Ideology is idiocy, and we have just seen a prime example of that fact. The Roman Catholic Church has just reaffirmed its opposition to the use of condoms to help control the spread of AIDS. When I heard that news report I said to my wife “If I believed in hell I’d hope that they burned in it for that one.” That is an uncharitable response I know. It is, I suppose, and un-Christian one. So be it. The Roman Catholic Church does much good in Africa providing medical care to victims of AIDS. For that God bless them. Their opposition to the use of condoms, however, is simply incomprehensible. It is incomprehensible everywhere, but it is particularly unconscionable in the pandemic stricken continent of Africa. The Catholic hierarchy is a bunch of celibate, mostly white men who cannot possibly understand human sexuality or the cultures of Africa, yet they arrogate to themselves the right to tell people whom they cannot possibly understand how they must behave. That anyone at all listens to them on topics such as this is beyond comprehension. Yes, some macho African men resist using condoms. Yes, condoms aren't always available everywhere. In the news report I heard some Catholics were advocating these facts as reasons for the Church’s opposition. Those things are, of course, no reason for opposition to advocating the use of condoms at all. More importantly, they aren't why the Church opposes the use of condoms in all situations. For decades the Roman Catholic Church has based its prohibition on all types of birth control, including condoms, on the thoroughly specious notion that any act of sexual intercourse is immoral unless it carries with it at least the possibility of procreation. These isolated, privileged, celibate men have for a long time now tried to tell everyone else what is and what isn’t moral in the realm of human sexuality. No reputable psychologist today would say that procreation was the only psychological, or for that matter spiritual, function of human sexuality, yet men who have taken a vow never to engage in any sexual act (not that all of them keep that vow of course) claim to know better. The Catholic prohibition of the use of any measure of birth control in any circumstance has become a classic example of the idiocy of ideology.
An idea, or a set of ideas, becomes an ideology when those who believe it adhere to it even when the application of the idea or set of ideas to real life has destructive consequences for the people rather than the positive consequences the idea’s advocates claim that it has. Examples are not hard to find. In the Soviet Union, with which the readers of this blog know that I have considerable familiarity, the Communist Party clung to the ideology of Marxism-Leninism for decades after it had become obvious to anyone with eyes to see that the ideology was having disastrous consequences for the people of the USSR. Marxism-Leninism was the justification for Stalin’s slaughter of millions of people. It was the ideology behind the forced collectivization of agriculture, which led to mass starvation and greatly reduced the agricultural output of the Soviet Union. It was the ideology behind the planned economy that kept millions of people in poverty and produced a poor standard of living for nearly everyone, creating inadequate numbers of shoddy consumer products and hampering innovation and creativity throughout the economy. It was the ideology behind the regime’s strict control of the people’s intellectual activity, restricting access to useful, accurate information and distorting the view of history (and of everything else) that the regime taught to the people. Yes, by the 1970s at least the leaders may not have believed the ideology themselves (although I argued at the time that they did), but they continued to use it to justify their own privileged lives and their monopoly of power. The Marxism-Leninism of the Soviet Union is perhaps the 20th centuries prime example of the idiocy of ideology.
We have another one right here in the United States. It is the conservative ideology of the Republican Party. The Republican Party continues to insist that government is a bad thing and that free market economics will bring great benefits to all Americans. It simply isn’t true, and it is obvious that it isn’t true. The tax policy that was begun under Reagan in the 1980s and continued by every President since, including so far President Obama, of giving big tax breaks to the wealthy has produced an ever increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of a very few and threatens to destroy the American middle class altogether. The deregulation of the financial sector of the economy, including its repeal of the law that prevented banks from engaging in financial speculation, crashed the economy in 2008, leading to high unemployment and a collapse of the housing market, from neither of which have we yet recovered nor will we for a long time to come. Every supposedly advanced country in the world other than the United States knows that the only health care delivery system that makes any sense and that has the ability to provide health care for all of the people is a government run, single payer system. Republican ideology says that we will all be better off if left to the tender mercies of the private insurance companies, whose only motive is profit and who have shown again and again that they care about nothing else. So the Republicans prevented the passage of any meaningful health care reform, and the Obama Administration now expects us to be satisfied with half measures that are nothing but warmed over Republican ideas from decades past. As a result, millions of Americans still have no health insurance, nor will they any time soon. The insurance mandate in the Obama health care plan nevertheless delivers millions of new victims to the insurance companies and has no potential for creating truly universal health insurance coverage. Yet the Republicans continue to attack even the half measure that was passed because, they say, anything run by the government is bad and anything run by private industry is good; and it just isn’t true. The Republican Party is the party of a failed set of ideas that have become an ideology as the Republicans continue to advocate it despite its undeniably disastrous consequences for the people.
All of these examples—the Catholic Church’s opposition to birth control, the way Marxism-Leninism functioned in the Soviet Union, and the policies that the Republican Party advocates in the US today—shed a bright light on the idiocy of ideology. Many other examples could be given (religious fundamentalism of all stripes is a very good one), but I think the point is made. Much of the harm that people do to each other in this world is a consequence of ideology. It is a consequence of people putting ideas ahead of human welfare. It is a consequence of people sticking to ideas even when the destructive effect of those ideas has become undeniable. Ideology is idiocy. Are we humans ever going to learn that obvious truth?
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