We all lament the ideological biases we see in governments and people. Yet ideology is the inescapable perspective through which we interpret the world. But not all perspectives are equal, and the more you can occupy and test out, the better, writes Alexis Papazoglou.

“The government’s actions are guided by ideology” is often said in a tone indicating this is an objection. The implicit meaning being “ideology is a bad guide”, so that once ideology is detected as informing a government’s actions, that’s seen as a knockdown argument. The government is acting ideologically, therefore wrongly.  This type of complaint became particularly fashionable since the start of the Covid-pandemic. The reassurances of governments around the world that they were “following the science” were met with the rebuttal that it was in fact political ideology that they were led by. Baffled by its decision to end all legal restrictions to do with Covid-19 in England, some are again accusing the U.K. government of being ideological, following the libertarian instincts of prime minister Boris Johnson, while disregarding the science.

This diagnosis is to a large extent accurate – the way governments around the world have dealt with the pandemic has indeed been ideological, that is, guided by each ruling party’s perspective on the world: its values, beliefs and biases. This was also true of how individuals reacted to the pandemic. In the United States, Republicans were less likely to wear facemasks and practice social distancing than Democrats were. The problem is, this diagnosis would only count as an objection if an alternative was possible. But that’s not the case. There is no such thing as a non-ideological view onto the world, a way to simply “follow the science” or be guided by “just the facts”. Instead of simply pointing out cases where governments or people are being driven by ideology, thinking our work as critics is done, we should be focusing on what function ideology plays in each case, and be weary of the limits of our own.  

For Nietzsche our perspective on the world is far from universal, instead each human being sees the world in ways shaped by their biography, psychology, values, beliefs and biases.

The views from somewhere

The realisation that western philosophy was plagued by the idea that Knowledge and Truth were connected to the idea of God and the way the world is from his perspective is usually attributed to Nietzsche. What Nietzsche thought followed from the fact that European culture had by the 19^th century killed God continues to be a matter of dispute.  But what Nietzsche certainly did think was that we had to reconcile ourselves with the fact that there could only ever be a perspectival view on the world.  By drawing an analogy with sight – we can only ever see things from a particular perspective, our position in space and time relative to the object in question – Nietzsche wanted us to realise that this was the case with everything: “There is only a perspectival seeing, a perspectival knowing”. “The view from nowhere” a phrase coined more than a century later by Thomas Nagel, is not available.