In this excellent survey of the major ideological alternatives in the West, Jason Blakely, a professor of political science at Pepperdine University, helpfully illuminates the complexity of a landscape that is too often reduced to a simple left-right duality or the 2x2 grid of the Internet’s Political Compass Test. Most of his book is devoted to historical sketches of the principal positions, illustrated by well-selected references to the writings of their leading advocates. The historical chapters are more summary than new research, yet for a thoughtful layperson who wants a rigorous but digestible account of contemporary Western cultural politics, this book is indeed, as a back-cover blurb declares, an “intellectual feast.”
Blakely, however, wants to do more than teach a history lesson. In an age of unreasoning political animus, Lost In Ideology models the search for reasons, the interpretive excavation of the fundamental beliefs about the world that underlie practical politics. Blakely’s faith in reasons should not be confused with strict rationalism; in fact, he thinks ideologies that claim to embody a pure objective reason have already discredited themselves. But his method resists the assumption, common among ideologues, that some people act out of pure malice or pure stupidity. All the major ideologies, he shows, are motivated by comprehensive and more or less internally coherent visions of the world and the human good.
This is not to say that popular ideologies never rely on false claims or contain internal contradictions, or that they all rest on equally noble premises. Blakely’s charity has its limits, as it should. However, he does labor to show, through careful reconstruction, that ideologies are grounded in understandable if not always laudable human motives. Even his chapter on fascism has room for a few lines considering the lofty experiences some people seek in far-right politics.
The master metaphor of Lost in Ideology is Jorge Luis Borges’s giant map from the well-known one-paragraph short story, “On Rigor in Science.” Blakely compares ideologies to maps that help us interpret the impossible complexity of the world around us. In Borges’s story, cartographers in search of perfect precision make a map that is as large as the empire it represents. Once it becomes clear that the map is useless, the empire abandons cartography altogether.
The story has at least two possible morals. First, a map buys its practical usefulness at the cost of inexactitude. We need imprecise models of the world to navigate the world. The point is not to make our models perfect, but to remember that they are models and be willing to update them when they cease to serve us. If ideologies are like maps, then the lesson for Blakely’s readers is that we cannot do without ideology: When we try to expand our model of the world to describe everything there is, we lose our ability to navigate. The pure, direct apprehension of being is the domain of mystics, who, whatever their virtues, seldom contribute much to political life.
Second, when a model attains a certain level of nuance, it risks being confused with reality. Although this is the lesson from Borges that Blakely stresses, it is not actually clear that Borges intended it; as the title of his story suggests, he seems to have imagined an exact but unusable map rather than an inexact and deceptive one. Blakely may be drawing on the French philosopher and scholar of postmodernism Jean Baudrillard’s creative reinterpretation of Borges’s map as a figure of the hyper-real, the simulacrum that supplants what it represents. In any case, the lesson is clear: No matter how comprehensive an ideological map may seem, we must be prepared to let the territory burst through. Maps should help us move through the confusion and complexity of the world, not lure us into a realm of pure philosophical coherence that has come apart from reality.
Accordingly, Blakely proposes that we can evaluate an ideology in part on whether it renounces the claim to being an immortal science and instead “self-narrates” as a system of interpretation. Ideologies that regard themselves as nothing more than straightforward descriptions of empirical reality are automatically “negated” and “invalidated.” This call for epistemic humility fits with Blakely’s project: Ideologues who understand that they are consulting human-made maps will be more open to alternative interpretations when their maps conflict with reality.
Blakely is in familiar territory with this style of criticism. In his first book, We Built Reality: How Social Science Infiltrated Culture, Politics, and Power (2020), he attacked the claims of social science to provide neutral descriptions of the world. Rather, he argued, social-scientific theories are irreducibly interpretive, and not only describe but influence social processes. The same vital project animates Lost in Ideology. Blakely aims to reveal models and maps of the world for what they are, not to dismantle them, but to provide a clearer understanding of their purposes.
Yet there is something about the implicit analogy between social science and ideology that does not quite come off. The characteristic error in social science’s account of itself is the blithe assumption that its interpretive frameworks are value-neutral and directly responsive to the empirical facts as given. As Blakely points out, a few ideologies, or common expressions of certain ideologies, make the same mistake. Some Marxists and libertarians claim that their theories follow logically from the best economic science. Some white supremacists claim that they are only putting into practice what race science reveals to be true, with no interpretation required.
Still, most ideologues—including, I would guess, even most Marxists, libertarians, and white supremacists—fall somewhere between the two extremes of unreflective scientism and the deeply self-aware interpretivism that Blakely commends. And no wonder, since each of those extremes has fatal flaws as a political disposition. The hard-core scientific ideologue risks having the science in question exposed as nonsense or at least nonscience, as has happened to Marxists, libertarians, and white supremacists alike. The hard-core interpretivist, meanwhile, risks losing the vigor and confidence required to fight hard for an idea in the public square. Interpretive self-narration may be more intellectually honest than ideological rigor, but the harsh evolutionary logic of competitive partisan politics seems to select for the latter over the former.
Rather than admit that their views are the products of creative interpretations of the world, most ideologues will, explicitly or implicitly, invoke a category that is missing from Blakely’s analysis: moral facts. Even if claims about right and wrong cannot be decisively verified or falsified through appeals to experience, they may—some would say they must—still be either true or false. Ideologues typically have strong, definite beliefs about certain matters of moral fact. Often they think that moral facts have been somehow revealed to them, through a holy book, intuition, a particular tradition, or the common sense of a community. They even claim that others are at fault for failing to apprehend the same truths about value. But ideologues concede that moral facts cannot be known scientifically. They simply deny that this diminishes the truth-value of such facts.
I am sure that none of this is news to Blakely, but it means that a Borgesian critique does not work as well for ideology as it might for social science. Imagine instead a world full of invisible hazards that inflict impalpable but somehow very grave harms, a place like the Zone in Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker. These invisible objects are marked on maps, but different maps locate them in different places. Because the harms inflicted by the hazards are impalpable, no one can verify which map gives the best account of the territory. (Some people use a map that does not show any of these objects at all, but it is no more based on verifiable fact than the others, and in fact the near-universal belief in the existence of invisible dangers seems to many like evidence that the denuded map is wrong.) With respect to ideology, this is the world we live in: The map is not merely an interpretive tool for making sense of a wholly shared reality but a guide to a territory whose basic layout cannot now or ever be agreed on by everyone.
To use the map is to submit to its authority, and you cannot use two maps at once. Or rather, you can carry around a backpack full of maps, as many people do, but when you reach a crossroads, you will have to choose which one to believe. In a world in which the map contains information about the territory that is not wholly and finally discernible from the territory itself, it is hard to see any alternative to getting “lost in ideology” in Blakely’s sense. He is certainly correct that ideologies sometimes encode interpretive social-scientific theories into their systems as if they were matters of fact. Carl Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction, which Blakely critiques in his chapter on fascism, is a good example of an interpretation that becomes real by being believed in. As such, it is not unfalsifiable: If Blakely is right, we can falsify it by refusing to live by it. However, the invisible hazards persist, and for the true believer they cannot be classified simply as products of contingent interpretation.
All we can do is choose a map by the best imperfect criteria available to us and be as charitable as we can to those who have chosen different maps, especially when we realize that we ourselves might have obeyed the same reasons they chose if the circumstances of our lives had been a little different. If Blakely cannot save us from getting lost in ideology, his interpretive approach does teach this kind of charity. In a time of proliferating maps and increasing brutality in political life, it is an essential virtue that he is urging and teaching us to cultivate.