A Note on Ideology.

What do religious, political and 'cultural' beliefs have in common?

1. Often, a founding figure and/or a group of key figures – who is/are beyond criticism.

     Jesus, Mohamed, Buddha, Marx, Lenin, Hitler etc., etc.

2. Often, a central text, texts or documents.

     Bible, Koran, Mein Kampf, Capital - or texts derived from these.

3. Saints and sinners.

4. A strong tendency to fragment into a variety of groups – often intensely hostile to each other.

5. Traitors, heroes, heretics – mythic figures.

6. A mythic history or origin myth.

7. A strong tendency to require followers to accept the mythic apparatus.

8. Varying degrees of sanction for those who deviate from the central myth.

9. Often an iconography and symbolic vocabulary.

10. A tendency to ignore, reject or adapt facts that are contrary to the central mythos.

11. A strong tendency to ignore reason and scientific realism.

12. An acceptable 'vocabulary of motivations' (a great concept that – thank you, C. Wright Mills.)

It was a dissatisfaction with the 'anti-realism' of religion that led me to choose atheism many, many years ago. All I have learned since then is plenty of other good reasons to be an atheist and none at all to be religious, or that modern cop out 'spiritual'.

I am beginning to see a similar development in my attitude to political ideologies.

I grew up in rural England in the '50s and '60s, the eldest child in a family of traditional British conservatives. By traditional British conservative, I mean in the tradition of Churchill or MacMillan, not Margaret Thatcher. Politics was not an issue in my family, things were as they were. As a teenager, I became a more or less traditional supporter of the Labour Party. Again, this was the 'traditional' Labour Party of Harold Wilson. Essentially a social democratic party with socialist tendencies. The modern Labour Party bears no resemblance to the Party I supported at that time.

I arrived at university in October 1974 and very quickly moved to the political left. I flirted with the Socialist Workers Party for a while and was, in general, a Marxist. The early 1970s were, still, marked by the radicalism of the '60s, especially in the university world. So I lived in a very politicised atmosphere, and it was wonderful. Many late night discussions, debates and arguments.

Yes, it was a lively place, the University of Essex in the mid-'70s.

However, the point of this is not to present a detailed history of my university days, as interesting as that might be, for me at least.

What I have come to realise is that all 'ideologies' share most or all of the random list of features above. In fact, belief or value systems that exhibit these features could be defined as 'ideologies'. This includes just about all political and religious systems of thought.

And I cannot, personally, tolerate them any more.

I learned long ago that one cannot argue with religious true believers and that one encounters the same long list of logical fallacies in their 'arguments' and the same denial of empirical evidence.

It has slowly dawned on me over the last 20 odd years that one encounters exactly the same problems within political discourse. It has only been a sort of 'faith' on my part that has kept me 'believing'.

Recognising the faith-based nature of my political views and recognising the element of 'belief' involved finally led me to reject all such systems of thought as essentially special pleading, distortions of reality, power games and egoism.

I am in the process of trying to put all this together into a much better and better documented and argued piece. I am aware of the many problems this unearths and the potential philosophical issues I may have to tackle.

We, as rationalists, cannot and must not use the same flawed methods in our argumentation. We must be much less sure of ourselves and much more humble.

My position today could be called Classical Liberalism, minarchism, 'Stirner-ism', a sort of nihilism.