Ideology is for suckers

On any politically-charged university campus, it's hard to make a case against certain omnipresent beliefs.

It's painfully easy, however, to poke holes in those beliefs, held as strongly as they are blindly, and in the name of ideology.

Political and social issues, all too often portrayed as black-and-white, are rarely so simple; yet many students appear to be too indoctrinated into the tactic of writing positional essays that they forget to be expositional, to question polemics, often becoming polemical themselves.

Now, this criticism can be applied equally -- whether you believe in equality or not, and liberally -- whether you think liberals (howsoever you choose to define "liberals") are the bane of society. We all fall victim to it, because it is so very tempting to skip the step between discourse and position, and fall instead into the murky waters of belief.

Once belief sets in -- whether it is that tuition is too high, that nuclear weapons are sexy, or that wearing pants should be optional -- criticism effectively dies, and with it, any hope you may have had of persuading others to join your cause in a ration light. Extrapolated to the greater university community, it appears that political ideologies spread more like STD's than through reasoned and intelligent debate, and to a fence-sitter, a moderate (a horrible thing for ideologues), the gentle demise of expression ultimately leads to the demise of the intelligence of the ideologies. From passionately held to subjunctive, the spread of ideology appears to become more and more like a disease -- only the pervaders of the anti-faith, of debate over dogma, who I would hope to be the student newspaperers, seem to be out of pencillin (ie legitimate and reasoned criticism).

Again, no excuses: anti-ideology is certainly guilty on the same counts, and centrism for pragmatic reasons is inherently indictable. But the type of ideology aside, the real problem is when you get sucked into beliefs that you can't back up with the courage of your convictions; then not only do my refutations of anything and everything fall on deaf ears, but the impetus to debate dies, and with it, some part of our society becomes inherently more stupid, more gullible, and less something I'd like to be a part of. Even if I'm not an agent of social change, that's still disheartening.

Here's to sitting on the fence -- one way or another, at least you're not a sucker.