Why Learning from History Means Saying No to Rigid Ideologies

Walter G. Moss is a professor emeritus of history at Eastern Michigan University and Contributing Editor of HNN. For a list of his recent books and online publications, click here. His most recent book is “An Age of Progress? Clashing Twentieth-Century Global Forces” (Anthem Press, 2008).


In a recent op ed in The New York Times John Burns reflected on his long career as a war and foreign correspondent in such places as the Soviet Union, China, apartheid-era South Africa, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Afghanistan, and Iraq. “What those years bred in me,” he wrote, “was an abiding revulsion for ideology, in all its guises.” But his revulsion is not limited to the non-Western ideologies but also to Western “ ‘isms’ of left and right . . . that excuse, and indeed smother, free thinking.”

From time to time since the end of World War II and then the death of Stalin in 1953, political observers have written of “the end of ideology.” In the early 1960s Daniel Bell used that phrase to title a book in which he wrote that ideology, “with good reason, is an irretrievably fallen word.” In 1989, as the Cold War was ending, Francis Fukuyama’s essay “The End of History?” stated that the world might be witnessing “the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” But ideology is far from dead. As Mark Twain once said about his reported death, such talk is “an exaggeration.”

In a 2013 sermon Pope Francis warned Christians against making their religion into an ideology: “Ideology does not beckon [people]. In ideologies there is not Jesus: in his tenderness, his love, his meekness. And ideologies are rigid, always. . . . And when a Christian becomes a disciple of the ideology, he has lost the faith. . . . But it is a serious illness, this of ideological Christians. . . . His attitude is: be rigid, moralistic, ethical, but without kindness.” He urged Christians “to remain humble, and so not to become closed.”

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