270 CHAPTER 13
suggests that the greater a person’s familiarity with, and knowledge of, a particular issue, the harder it is for them to approach the issue in an open-minded and self-critical manner. This implies that there is always a trade-off in intellectual activity between expertise and flexibility. Distorting ‘truth’ A second problem with political ideologies is that they have, seemingly unavoidably, an unreliable relationship with truth. Indeed, to suggest that ideologies can be deemed to be either true or false is to miss the vital point that they embody values, dreams and aspirations that are, by their very nature, not susceptible to scientific analysis. No one can ‘prove’ that one theory of justice is preferable to any other, any more than rival conceptions of human nature can be tested by surgical intervention to demonstrate once and for all that human beings possess rights, are entitled to freedom, or are naturally selfish or naturally sociable. Ideologies are embraced less because they stand up to scrutiny and logical analysis, and more because they help individuals, groups and societies to deal with the world in which they live. As Andrew Vincent (2009) put it, ‘We examine ideology as fellow travellers, not as neutral observers’. Nevertheless, ideologies undoubtedly embody a claim to uncover truth; in this sense, they can be seen, in Michel Foucault’s (1991) words, as ‘regimes of truth’. As ‘regimes of truth’, ideologies are always linked to power. In a world of competing truths, values and theories, ideologies seek to prioritize certain values over others, and to invest legitimacy in particular theories or sets of meanings. However, this is never done on the basis of a standard of truth that has an objective character. Although all ideologies may have an unreliable relationship with truth, 'truth decay' has become more prominent due to the rise of populism, particularly through its emphasis on conspiracy theories. Pitting ‘us’ against ‘them’ Although political ideologies build within people a sense of collective belonging, this is often accomplished through a deepening of conflict and division. In some cases, the link within an ideology between conflict and the collective is stark and unmistakable. Marxism, for instance, embraces the doctrine of class war, while fascists extol the virtues of the national community while also believing in a conception of life as ‘unending struggle’. Nevertheless, the association between conflict and the collective may have a wider application, and perhaps taints all ideological traditions. Theorists in the field of social psychology have argued that there is a basic tendency for people to divide the world into an in-group (‘us’), consisting, in this case, of those who support one’s own ideological beliefs, and an out-group (‘them’), consisting of those who support rival political ideologies. In a process of negative integration, our sense of ‘us’ is strengthened by the
existence of ‘them’ – sometimes seen as the ‘other’ – who we come to distrust, fear or even hate. It is, nevertheless, widely argued that the tendency for the ideological landscape to be structured according to the ‘us/them’ divide has become more prominent since the 1990s, as issues related to identity, and thus who we are , displace more conventional socio-economic issues. This is evident in the growing prevalence of ‘culture wars’ (see p. 179).
Cognitive entrenchment theory: The theory that people’s beliefs become more rigid the greater the degree to which they are immersed in their domain of expertise.
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