Ideology: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) by Michael Freeden

enough interpretative leeway to find an area of logical consistency among them. The ideology may insert a policy of taxing polluters and utilizing those funds for environmental research, arguing that zero pollution is always impossible. Or it may introduce a time-scale, maintaining that other ideological principles – gradualism, respect for current property rights – intervene and require protection as well. Or it may produce empirical evidence to the effect that the pollution created by national industries contributes quite insignificantly to global warming. The opportunities are legion, and not all of them are cynical manipulations of information sent out to the public.
    In effect, vagueness and elusiveness are frequently necessary to, and functional in, the political arena. Politics consists not only of decision-making, which demands decontestation, but also of the mobilization of support. The latter requires the construction ofconsensus, or at least the corralling of members of a society into overlapping positions in order to optimize backing for a political stance. In those situations, consumers of political language must be offered sentences that are sufficiently open in their meaning for different individuals and groups to read into them their own preferences and to gloss over distinctions. When a politician announces that he wishes to encourage the values of community, the moving of that concept to the centre of the ideological room will please many ideological consumers. It will please socialists, for whom the notion of community is associated with social solidarity and the importance of group activity. It will please conservatives, for whom the notion of community is associated with the collective wisdom of accumulative generations and the settled ways of existing concrete small communities. It will even please some environmentalists, for whom the interconnectedness of nature must be mirrored in the holistic interlocking of social life.
    Hence ambiguity as well as certainty are two necessary features of any ideology. They extend its life expectancy, and are vital to the (imagined) harmony and stability normally sought through the political process. This may give a bad name to politics, but elusiveness is not simply dissimulation, trickery, or sloppy thinking – though it may be any of these – but the harnessing of political language in order to provide one of the most valuable scarce resources of politics: public political backing. In any case, the precision of language is never guaranteed, and even strong decontestation will be open to many interpretations. Some unanticipated, as well as anticipated, interpretations may of course reduce support rather than increasing it. The British Conservative Party’s decision to promote ‘family values’ backfired when it was decontested, inter alia, as marital fidelity (which not all conservative politicians exhibited) rather than, say, as altruism and care for others.
    Moving to cultural constraints, we may note that culture refers tothe symbolic and material goods that societies produce. Those will include artefacts, science and technology, art, and social practices. It involves imaginative creativity and encompasses the systems of ideas and of thought that order our worlds and direct our conduct and activities. The cultural constraints on ideologies serve to anchor them firmly into the contexts of time and space, and to fine-tune the logical interpretations that their conceptual arrangements can carry. Take for instance the question of how to eradicate poverty in a particular country. Logically we have a very broad range of possibilities. One solution would be to exterminate the poor. Another would be to transport them to Ruritania – we might call that economic cleansing! A third would be to redefine the concept of poverty so as to exclude the entire living population, say by claiming that we are impoverished only at the point of death. A fourth would be to