Beyond Ideology: Finding Hope in a Divided World

Under the surface of things, we tend to believe that if we don’t have an ideology, we don’t have an identity. I’ve been unpacking this deeply ingrained collective societal belief because ideology, in my experience, is supremely unsatisfying.

Being “on the right” or being “on the left” both imply, in my world, accepting too many blind spots.

This doesn’t mean I don’t take positions on things or participate in the world. What it means is that I research such positions independent of ideological trends and proceed to check in with my heart, my intuition, and an intelligence that goes beyond the mind. Anyone else out there with me on this?

Of course, this takes more time and effort, and often means I take longer to find my truth–a truth which, let me add, is constantly fluid, potentially changed at any moment by new information or insight.

I won’t candy-coat it: it’s more work and it leaves me standing on the sidelines of life’s primary ideological camps. In conversations, my friends on the right can sense I’m not fully “on their side,” (mostly because I abstain from murmuring things like, “yes, exactly,” or “I totally agree” at key moments), while my friends on the left sense the same thing. This undoubtedly frustrates them, but they tolerate me because I listen. I listen because I am curious, and I am curious because my truth is fluid.

Another way of saying that is I do not have absolute certainty my truth is “the truth”–rather, my take on any given issue will be where I feel most aligned at the moment. That’s a place of true dialogue, because who knows what I can learn from you?

Let me give you two examples of how this works. If you lean toward the right, one of these examples may unsettle you, if not outright annoy you. If you lean toward the left, a similar scenario may present.

I did not get a COVID-19 vaccination. Simply saying that, particularly to a US audience, groups me with the right. Many will assume, simply based on that one fact, that I voted for Trump. Most scientists will detest me. Others will go on to assume I am a socially irresponsible amoral anti-vaxxer (an issue I can take on, if there is reader interest, in a separate article).

At the same time, I consider climate change a real, predominantly man-made phenomenon. That statement, more often than not, throws me into the opposite camp. “Oh, she’s left-wing.”

How can you make sense of your world living like this? you may ask. Your worldview is so fragmented!

No, to be precise, my worldview is not outsourced.

Let’s face it: it is overwhelming, particularly with the amount of information and propaganda-tinged “information” currently available, to make the time to dive in, try to separate the wheat from the chaff, and decide for ourselves with no regard for ideological loyalty in a world that values that.

It’s even harder to ensure that such decisions do not become themselves rigid and transform into their own mini-ideology, but rather remain fluid, constantly questioning themselves.

In short, it’s easier to just pick a side, like a football team, where we all militantly agree, even though maybe secretly there might be some things that feel a little off to us.

Taking back one’s sovereignty is no easy task, a reality that has served ideology well over the centuries. The “loss of sovereignty…is a generalized surrender of the horizon to those experts within whose competence a particular segment of the horizon is thought to lie,” wrote the novelist-philosopher Walker Percy in his 1954 essay The Loss of the Creature.

“No matter what the object or event is, whether it is a star, a swallow, a Kwakiutl, a ‘psychological phenomenon,’ the layman who confronts it does not confront it as a sovereign person, as Crusoe confronts a seashell he finds on the beach,” he says later on in the same essay.

“The highest role he can conceive himself as playing is to be able to recognize the title of the object, to return it to the appropriate expert and have it certified as a genuine find. He does not even permit himself to see the thing — as [the poet] Gerard Hopkins could see a rock or a cloud or a field. If anyone asks him why he doesn’t look, he may reply that he didn’t take that subject in college (or he hasn’t read Faulkner).”

In this day and age, the “appropriate expert” signaled by Percy is, increasingly, Chat GPT.

Our loss of sovereignty is ideology’s gain. If you lean toward the right, you may wonder, given that I was not pushed into climate change by loyalty to an ideological agenda, how indeed I did get there. You may further consider global warming just another natural cycle or a relatively harmless anomaly created by the sun. I get you!

As someone who asks questions, I went to all those places. Here’s what my process looked like, and please share if you think there’s information I’m missing. I am always eager to investigate new information on what I consider to be the most critical issue of our time.

It started in the 1950s. That grabbed my attention: climate change wasn’t even a term then, much less an ideologically-loaded one. In fact, there was so little information about the implications of burning fossil fuels at that time that “[g]reenhouse warming had seemed to nearly all scientists a subject of no practical significance” according to the historian Spencer Weart and the American Institute of Physics.

Even so, the decade was a turning point because leading figures from a wide variety of fields all stumbled across evidence of a rapidly warming planet independently. These scientists weren’t out there “looking for climate change” (which wasn’t even a thing). They were busy addressing other issues.

