My guess is that this has to do again with something that is usually forgotten in discussions about ideology: the unavoidable uncertainty about most of our practical knowledge. I started by saying that we need knowledge in order to foresee the consequences of our possible actions, but those forecastings are usually rather uncertain in most cases. Our actions have lots of consequences, and some of these consequences are less certain than others. We simply cannot be very sure of what will happen exactly if we do A instead of B under circumstances C. And even more when the circumstances and the actions are political in nature, i.e., involving the behaviour and interests of many different people. But it is important that, as I have just said, not all the consequences of an action are equally uncertain: some are more certain, and some more doubtful. For example, long-term consequences tend to be much less sure than short-term ones.
Suppose, then, that we are in a political debate in which there are two possible courses of action, A and B. An ideally objective mind would try to scrutinize the ‘expected utility’ she would get from each, and choose the one that maximises that mathematical function. But usually this is not the way we mentally function, mostly because the world doesn’t have the habit of offering us data so precise and abundant as to make such a computation possible. Instead, we usually don’t have other alternative except considering how good or bad we think the almost sure consequences of A and B, basing our evaluation mostly on that, and leave a little margin to take into consideration how good or bad their more uncertain consequences are. Very probably, almost everybody would agree on what are the almost sure consequences; disagreement will grow as we start considering less sure ones. Let’s assume that A is your preferred option, i.e. A is the option whose more sure consequences are better from your point of view. My conjecture is that the main role of ideology consists in giving you a preference for those theories that, if they were true, would entail that the less sure consequences of A are also better for almost everybody.
Just with an example: imagine that A is a liberal economic policy, and B is a socialist or Keynesian economic policy; or, to be still more concrete: A consists in lowering taxes and cutting social services, and B consists in the opposite. What is what makes of you, say, ‘a liberal’? Both liberal and Keynesians will agree on certain short-term consequences of A and B; for example, in the short term, the income of the wealthy will raise if A is applied, and the welfare of many people depending on social services will decrease. Being a liberal, you believe (but, remember, ‘belief’ is not knowledge) that liberal policies will make national product grow, so that, in the long term, even the poor will be in a better position than if B were applied. Of course, the objective truth of liberal or Keynesian theories, especially about their long term consequences, is not only hard to establish, but very probably it’s just impossible. So, everything remains in the realm of ‘mere belief’. You have an interest, then, in persuading as much people as possible of the truth of liberal theories, for the more popular they become, the more likely it will be that their recommended policies get applied. The question is, are you also persuaded? Probably yes, because being persuaded of something makes much easier for you to convince others, and also because the other biases we mentioned and the beginning will probably make you to have more sensibility towards ‘your-side’ arguments.
Hence, to conclude: ideology may have several roles in our ‘economy of thought’, but probably the most important one is helping us to navigate social debates in our favour (at least in the short term) in a world of uncertainties.
Jesús Zamora Bonilla
Mappingignorance
