It’s hard to be an ideologue

I feel sympathy mixed with Schadenfreude when watching dogmatic followers of any ideology in action. Sooner or later they run headlong into the stonewall of irreconcilable contradictions, and their brains scramble.

Since they can’t give up their ideology for, well, ideological considerations, they have to give up reason and any semblance of intellectual integrity. Instead they indulge in rhetorical calisthenics to put any circus contortionist to shame. Yet no twists and turns can lead them out of their predicament.

Take Left-wing ideologues, for example. They have a set of unchallengeable pieties, and I don’t have to give you the full list.

One such piety is the conviction that only denizens of the Third World have virtue. They may not be impeccably pristine but, compared to the vile West with its [colonialism, imperialism, misogyny, inequality and so on], they stand out as victimised paragons of goodness.

Muslims make up a large swath of Third World hagiography, which makes them saintly fighters against Western wickedness and hence ipso facto icons of woke ideologies.

But then the icons begin to crack, and seeping through the fissures are some disconcerting reports. For example, it turns out that Muslims treat women without the reverence demanded by woke, in this case feminist, sensibilities.

In fact, the status of women in some Islamic countries is similar to that of livestock. They are seen as strictly functional beings created by Allah for the sole purpose of waiting on men hand and foot, not to mention other parts of the anatomy. On hearing that, a woke ideologue begins to squirm.

And then – shock, horror. Apparently, rather than obediently treating same-sex relationships as equal, perhaps even superior, to the more common kind – Muslims tend to throw homosexuals off tall buildings. Squirming turns into agony.

Or take the sacrosanct human right to identify as any of the 100-odd sexes. Any doubt about the sanctity of that right brands the naysayer as an enemy. But then it turns out that feminists are perhaps the greatest opponents of accepting former men as women. Trans is good, feminism is a virtue, so how come they clash? And how do wokers of the world reconcile that conflict?

I could perhaps think of a way, but won’t. I enjoy too much watching conflicts of pieties from the sidelines – especially since it’s not just Left-wing ideologues who tie themselves in knots trying to untangle such conundrums.

I know quite a few people who treat Trump as a messiah. Their whole Weltanschauung is the flesh built on the skeleton of their deified idol. And deities can do no wrong by definition.

Anyone who attempts to find fault with anything the idol says or does is a heretic to be immolated in the pyre of fiery invective. If Christ could say “He who is not with Me is against Me,” then Trump and his zealots are also entitled to say the same thing.

But here’s the rub. Some of my Trumpist friends have been staunch supporters of the Ukraine from 2014 onwards – and avowed enemies of Putinism for quite a bit longer. And now that Trump is obviously trying to sell the Ukraine down the Dnieper by bypassing Zelensky and striking a deal (dread word) with the fascist aggressor, my ideological friends find themselves in a pickle.

They bang their heads against the wall trying to find a way out, but that door is nailed shut. Either you betray the Ukraine in your own mind, or commit apostasy by admitting that Trump is neither divine nor even angelic. He is a flawed individual with some good ideas, but also with many tragic failings that may yet cancel out whatever good he does.

The most current example of that is his concerted effort to throw the Ukraine first and Europe second under the bus, which supporters of the Ukraine’s heroic struggle try in vain to square with their hagiographic adoration of Trump.

Their last line of defence is saying that things aren’t what they appear to be. This reminds me of the Polish aphorist Jerzy Lec who once quipped, “Reality isn’t what really happens”. In this case, reality is for real. Trump is betraying the Ukraine, setting up the stage for a wider conflict in the near future.

My aim here isn’t Trump-bashing but ideology-bashing. The point is that no set of beliefs rates a dogmatic status on earth unless it comes down from heaven.

A cogent system of thought has to rest on a solid philosophical and theological base that alone enables the observer to look down on world events from a high vantage point, rather than being mired in their midst.

A bird’s eye view provides a clear sight of the vicissitudes and relativities of politics, leading the thinker to the realisation that, as often as not, the moral, absolutist solution to any problem also happens to be the most practical.

In the absence of that vantage point, petty relativities often take on aspects of the absolute – until they turn out mutually exclusive with other putative absolutes, proving that most of them are simply fallacies.

A propensity to succumb to ideological fervour is a symptom of intellectual laziness, a pandemic disease of modernity. What’s especially risible is various fire-eating ideologues claiming that their particular obsession is commonsensical and pragmatic, as opposed to pie-in-the-sky idealistic.

In fact, secular obsessions have nothing to do with common sense – and everything to do with worshipping a secular idol in defiance of reason and morality. The wages of that sin can only ever be disastrous.

The other day JD Vance correctly outlined the deleterious effect of woke ideologies on the core values of the West. However, he fails to realise that the ideological totem at which he worships, Trumpism, can be as damaging.

In his Republic Plato explored the concept of a state ruled by the philosopher king. That, as he himself knew, was only a hypothetical proposition. It’s not philosophers but men of action who tend to run countries.

But no action will succeed unless inspired by sound and dispassionate thought. Anyone capable of thinking about politics in that manner has to proceed, perhaps unwittingly, from a system of thought that transcends politics and supersedes ideologies. If he doesn’t, a disaster will never be far around the corner.

Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy is a good book whose author has to know everything I’m saying. Alas, his political ambitions force him into an ideological straitjacket that can’t be shaken off.

He hitched his wagon to Trump’s star against his own original instincts. Back in 2016, when Trump won his first presidential term, Vance publicly called him “reprehensible” and an “idiot”. Privately, he compared him to Adolf Hitler, which has to be put down to febrile polemical ardour.

Since then Vance has changed his tune by selling his soul for a pot of ideological message. Such transactions seldom end up well – ideologies, whatever they may be, are deadly toxins of the mind. And once bargained away, one’s soul can seldom be bought back.