MEDIA RELEASE: Ideology without being an ideologue

Speech delivered by Trisha Jha at the Australian and New Zealand Students for Liberty Conference on 4 July

When I was at uni, I took a compulsory class on Australian foreign policy. In the final tutorial for the semester, we were asked to tell the rest of the class one thing we had learned during the course. Everyone, save one or two people, said the same thing: what they’d learned from a whole semester of lectures and tutorials was to ‘question everything’.

On its own, this is sound advice. We should be sceptical of information that is presented to us as true, especially when it is couched in emotive terms. We should question everything.

But in the context of the class, it was mostly nonsense. The class hadn’t been about ‘questioning everything’ at all. It had just been about questioning a historical narrative favoured by one side of politics to the end of replacing that narrative with one favoured by a different side of politics.

As uni students – or former uni students – I’m sure you’ve experienced something similar.

In that Australian foreign policy class, it was quite clear that the material was designed to propagate a particular viewpoint at the expense of analysing the various perspectives at hand.

It also meant that students who are ostensibly at university to learn how to think critically weren’t actually being taught how to do that. What passes for critical thinking is replacing one kind of dogma with another.

This plays a role in political tribalism at universities, and that’s obviously a bad thing. Tribalism means that the content delivered at universities can be blinkered, and their function is not being fulfilled adequately. But more importantly, it also means that the field of academic inquiry is drawn narrow, and serves to impede the quality of public discourse.

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This brings me to the topic I’d like to discuss with you today: how to have ideology without being an ideologue.

Situations like the one I just described can get right-of-centre students riled up. And many take that to mean that that means they should fight harder against ‘the left’.

But I don’t want to feed a sense of victimhood or lend credence to the notion that anyone to the right of Stalin is a persecuted minority on a university campus. That just leads to more of the same problem: tribalism and polarisation.

Personally, I’m a lover, not a fighter, and I’d prefer to reach out in good faith rather than shut down discussions before they even occur. If the kind of tribalism and pathetic narrow-mindedness I describe here exists on the left, libertarians can also be guilty of it.

In some ways, we might be more prone to it than others. Many political ideologies that people claim to adhere to – their basis in history notwithstanding – are made up of a grab-bag of various moral positions and policy ideas. Libertarianism, on the other hand, has very clear notions of what the ideal government does and doesn’t do, inspired by the belief that the use of force to achieve a particular end is immoral in a way that voluntary actions and interactions are not.

It’s what libertarian ideology is all about, and I personally think it’s pretty great.

Having an ideology means that you’ve got a consistent lens to apply to whatever confronts you. It equips you with an analytical tool that you can use to deconstruct phenomena.

That clarity can come at a price, which is something I’ll get to in a moment.

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But first I want to put to bed this idea that there’s somehow such a thing as not having an ideology. It’s a common criticism of the left of the Abbott government – that it’s ‘ideological’. This seems strange to us because it doesn’t seem like there’s been much ideology about the Abbott Government at all. Unless blundering around with no focus trying to be all things to all people and bowing down to the national security industry counts as an ideology.

Ideology is also often contrasted directly with democracy. Apparently the problem with our parliament is that people are too ‘ideological’ and if they would just put ideology and partisanship aside and come together to tackle the ‘real issues’, then our country would be better off.

This simplistic model of how democracy ought to work is belied by the fact that ideology is everywhere. Everyone has one. One of the first things you learn in a first-year politics class is the notion of an ‘essentially-contested’ concept: something like power, or freedom, or liberty, or ‘right’. These basic concepts underpin all political worldviews and they are central to the business of governing. So how is it possible that you can somehow throw a bunch of people and perspectives, who can’t even agree on what these words mean, into a process called ‘negotiation’ and that something coherent would emerge from it?

Ideology doesn’t just tell you what to do when faced with a problem. It tells you which problems are problems in the first place. The current debate about superannuation tax concessions is a perfect example of this. The fact that there are tax breaks associated with mandatory super concessions means, for some people, that there’s a big pot of money that the government could collect, but isn’t. Is this a problem? I think it’s arguable. But it’s surprising how many people accept as a given that the status quo – where people are paying less tax than if they were forced to pay more tax on their super – is a problem.

