It’s election season in the United States, and I, like many others, find myself contemplating the weighty question of how people can be so stupid.
I have nevertheless recently taken a break from the outrage that fills my email inbox to read Jason Blakely’s new book, Lost in Ideology, and it has been a balm for the soul.
More than just another anodyne admonition to dialogue with one another across political divides, Lost in Ideology lays out a roadmap of contemporary ideologies across the political spectrum, explains their appeal and tries to loosen their grip on us by diagnosing exactly how people get lost in them. Blakely’s hope “is that the reader will fall slightly less in love with their own ideology, and have a more nuanced, if still critical understanding of one that is not their own.”
Blakely likens ideologies to both stories and maps; we need them to make sense of the world. Yet both tend to oversimplify a complex situation and to include some things while excluding others. The same tendency haunts our efforts to understand the ideologies of others. We dismiss rival ideologies as mere products of demographics, class interests or psychological traumas. Blakely tries instead to listen carefully to the stories that each ideology tells to discern what genuine goods it tries to protect and advance. At the same time, he offers tools for criticizing ideologies, tools that come from no particular ideology but apply to them all.
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William T. Cavanaugh is a professor of Catholic studies at DePaul University in Chicago.
With thanks to America and William T. Cavanaugh, where this article originally appeared.
