The Blinders of Ideology
The path forward is for us to abandon the outdated dichotomies through which we formerly interpreted politics and the world.
BY REVEREND JOHN F. NAUGLE
View original article at Brownstone.org.
Recently I had the opportunity to get away from my Lenten responsibilities for just a few days to enjoy a Spring Training baseball game and some Florida sun. Perhaps as the ultimate proof of my contrarian disposition, I chose to return home to Pittsburgh not by plane, but rather by taking Amtrak’s Floridian for the 31-hour journey from Tampa Union Station to Pittsburgh Union Station for the mere cost of $83 for a ticket in coach.
I arrived at Tampa Union Station several hours early for train 40’s 4:45 p.m. scheduled departure, as my hotel had an 11 a.m. checkout time. To facilitate exploring the area around the station, I took advantage of Amtrak’s service of complimentary checked baggage to free myself of my suitcase.
After hours split between exploring Ybor City and enjoying a few libations at a nearby Irish bar, it was time for the train’s arrival from Miami. I boarded, waited for my ticket to be scanned, and then proceeded to inquire if there was space for me at dinner service in the dining car. I agreed to the 6:30 p.m. reservation time and the price and began looking forward to enjoying a steak dinner. It did not disappoint.
As I sat there at dinner, however, two things occurred to me.
First, this meal was of infinitely higher quality than anything I was able to find in Pittsburgh’s airport when I was stranded there for hours hoping to fly to Tampa days earlier.
Second, the whole experience stood in stark contrast to the way air carriers treat their customers in general, especially with Southwest Airlines just days earlier choosing to set their entire brand identity on fire by deciding to nickel and dime their customers to satisfy the demands of a minority shareholder.
In fact, the whole of air travel from beginning to end seems to have the explicit purpose of being as dehumanizing as possible. You must pick your flight and time weeks earlier, and changes to your itinerary are either impossible or punished severely.
Bringing your needed belongings with you is no longer included in the price of the ticket; checked baggage requires an additional fee, on some carriers you may even need to pay for a carry-on, and it is illegal to bring obviously necessary things with you in a carry-on due to TSA’s security theater. (For example, sacramental wine must be checked any time I bring my Mass kit.)
You shouldn’t expect food even on a long domestic flight, and in fact the airport may not provide what could be considered a respectable meal.
Then, of course, there is the matter of getting through security.
In effect, a normal ticket entitles you to nothing more than transport in a cramped seat with an empty stomach and none of your belongings. Only those who can afford a higher class of travel can maintain a modicum of their humanity. None of this was true years prior when the airlines still modeled their service after the amenities of older means of transportation such as trains.
Here I was on an archaic and inefficient way home, but I felt more human than at any point in my years of traveling by air. Obviously, the free market and technological advancement have provided us with the seemingly miraculous ability to travel great distances in almost no time at all, but isn’t it terribly unwise not to acknowledge the dehumanizing effects as well?
The Market’s Efficiency, a Two-Edged Sword
I’d like to suggest that the ideological divide that has existed in our politics is fueled, at least in part, by the refusal to recognize that the market has great power to do things efficiently, but that this efficiency can accomplish both great good and great evil, even simultaneously.
As one trained in Economics in college, I am very aware that attempts to bypass market forces completely will be grossly inefficient at best or even accomplish precisely the opposite of what one is trying to accomplish at worst. The invisible hand is powerful indeed, and only a fool would doubt this. (Such fools often run for office.)
That said, many years ago, I confronted the absurd extreme of near-religious faith in the market when reviewing an insane book for the Journal of Markets and Moralitythat posited efficient societal levels of adultery and cannibalism.
To update the thesis of this book, I suppose we can also speak of the market’s efficient delivery of things like fentanyl, human trafficking, and pharmaceuticals that are neither safe nor effective, invasions of our privacy, and means of censorship.
In the dark years of the Industrial Revolution, the market also very efficiently defrauded laborers of their wages (a sin which cries to Heaven for vengeance) as people were desperately poor enough to work for almost nothing while going into debt purchasing overpriced necessities from the “company store.”
The realist applauds the market for its efficiency while warning that not all that is done efficiently need be for the good. A maxim that I’ve developed recently captures this point: The market does all things efficiently, including dehumanization. I find that the primary ideological divide we see is whether one wishes to pretend the first part is untrue or the second.
Sometimes the examples of this dehumanization are comical in retrospect. When microwaves were invented, people who were wealthy enough to own them replaced their delicious and nutritious meals with microwave dinners, efficiently dehumanizing themselves in service of a status symbol and a few minutes saved.
Less comical are the numerous examples of alleged libertarians who celebrated the efficiency with which the market facilitated lockdowns, mask mandates, and forced experimental gene therapy shots.
