Ecology of ideology

Google any combination of words and it’s likely that the combination has been used before. Originality was a scarce commodity before the internet, but the internet can prove to you just how scarce it is.

I had an idea for a Third Testament: The Book of the Spirit. It seemed like the natural progression from The Old (Father) and New (Son). I thought I might write the book as a work of fiction (sort of) or as a fictitious element in something else. But I did a web search first and discovered several Third Testaments, and most of them centred around the Holy Spirit. Oh well.

So I should have known that the concept of an “ecology of ideology” would not be a new one. It’s not, although there aren’t many ideological ecologists out there. And what I can glean from their abstracts is that it’s at proof-of-concept stage at this point.

Well, if the good professors at Carnegie Mellon have proved the principle (by studying moshav and kibbutz) then let the concept take flight—what does it mean to have an ecology of ideology/ies?

Ecology is the study of interaction between entities and between entities and their environment. When biological ecology is extended to human culture, the environment is usually understood by its conventional definition: trees, rivers, bunnies and stuff. Hence the “green” movement, and its focus on how we exist within the world.

But sometimes the dominant interactions aren’t with the planet, but with similar human entities and the environment they create. That’s not to forget the bunnies and their effect on us, but it is possible to extend ecological thinking into areas that are not specifically green.

So it is with ideology. An ideology is a comprehensive set of ideas to encapsulate a particular world view. Usually, an ideology forms from the sum of the beliefs and actions of a group of people. It can then be codified and used as a reference against potential progress or against other ideologies.

Species classification, from what little I know, isn’t easy, but the principles are quite clear. Ideology classification is similarly easy in principle but very difficult in practice. The process is made more difficult by the human tendency to bend the definition of what they say they agree with to what they believe in.

That said, it is possible to classify ideologies, and the most straightforward way to do so is by their proponent’s principles. A survey of a large number of self-described Marxists, anarchists, socialists, conservatives, liberals, neo-liberals, fascists, neo-fascists, etc., etc., could provide a map of priorities.

What I picked up from the abstracts of the Carnegie Mellon group is that ideologies can affect one another in their evolution, but principles are immutable. That’s not to say that individual’s principles and priorities cannot change, but that ideologies never die.

That is a great source of hope for me—clinging to principles that are commonly seen as subservient to pragmatic powerplay—hope that a kernel of writing and activism that places non-violence, self-determination and sustainability at or near the top of the priority list will always survive. And, more faintly, that it will be in ascendancy some day.