Wherefore Ideology?: Thinking for the Public

I found Sudhir T. Vadaketh’s 4-part series about his thoughts on the GE to offer some refreshing perspective. If you’re already relishing the prospect of reading the entire series, there’s quite a lot to chew on, and I’d recommend you go ahead (though I don’t agree with quite a bit of it).

As much as I enjoyed the read, I’m writing this post in response to just one of the questions he poses (in Part 4), about the whether the PAP has the necessary ideological adaptability to manage Singapore’s long-term evolution, within a complex and changing world ecosystem.

Actually the notion of ideological evolution happens to be an idea I’ve recently written about, in a post about the idea of a Singaporean exceptionalism. My main point was that some kind of exceptionalism is (as others have said, if perhaps more self-servingly) good and necessary, but that it needs to be an imaginative exceptionalism.

Additionally I found myself largely in agreement with Sudhir’s premises about what the world situation is like, and the kind of demands it will impose. However, the point I found myself to be in doubt about is whether ideological adaptability is something we can realistically demand from any political party at all.

Now, I don’t think that this is a question with an inherently pessimistic premise – it’s not that I think politicians necessarily lack imagination, or that political parties are doomed to dogma. Rather, the implicit premise I would contest is that political ideology is mostly shaped by politicians.

While politicians appear to be responsible for communicating and even enacting ideology over a large remit, I strongly suspect that in a complex ecosystem of ideas and technologically-enabled everyman-ideologues, the efforts of politicians to shape ideology don’t go very far at all – are, in fact, apt to be counter-productive. The reality is that our discursive culture (the one performed in the media and taught in schools, among other things) has primed us to regard any official, vaguely ideological messaging as transparent attempts at manipulation and so much propaganda. The learned instinct is to resist messages from certain recognized quarters.

At the same time ideological messages are easier to broadcast than ever, and fairly cheap to create. Add to this the availability of messages already made, needing only to be found. The power to express and disseminate creative ideological resistance is, I think, greater than the power of political authority to neutralize it.

I also suspect most politicians quickly realize this: would you not, in a society where every public thought-proposal is liable to raise a storm of commentary? And I think the more adroit of them can be observed to have become better and better at subversive messaging.

The crux of the matter is that I think it is fairer to see political parties as reflecting our (‘the people’s’) choices to us, than it is to see them as circumscribing the choices available to us. In other words I think ideological change will come primarily from their responding to broader society, than it comes from their imposing it or contriving it somehow through the exercise of institutional power. This is one reason I find it difficult to endorse the call for greater ideological adaptability on the part of the PAP, or any other party.

This is not to say that I think politicians lack agency altogether, or that there is no power-wielding for which they can be rightly held responsible. Certainly they can and ought to be influential; but the question is, in the ideological markets, to what extent are they ‘price-takers’ rather than ‘price-setters’?

Another problem I see with the expectation that politicians and political parties be ideologically adaptable, is that in the first place the ideological complex they subscribe to (i.e. the range of systematically related ideas they regard as informing their institutional identity and ethos) is probably going to be something of a sprawl, something of a hodge-podge, probably something undergoing frequent renovation, and something that most individual members appreciate only in part. Perhaps there are a few members who could be said to approximate something like the encompassing vision of an architect, but these are as easily found outside the structure. The question here is, how does the adapting and the reconceptualizing and the renovation get done?

I think my answer to this second question is that it gets done by the people who have the most space to manoeuvre, the ones with the greatest capacity to co-opt emerging social technologies, the ones with the greatest freedom to develop and seek novel ideas. I don’t think these will be politicians or their parties. My hopeful forecast is that it will be some non-fixed coalition of private citizens and citizen-groups (to the extent we can resist becoming capitalist or imperial subjects, and to the extent we remain impressionable enough to imagine ourselves as citizens). (Another relevant developmental trend in social technologies here is that it is easier than ever for crowds to reiteratively shape and weave the dimensions and strands of discourse, but I think this observation requires an explanation best left to another day.)

Returning to the call for ideological adaptability, my main contention then would be that this is more rightly regarded as a challenge for the citizenry. If we are all already subjects, then I think to demand or hope for some kind of ‘thought-leadership’ from political authorities, authorities whom we loudly and frequently declare ought to listen to and serve us, is doubly perverse.

I think one of the more immediate implications of ‘taking up the challenge’ would be an urgent reconsideration of how we talk about politics to our fellow citizens. What I see as a particularly pernicious variety of discourse is the rationalization of political difference as failure, e.g. for conservative voters political difference is an intellectual failure, for liberal voters political difference is a moral failure, etc. This is precisely the kind of discourse that is not only entirely sterile, but also costly in terms of resources available for further debate. It represents a failure of both imagination and compassion.

I do not deny that policy can be profoundly influential, but I think a more-or-less civil society cannot neglect to recognize how considerably empowered it already is in the ideological sphere.