Reality rendered intelligible. A doctrine, credo, tenet or Weltanschauung. Without ideologies we wouldn’t have opinions, convictions, attitudes or principles. They influence expectation and aspiration, shape how we interpret and react to situations, and define our relationships. Ideologies guide us with an understanding of the world and how we fit in it.
In it’s purest form, an ideology is a deep foundational belief within a person. It’s the characteristics of an individual’s thoughts on life. They’re also shared between people in groups, societies and nations. Where a paradigm is more a science based belief, an ideology is more a creation of culture and its evolution. Nurture or the manner in how we’re raised, has a huge impact on our ideologies. We could take it one step further with nature, which involve the genes we inherit from our parents, but this would be more related to personality traits influencing how we interpret, choose and invent ideologies. This is a modified concept of ideology because originally influences were based on the information that come in from a persons senses.
Quite often ideologies are assumptions with little or no thought put into them, that may or may not have factual basis. These ideologies become coherent through repeated, subjective choices where further thoughts grow. People can be anywhere from dogmatic to passive when expressing them. It’s not only taken on multiple meanings throughout the years, there are many different kinds within each type. To be extreme for a moment, there are probably millions of ideologies. Hundreds of political ideologies alone exist. To name a few more; sexual orientation, economic theory, religion, myths and discrimination are all ideologies.
It’s so broadly used, it helps to know where it originated. Antoine Destutt de Tracy is the creator of its first meaning and he coined the term “ideology” in 1796. He got his inspiration for this during the French Revolution, when irrational mob impulses almost killed him. After this experience, Tracy’s goal was to create a system of ideas or ideology, to form a foundation for the moral and political sciences, by examining the sensations people experience as they interact with the material world, and the ideas that form in their minds due to those sensations. His concept of ideology was a liberal philosophy that provided a powerful defense of an individual’s liberty, property and free markets. It also put constitutional limits on state power.
After Tracy’s first view, Napoleon Bonaparte came to view ideology as a term he used against the liberals of Tracy’s Institut National. Napoleon described his opponents as the ideologues, meaning someone who is adherent of an ideology, especially one who is uncompromising and dogmatic. Through out history the term would move back and forth between positive and negative connotations.
David W. Minar describes six different ways in which the word ideology has been used.
- As a collection of certain ideas with certain kinds of content, usually normative.
- As the form or internal logical structure that ideas have within a set.
- By the role in which ideas play in human-social interaction.
- By the role that ideas play in the structure of an organization.
- As meaning, whose purpose is persuasion.
- As the locus of social interaction.
“Ideologies are patterned clusters of normatively imbued ideas and concepts, including particular representations of power relations. These conceptual maps help people navigate the complexity of their political universe and carry claims to social truth.”
Manfred Steger(1961-) and Paul James(1958-)
A great paradigm awakening should usher in an ideological shift as well. Adapting to this could be even more of a challenge because where a paradigm is a scientifically established belief, an ideology is a deeper belief that most people just react off of, apposed to thinking it out. The common theme that needs to be revisited over and over again is, don’t be so convicted in your beliefs that they can’t be changed. Remember humanity is a work in progress, not only because it’s always evolving, but because there is an overwhelming majority’s opinion that there has to be a better way for the world to live. When and if a shift happens, I believe it should start with individuals making their own personal decisions and then through mutual agreement, spread to the masses.
If a shift does actually begins to happen, let’s never forget, it is diversity that makes planet Earth such a beautiful place and any kind of change should try to preserve that.