Another example is one that I experienced personally. A radio producer invited me to participate in a panel discussion on inequality, inspired by a recent report from the Australian Council of Social Service. As it’s not something I know a great deal about, I asked for more information about what they wanted to discuss. In response, I received a few discussion points which essentially revolved around “what should the government do about inequality?” Not one even seemed to canvass the possibility that inequality as it was discussed in the report might not be a problem, to say nothing of the solutions that ACOSS proposed to mitigate it (which were, unsurprisingly, tax increases).

I’m sure that people who identify these issues as Problems, with a capital P, don’t think they’re being ideological in doing so. But that’s the other part of being an ideologue – sometimes you forget that your priors are not the same as everyone else’s.

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There’s a fine line between having an ideology and being an ideologue. Where ideology is a firm set of principles, being an ideologue means being unable to see beyond those principles, even if it means it’s difficult to understand other perspectives. It also means that it’s harder to think in a constructive way about issues that aren’t informed by those principles. Given libertarianism is a philosophy about the ideal role of government, that leaves a lot outside of scope for a libertarian ideologue.

Being an ideologue is dangerous. Not because it colours how we see the world – that’s impossible to avoid. It’s dangerous because it means not looking fully at the information that has been presented to you. It’s having a pre-prepared explanation for everything the world confronts us with, regardless of whether that means having an accurate understanding of the way things are.

In my capacity as a policy analyst, I come across things that challenge my preconceptions all the time. As a classical liberal, I could very well just ignore what was inconvenient and only dwell in an environment where I surround myself with things that confirm my biases. But if I want to be a good researcher, I can’t do that. I have to engage with everything, even if that means the conclusion I draw is that the evidence is mixed, or the evidence says nothing one way or the other.

Research and similar work means nothing if you’re not trying to add to the scope of human knowledge. I don’t think you can do that, at least not very well, if you’re an ideologue. Ideology guides you. If someone pretends they’re not influenced by ideology you can tell them to go jump in a lake, because it’s not true.

But being an ideologue means you already have all the answers, and you’re not looking particularly hard for the truth. Not only does that have the capacity to dull the best human faculties, it’s also not very true to liberalism.

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John Stuart Mill was the first thinker to turn me towards liberalism rather than the weird mishmash of bleeding heart progressive and champagne socialist that I was before that. In his seminal essay On Liberty, which you should all read if you haven’t yet, he writes about silencing expression and says “if [an] opinion is right, [people] are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.”

I no longer believe that an essential justificatory element of free speech is whether it enables us to find truth, though that undoubtedly is a happy byproduct. What I find more interesting here is the notion that we have to engage with error, or at least things we perceive as erroneous, for our truths to be better.

This was the source of frustration for me in many classes at university. How could we build good, strong arguments and come to solid conclusions without actually engaging meaningfully with things we were taught were erroneous?

By the same token, how can libertarians be good and effective advocates for liberty without engaging with things they think are wrong? Or by not engaging critically with things they are told are right, but accept without any independent verification?

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Recently on Twitter I encountered who had a string of descriptors in his profile, of which one was ‘firm believer in Keynesian economics’. I showed this to someone because I thought his profile as a whole was not really the type of person who saw eye-to-eye with me, and my friend then asked me whether that meant I had a problem with Keynesian economics. The problem, of course, is not that this Twitter person is a Keynesian, though Keynes would probably disagree with that moniker. It’s the fact that he’s such a ‘firm believer’ that he put it in his profile. He nailed the Keynesian colours to his mast because it was a tribal thing, not because it was something he’d necessarily studied or verified independently.

I’ve noticed the same with some libertarians who call themselves adherents of ‘Austrian economics’, in spite of never having trained as such or studying it. I don’t associate myself with a particular school of economic thought, because I’ve never studied economics and I don’t want to uncritically accept something I don’t fully understand.

But I think this sort of thing is more of a problem because it stems from a broader tendency to view politics, even libertarian politics, as a tribe that you join rather than something that enriches your understanding of the world and enhances your capacity to effect change.

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There are ways to have ideology without being an ideologue.

Reading widely is key to coming up against ideas you might disagree with, which is in turn vital for both understanding what you’re up against, and making sure you’re using the best arguments you possibly can.

It’s also necessary to remember the principle of charity: engage with the strongest parts of the arguments you encounter, not the weaker ones. And especially not straw men. We all hate it when people write about libertarianism despite not knowing anything about it. It’s advisable to try and keep an open mind as much as possible.

