a technical term meaning the use of an analogical or metaphorical term to assign characteristics that are not really there. “Metonymy” is a similar misuse, applied when a particular feature is used to designate something, but, again, is used to associate attributes on the sly. Ideologies tend to have characteristic sets of such “figures” or “tropes” which by repetition become characteristic of the ideology.
In such ways an ideology is much more than a set of conceptual propositions or principles. Concepts and logic are often obscured by emotion. Ideologies are tools for use, and much of their meaning is revealed by their uses.
One of the forms of political contestation in ideologies is over what is a legitimate subject of political contestation. [Finlayson 2013, p. 205] This is particularly true of conservative ideologies which in general tend to discourage change.
The study of political ideology can raise a number of rather complex questions about the use of rhetoric. How are effective arguments made, and how is the ideology affected by the need to be persuasive? How does the ideology use ‘naming,’ that is, assigning labels, in ways that favor political argumentation? Arguments need not only be persuasive, but also defensible. How does the ideology protect against contestation? “Conservative Rhetoric” explores in somewhat more depth the political rhetoric of today’s American conservatism.
Ideology, seen here as a rhetorical model, paints a picture of the world that defines a role and a status for ‘us,’ its adherents, we of like mind. How and why is it that people develop so strong an identification and commitment to an ideological model? The answer may be found in the related facts that ideology is (ostensibly, at least) about ethical values, and that ideology is a social activity.
Ideologies deal with matters that are very important. These matters are also far outside our normal scope of control and beyond our personal experience. They deal with matters that we know about but can’t experience directly or completely. The assertions of political ideologies are highly abstract and their truth or falsity is neither directly observable nor empirically testable. Many of the ideological claims we make are arguably neither provable nor disprovable. We might suppose then, as responsible people, that we would both hold our beliefs lightly and be willing to think it that we might be mistaken (as said Oliver Cromwell). History proves this is not the case, especially the history of disputes over religious orthodoxies and entitlement to resources. Who really knows the true nature of God, of Jesus, or of the apostles’ Holy Spirit? Nevertheless, you must declare the approved belief about these things to receive sacraments in many Christian churches.
Perhaps this is so because we’re all over-awed by syllogistic logic: “If A then B. C is an instance of A. Therefore B is true of C.” We string our positions together from relations and facts we believe to be true, forgetting, however, another syllogism: “A chain is as strong as its weakest link. A syllogistic argument is a chain.” Thus, perhaps, we use elaborate arguments to convince one another of conclusions we don’t really understand.
Perhaps, though, it’s something entirely different. Perhaps we all realize that the basis of social life is reciprocity. Perhaps our allegiance to an ideology signals our endorsement of a particular pact of reciprocity. Perhaps failure to adhere to an ideology is tantamount to rejecting the rules of social reciprocity. Perhaps a non-believer is a cheater.
Social psychologists John Jost, Christopher Federico, and Jaime Napier composed a chapter they titled “Political Ideologies and their Social Psychological Functions,” in “The Oxford Handbook of Ideologies.” They point out that the ‘non-rational’ factors in political ideology have been a concern of its students since ideology first became a subject of scrutiny late in the nineteenth century. This concern was boosted by the mid-twentieth-century totalitarian regimes that burst to life in Europe and elsewhere.
Jost and his colleagues propose a view, broadly held today, of the coexistence of conceptual and social psychological influences in conservatism. “[W]e propose that ideologies possess both a discursive (socially constructed) superstructure and a functional (or motivational) base or substructure....The former describes a set of socially constructed ‘attitudes, values, and beliefs’....that guides political judgment and is usually transmitted from political elites to mass publics. The functional substructure refers to the constellation of social and psychological needs, goals, and motives that drive the political preferences of ordinary citizens....” [Jost 2013, p. 232] Thus they propose a visible and somewhat explicit set of concepts and proposals which gets its motivating force from the social and psychological lives of its adherents.
According to Jost and his collaborators, political elites (local and national politicoes and their support organizations) attempt to “bundle” policy positions and arguments in order to form effective political coalitions. The inclusion or exclusion of an idea from an ideology is therefore not done just on the basis of logical fit. Ideological “bundles” must be able to command attention and be comprehensible to mass publics. In the US, and within other similarly-situated nations, ideological positions are arrayed along a left-right spectrum, which is supported by legal constraints and custom. Citizens stake out some position along this continuum. [Jost 2013, p. 233]
Although some non-elites can and do understand the discursive (logical) contents of ideologies, most citizens here and elsewhere lack such detailed understanding. They tend to be inconsistent and unstable in their attitudes. There is however evidence that as citizens age, their attitudes become both more consistent and more stable with respect to their chosen ideology. Each person’s personal ideology (his own political attitudes, values, and beliefs) tends to be chosen from along this spectrum. Where along the spectrum individuals begin and end is influenced both by social factors (family, other affiliations, education, etc.) and by the fit between these beliefs and attitudes and each person’s psychological needs. [Jost 2013, p. 235] Since neither conceptual clarity nor consistency seem to be strong constraints in achieving that fit, personal psychological factors seem to have a strong opportunity to express themselves in ideology. The larger story of that fit, and the evolution of that story, is presented in “The Mark and the Draw.”
An example that illustrates psychological fit came to light about 2008 when a ‘happiness gap’ was discovered between American conservatives and liberals. As Jost and his co-authors describe it,
The power of ideology to explain and justify discrepancies between the current social order and some alternative not only maintains support for the status quo, but also serves for its adherents the palliative function of alleviating dissonance or discomfort associated with the awareness of systemic injustice or inequality....The endorsement of system-justifying beliefs is associated with increased positive affect, decreased negative affect, and self-reported satisfaction or contentment....Napier and Jost (2008) found that the association between political ideology and subjective well-being was explained to a significant degree by respondents’ differential tendencies to rationalize economic inequality in society. Furthermore, the happiness gap between conservatives and liberals in the United States was tied to the nation’s level of income inequality, such that as inequality has increased steadily over the last 30 years, the subjective well-being of liberals dropped more precipitously than that of conservatives. [Jost 2013, p. 242]
Thus, small effects summed across a population create large effects. They add that “...there is a lot of evidence indicating that when the status quo is perceived as inevitable (or nearly so), people are far more likely to rationalize than to challenge it....” [Jost 2013, p. 243]
An ideology is a shared model of social phenomena used for conceptualizing, discussing, and evaluating political issues. But that’s just the surface. Ideology, researchers say, is closely associated with personality and life history.
Next: Conservative Rhetoric
© 2021, Ross A. Hangartner