On the other side of the ideological aisle, there are those who are deeply distrustful of the market and seek to give credit only to government when things go the way they think things should go. Consider one example of this argument:
So yes, the science is amazing. And yes, Big (and small) Pharma have delivered vaccines incredibly quickly. But a triumph for the free market? Not quite. Rather, it points to the importance of government policy in setting the right framework for innovation incentives, to then harness the energy and creativity of the market.
While the authors here want to give the government credit for vaccine development, it points to a wider pattern of the government using and abusing market forces to achieve its dehumanizing goals. Much of the CARES Act was corporate bribery to get them to go along with lockdowns. Enforcement of mask and shot mandates was largely left up to private businesses to enforce. Even censorship was privatized, with companies like Facebook and Twitter doing the dirty work so as to create a level of deniability for the regime.
The frightening fact is that the government (which does all things inefficiently) accomplished its purposes more efficiently by learning how to control and manipulate market forces. The uniparty therefore was able to short-circuit everybody’s ideological priors; those who love government were able to celebrate the state’s accomplishments and those who love the market were able to celebrate its efficiency.
Meanwhile, the “accomplishments” being celebrated were: population-wide house arrest, mandates of medical interventions, and censorship of anything true. Inefficient government used the efficient marketplace to dehumanize its citizens.
Brownstone: A Post-Ideological Think Tank
I like periodically taking the train especially because its inefficiency allows me to catch up on the reading which I otherwise find myself too distracted to focus on. On this trip, I had the opportunity to get to a book which had been waiting on my shelf for almost two years now, Thomas Harrington’s The Treason of the Experts: Covid and the Credentialed Class.
I thoroughly enjoyed the book, but I had the same thought which has occurred to me so many times with respect to several of the wonderful people I’ve met at Brownstone events; namely, that there would be no way we would have been allies prior to 2020, as I was generally not in the habit of making myself welcome in particularly progressive circles.
With the beginning of Covid hysteria, so many of us experienced disillusionment with our former ideological tribes. As I reflected back in 2022:
Committed libertarians became radical authoritarians. Those who would proclaim that health care should be free to everyone now insisted it should be denied to those who don’t comply. Those who once claimed government was too large now eagerly caused it to grow.
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We all know the very real pain of betrayal by those who shared our ideological priors. Indeed, we watched as dark forces used precisely these ideological priors to manipulate our former friends to violate them.
Libertarians began equating breathing normally with physical violence, progressives became convinced that their utopian urges could be advanced by Big Pharma, and conservatives took a break from the War on Terror to begin a war with cold and flu season.
Old dichotomies like market versus government are not relevant anymore in a world where the two have aligned themselves so effectively for the cause of dehumanization.
Toby Rogers, another Brownstone Fellow from a very different ideological background than me, recently painted this picture starkly:
What happens if corporations and the state merge (what we’ve historically called fascism but the faint of heart call corporatism) and put their profit interests ahead of the well-being of individuals, families, and society? At that point, we are participating in our own demise if we play by the rules (unwritten or otherwise) of the system.
Indeed that’s what happened over the last five years. Corporations and the state merged. They ran a sophisticated global operation to increase their power, wealth, and control.
It is as if the forces of darkness set out to create precisely the opposite of what St. John Paul II called for in his encyclical Centesimus Annus:
Returning now to the initial question: can it perhaps be said that, after the failure of Communism, capitalism is the victorious social system, and that capitalism should be the goal of the countries now making efforts to rebuild their economy and society? Is this the model which ought to be proposed to the countries of the Third World which are searching for the path to true economic and civil progress?
The answer is obviously complex. If by “capitalism” is meant an economic system which recognizes the fundamental and positive role of business, the market, private property and the resulting responsibility for the means of production, as well as free human creativity in the economic sector, then the answer is certainly in the affirmative, even though it would perhaps be more appropriate to speak of a “business economy,” “market economy,” or simply “free economy.” But if by “capitalism” is meant a system in which freedom in the economic sector is not circumscribed within a strong juridical framework which places it at the service of human freedom in its totality, and which sees it as a particular aspect of that freedom, the core of which is ethical and religious, then the reply is certainly negative. (42)
I’d like to suggest that the path forward is for us to abandon the outdated dichotomies through which we formerly interpreted politics and the world and instead turn our attention to how to make the world more and more human and less and less inhuman. The forces that hate humanity (which we Christians recognize as demonic) wanted us isolated, forbidden to gather, dine, and celebrate, unable to sing or to be sung to, disallowed to worship, and taught to see others as filthy disease bearers precisely because they wanted us dehumanized.
Resisting the dehumanization that seeks to destroy human freedom is paramount, regardless of whether these dark forces operate in governmental halls or corporate boardrooms, especially now that we know that they are present in both. Let us leave behind any ideological blinders which prevent us from seeing both clearly.
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