When you start to think and write about something called “Personal Ideology”, there must be a need to question the assumptions behind the words. An Ideology is, according to dictionary.com, “the body of doctrine, myth, belief etc., that guides an individual, class, or large group.” It apparently dates to end of the 18th Century and was coined by Antoine Louis Claude Destutt, comte de Tracy. But you knew that…
Personal conjures an image of something that belongs to me, is mine and not anyone else’s. Private, in fact.
But it’s not so easy to reconcile these two ideas. None of us makes up our own guide to life from scratch, without reference or in isolation from everyone else’s personal ideology. Surely, regardless of where we end up, all our guiding principles, values and beliefs are inculcated in us (knowingly and unknowingly) by the world we come into and which we tend to become conscious of only with reflection. It just feels like it’s private because that’s just how we encounter the world, as agents in it.
So, first off, I my guiding principle is that whatever belief system I have, it is there because of all the inputs I have had from and with other people and theirs are the result of all the belief systems and values that define them. Whether these things are expressed as the result of a rational thought process or the poorly articulated attempt to express something that is more basic than language, that is something I have started to reflect on more recently.
I know that this step in this reflection (and we’re getting to the home straight now, with only nine postings left) starts by asking me to relate my fundamental beliefs (or values, which are the bedrock of beliefs) around the existence of a god or deity, or force in the universe. But actually I have a question – “why do so many people have a belief in a deity?”
This is not to criticise them (or you), but to wonder why. What is it about us and our ability to abstract our thought that has created in us the need for myth, for religion, for belief? Even the counter-argument to theism that has grown in eloquence and force over the last 200 years at least, seems not to dent in otherwise intelligent, thinking people the wish to believe in something more than the blink-of-an-eye that each of our lives constitutes in universal terms. It’s not a blink of an eye to us, of course. The idea of a life-span, fully lived, is apparently enough for some people, but not for most – so perhaps there is something in what makes us humans that demands we reconcile the self-knowledge of mortality with the self-belief in the worth of living, and that we do so by calling in an exterior agent.
But isn’t the existence or not of a deity (what Heinz von Foerster would describe as) an “undecidable question”? That is, all our stories of origin must remain conjecture.
My own guiding belief is that, for us, this is it. I experienced oblivion before I was born and I will experience oblivion after I die, and the two states of nothingness are exactly the same. I should be bloody grateful for the chance to spend a lifetime wondering about it all in-between. I like the expression ‘a system is the best explanation for itself” and I feel no need for a teleological explanation of why we are here. I think the “how” of us being here is pretty fascinating and important if we are to see what we can do for our children and other generations, but not the “why”. There’s no why.
And yet, I am really interested in understanding this fascination for belief, and I won’t deny that something of who I am is a result of a very long history of these ideas. I’ll try to reflect on my own history with all that tomorrow.
Chris Dalton's Personal Development Blog 