Libertarians are generally very clear about what assumptions underpin their beliefs, and that’s a good thing. We’re aware of our priors. But it’s also important to understand others’ priors. It’s especially important to understand the assumptions that others make. Ideally you could understand your opponents’ perspectives so well that you could replicate the arguments used to justify these positions, and that someone who holds those views would be unable to tell that you disagree. This is referred to as an ‘ideological Turing test’, of which Tim Andrews, head of the Australian Taxpayers’ Alliance and general don of the freedom movement is a great advocate.

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To be clear, I am not exhorting you to abandon your principles. Principles, and consistent ones at that, are decidedly in the minority in today’s political culture.

It is in no way antithetical to those principles to be more sceptical and more critical. At the most basic level, it can only enhance your ability to advocate effectively for what you believe in.

But in a way, I think you are being more true to libertarian principles. I don’t think it’s an accident that the Enlightenment principles which were shaped by scientific methods of inquiry also in turn underpin libertarianism’s intellectual forebear, classical liberalism. The two are inseparable, and you aren’t somehow a better libertarian for dismissing someone as a ‘statist’ and ignoring what they have to say. In fact, if anything it makes you a worse one.

For my own part, I can honestly say that the most interesting and memorable contributions to my intellectual development come from encountering people and concepts with which I did not previously see eye to eye with at all. In some ways my thinking has shifted, but where it hasn’t, I have become a much more able defender of what I believe in.

It’s also not antithetical to libertarianism to use gather and use evidence to prosecute your arguments. On a basic level, this is obvious from seeing the proliferation of think-tanks and similar organisations that are driven by converting dense academic material into something that can be communicated and understood by people, as well as being underpinned by a sense of principle.

And, being outside the formal political process, think-tankers don’t fall into the public choice problems we see in politics and the civil service: our jobs, budgets and prestige do not depend on continuing a government program even if it doesn’t work.

In my experience, the evidence about big, ambitious social programs is almost always on the side of libertarian perspectives about government. It’s very rare to find a government program that successfully tackles a policy problem at a cost which is smaller than the benefits of solving that problem. Government programs are usually embedded with misspent funds, over-promising, under-delivering, cost blowouts, and shoddy evaluation processes.

Evaluations, or even the establishment clear metrics upon which an evaluation can be based, is poorly done by government. When I was doing my research on childcare, I discovered that 5 years after a policy began to be developed, in 2014 there were still no key performance indicators relating to costs and benefits that the Productivity Commission’s annual Report on Government Services could use to, you know, report on government services.

That is staggering when the childcare sector currently consumes $7 billion of taxpayers’ money and is slated to consume $10 billion by the time the Abbott Government’s ill-considered ‘childcare package’ is fully implemented.

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This brings me to another reason why I think libertarian principles are important. I think it genuinely enhances the public policy process to have more people who are sceptical of government and can actually recognise what – not just how much – things cost.

You guys understand the concept of ‘taxpayers’ money’. You know that not taxing somebody isn’t morally the same as taking money away from someone when that money first had to be taken from someone else. You can see that when there’s a new government advertising campaign, or some new pork-barrelling, that that money has to come from people’s pockets – something that a lot of people usually don’t see.

And there are costs to that beyond the dollar figure. Money that we take from people in taxes is money they can’t use to save for a house. To spend on building a business. To travel and see the world. To support themselves while they study that thing they’ve always wanted to study. To give their kids the chance to learn a new skill. For them to learn a new skill or discover a new talent.

Too many people don’t see that.

They’d prefer to think that the money we spend on things grows on a tree or else it just comes from the pockets of Gina and Twiggy. This is, of course, aided and abetted by the political class.

You know that it doesn’t. And that knowledge can be used to add a moral dimension to whatever example of government failure it is you’re discussing.

This is ideology, sure. But it’s ideology that’s grounded in the ability to think critically, the ability to construct good arguments and use evidence. It’s ideology that’s being used to discover and reiterate truths rather than accept that we already have all the answers.

Currently, we live in a world where the answer is government. Sometimes it’s a bit more complicated than that – like, sometimes it’s ‘government, because market failure’. But in the end it’s the same.

If we want to change that, we have to start loving, not just fighting.