It seems that Ends are like buses, you wait for them (endlessly) and then three come along at once. The End of History, The End of the Biosphere and The End of Ideology, and none of them seem to stop at Kilburn.
I don’t like people announcing ends, they are rather too final. It feels like the intellectual equivalent of holding your breath, it may catch attention, but eventually you end up looking silly. Even Fukuyama is starting to feel a bit sheepish about his End of History thesis and is questioning the accompanying revival of Daniel Bell’s End of Ideology Thesis: American values are not so self-evident any more. However, this does not stop people on the left in the UK from carrying on as if the End of Ideology was where we are at, partly triggered by the lack of principle seemingly displayed by New Labour at the moment, a discontent brought to a head by the Green affair (Thus passim).
A key problem with the idea of “Ideology” is that is often invoked in too rigid a way. There is an assumption that an “ideological” person has a consistent world view which they stick to come what may. The end of this was announced when people started looking at populations (starting in the 1950s) and saw that this was not so. It took a while for the Social Scientists and Political Psychologists to see that this was never so and never could have been so: People are just not that consistent either over time or within themselves. But this is not to say that they do not have consistent left-right preferences, or a set of values that conform to this distinction, just that they are not expressed in a massively self-consistent manner.
However, even though social science has largely moved on to more flexible ideas like “Hegemony” to mark out dominant value sets, and even though Political Psychologists have pointed out things like the enduring links between personality types (as distinct from intellectually consistent world-views) and voting patterns, none of this seems to have made a major impact on public debate. It is still fashionable to claim that one is “beyond ideology.” Usually this is used to denote “my ideas are not immune to evidence” i.e I am a reasonable person. But it also becomes a way of dismissing alternative visions of the future, before they have been looked at in relationship to whether they are workable, because they seem “too ideological.”
Now the problem with this is that it puts you into a default position of Economism, because the antidote to ideology is the practical and technical exercise of raising living standards via the market (though punctuated by the odd election.) This is progress we are told, and politics becomes a way of fine tuning the vehicle. What about the glaringly obvious point that business as usual currently leads to between four to six degrees of warming? This is even if we reduce emissions as European governments currently propose. So our current vision of progress leads to the rather more evidence-based End of the Biosphere (or more accurately the End of the Anthropocene, or the age of Humans). Even if you ignore this elephant in the room, there is also the problem of how you value human life within this default economistic framework (see Thus passim also) .
Quite simply we need ideology in order to have a view of society, because society includes human relationships, which inevitably involve value judgements about what it is to be human and about the value of human life. You do not escape this via Economics, you just reduce your value judgements to mathematical equations. Take the Stern Review on climate change. How do you weigh a human life in order to work out the real cost of a Carbon Emission? Well, how about that tried and tested economic metric “willingness to pay?” Seems lovely and quantitative and evidence based, but what are the social implications of this? Well one glaring implication is that poor people are not worth very much. Indeed, there are situations where it is clearly “rational” in economic terms to let them die. Is this a position that is beyond ideology? It sounds awfully like Malthus to me.
This is the irony with Ends, the one thing that is inevitable about them is that they eventually prove to be illusory. Even the End of the Biosphere is more likely to be a massive cull of larger life-forms, humans being the prime example. But even so, life goes on. A further irony is that in this case, believing in the End of History or The End of Ideology may prove to be Ideological in the worst sense, in the sense we abhor the most, the one that blinds us to the massive human cost of such ideas. So perhaps it is time for the history of ideas to begin anew, bring on the fresh thinking.