Take, for example, the Danish paleoclimatologist Willi Dansgaard. While trying to measure the temperature in clouds in 1952, he figured out how to reconstruct past climate using ice cores–never imagining they would figure prominently in discussions of climate change today. In 1957, oceanographer Roger Revelle and geochemist Hans Suess published a paper linking fossil fuels to CO₂ uptake, warning that the oceans couldn’t absorb all human-caused CO₂ (in the context of that now-famous paper, the observation was more of an aside), work followed up two years later by Bert Bolin and Erik Eriksson. In 1958, the atmospheric scientist Charles David Keeling was studying the relationship between carbonate in surface waters, limestone and atmospheric CO₂. To do this, he had to monitor CO₂ levels, discovering (without that being his intention) a constant upward trend known as the Keeling Curve. All these discoveries struck me as evidence of something real actually happening that scientists were belatedly discovering, versus something they were, say, paid to invent for political ends.

Then there are the records, which are important to take into account in any fair-minded look at the issue. The main one is the EPICA Dome C core project, which shows climate history going back some 800,000 years. Ice cores trap carbon. Interestingly, carbon produced by fossil fuels has a slightly different chemical structure, so scientists can easily distinguish between CO₂ concentrations caused by fossil fuels versus natural causes.

The ice cores (Vostok, EPICA) do indeed show many variations in climate over time. They also show something completely new for a human-inhabited planet: higher CO₂ levels than ever recorded in human history, and rising faster. “The fastest natural increase measured in older ice cores is around 15ppm (parts per million) over about 200 years. For comparison, atmospheric CO2 is now rising 15ppm every 6 years,” according to the British Antarctic Survey.

While CO₂ levels have been registered in ice cores at current levels, you have to go back 14 million years to find levels like today’s. Given that homo sapiens evolved 3 million years ago, humans were very much not part of the picture at that time. Otherwise put, current levels have never been registered during our species’ entire history, a rather troubling observation. Nor have they been observed to rise with such rapidity.

Allow me to go beyond science to the oil and gas industry itself. Collectively, they’ve made $3 billion a day in profits over the past 50 years. Where there is money, there is power. One exercises a bare minimum in critical thinking skills to connect the dots here. With this amount of money at stake, they will want to protect their industry, their earnings, their influence, their power. The oil and gas industry is politically aligned with the right in many, if not most, countries. So if you lean right, I’m not here to convince you otherwise, just be aware that you will likely be exposed to more information from them trying to convince you that climate change is a lie. The left has similar problems with other issues.

A good example is the 2023 film Climate: The Movie (The Cold Truth) produced by the Climate Intelligence Foundation, which reportedly has ties to the Dutch far-right. The Foundation’s co-founder created the Delphi consortium, whose work supports major oil companies like Shell, BP, Saudi Aramco, Chevron, and Total. The film heavily features a senior figure from the Institute of Economic Affairs, a British think tank that had received donations from the oil giant BP for more than 50 consecutive years, plus a £21,000 grant from ExxonMobil in 2005.

Things are not always what they appear. Whenever I weigh a politically contentious issue, I pay close attention to where the money is and how it is being threatened, because that will produce a powerful discourse of its own. “A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep,” wrote Saul Bellow in To Jerusalem and Back (1976).

Then there are the animals. Or rather, lack thereof. If nothing out of the ordinary was happening, I don’t think they’d be departing en masse – which, in fact, they are. Global wildlife populations have fallen by 73% in just 50 years. Wild mammals now account for just four percent of total mammal biomass. Biodiversity loss ranges between an estimated 100-10,000 times higher than the natural background extinction rate. Something’s going on.

There’s also the reality that the implications of climate change take us into the unknown, and the unknown scares us. Even taking out all the politics, fear will incline us toward denial.

Finally, there is my own personal feeling and connection with the Earth, the seat of my own intuitive knowledge personal to me, which I explore in the song I just released called Atomic Love.

This personal, intuitive, iterative process is largely neglected in the global conversation. If climate change wasn’t ideological, the first thing many of us would do is look inward to our own sense of the Earth. Today, the issue is so politically loaded that doing so is a big ask: there’s too much ideological interference.

Beyond Ideology

Whatever your thoughts on climate change, the bigger question is: do we have the courage to find our own truth in an age of collective ideology? Doing so is a radical act. Can we honor it, even if that truth isn’t popular with our friends or doesn’t “fit in” with our brand of ideological loyalty?

In doing so, we reclaim our sovereignty. What would a society look like in which its members did not confuse their current alignment with “absolute truth” and were, on the contrary, open to dialogue, to listening, to learning?

At this point, the statement “the world is in crisis” needs no explanation. To find solutions to our manifold crises, we need dialogue. Currently, we have (at best) debate and (at worst and more often) the silent treatment amid the emergence of two or more parallel realities. To establish dialogue, we need to step beyond ideology and its constructs. To step beyond ideology takes courage. To find courage, we look to love.

"Be not dishearten'd - Affection shall solve the problems of Freedom yet; Those who love each other shall become invincible.” — Walt Whitman, Leaves Of Grass, 1855.