“You can’t kill an idea” is a cliche. But it is a bad one? Israel’s recent assassinations of Hamas and Hezbollah leaders and middle managers has once again revived this very old debate. The comeback is rather obvious: you can’t kill an idea, but particular groups can be crippled by destroying their human and material pillars of strength. An Economist article scoffed at the notion either group will rise from the ashes:
Analysts made similar claims about Islamic State (IS) a decade ago, as the jihadist group declared a caliphate and seized a swathe of territory across Syria and Iraq. The caliphate lasted less than four years: it crumbled in the face of an international coalition that killed tens of thousands of IS fighters in a ferocious campaign…IS endures as a rural insurgency in Syria and Iraq;…Perhaps you cannot kill such groups—but if you are willing to apply an enormous level of violence and repression, you can marginalise them for a long time.
The trouble is that Hamas and Hezbollah aren’t really useful examples. As the article points out, both groups are “institutions, not ideas.” What they symbolically represent is not as important as banal organizational functions such as paying salaries and doling out patronage. If they are ideas, tying ideology too close to very specific political entities means it rises and falls with the group’s fortunes. Not all ideas are like this — the 20th century’s armed conflicts were mostly dominated by grand narratives that were not so closely coupled to very particular organizations.
Ideology as theory
Is there still something we can learn about claims like “you can’t kill an idea,” however trite they may be? I would submit that your answer to this question depends a great deal on whether you consider ideas to be sources of meaning or theories about how the world works. 1
An ideology-as-theory makes predictive claims about what will happen and as well as testable propositions about how to make it happen in some form or fashion. These theories can be vague, incoherent, silly, grandiose, and even delusional. However, they also are either right or wrong. And, in the limit, followers do pay attention to results. I am, of course, going to immediately qualify that claim.
Let the throat-clearing commence: ideological adherents do not practice anything close to optimal “scientific” observation and evaluation. They frequently confuse correlation and causation, and most of the time engage in some form of cargo cult reasoning about their ability to influence the world around them. I am not denying any of that.
However, to paraphrase another cliche, ideologies cannot fool all of their followers all the time. The results — especially when the stakes are high — do matter. The history of the bundle of interrelated ideologies called “Communism” is a case in point.
The Communist cluster
Karl Marx famously said that philosophers ought to change the world instead of merely interpreting it. Accordingly, by the mid-20th century the Communism cluster eventually evolved into a sophisticated collection of branching ideologies that often consisted of at least one of the following features:
- Theories of history that made particular predictions about how society would evolve.
- Models of political organization that provided templates for generating viable coalitions.
- Strategies and tactics for using the aforementioned coalitions to violently seize political power.
This does not even begin to describe the complexity of how items 1-3 were operationalized in practice. 2 Shoddy arguments often use nuance as a shield to hide behind, but it is more than appropriate here. Even if many aspects of the ideological core could not be questioned, Communist adherents demonstrated flexibility and creativity in generating novel branches and offshoots to suit local circumstances and their own personal interests.
Leninist theories of a revolutionary vanguard were often a failure outside of Russia. So, for example, Chinese Communists developed a variant that deviated substantially from its assumptions — and eventually led to the Sino-Soviet split. Still…how “correct” were all of these theories, models, and tactics? What to make of the Communist cluster’s catastrophic failure to live up to its own (sometimes comically) grandiose expectations?
Knowing and doing
As stated earlier, the “knowledge” that ideologies grant is know-what and know-how. This is in part why debating about whether or not you can “kill” an idea makes little sense. Ideas do not survive big setbacks simply because of their inherent immaterial power to inspire people to commit to the bit. They have to offer at least locally useful know-what and know-how even if they are globally delusional.
We are still living in the aftermath of the decline and fall of the Communism cluster. However what made it so tenacious an adversary is that it offered enough know-what and know-how to help a substantial number of people all over the world to gain social influence and power. Less charitably, it at least did not impede the ambitious and fortunate from gaining influence and power.
Perhaps it may re-emerge again, depending on the fortunes of the only major power (China) that still practices it. It is worth pointing out that the Communist cluster’s totalitarian twin, the Fascist cluster, has demonstrated an disturbing capacity for polymorphic adaptation and opportunistic exploitation long after the original variants were destroyed in 1945. Fascism’s antecedent and sometime cousin, Bonapartism, is equally stubborn and resilient. 3
Hosts and parasites
I’ll close with the advice that we ought to always remember that ideas do not exist in pristine isolation from each other. Their interaction is always an important component of how well they fare over the short, near, and long-term. In fact, many ideologies — in particular flawed and self-destructive ideologies — have parasitic relationships with more successful counterparts. 4
As long as the “host” ideology generates divisions, disappointments, and exploitable openings, the “parasite” can grow (and regrow) alongside it. And, unfortunately, eventually consume it. The bitter irony is that while the success of the parasite can kill the host (and thus endanger its own survival), there is no level of strength the host can attain that will permanently inoculate it from infestation by the parasite.
So, can you kill an idea? Some ideas are akin to extinct species. You’d need a Jurassic Park-like feat of genetic engineering to bring them back in something approximating their original form. Others are like termites. You could kill all of the termites for good — if you were willing to destroy your house in the process.5 As with so many other things in life, the hard part is figuring out which category your particular problem belongs to.
Footnotes
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This post is biased towards examples that, like Hamas and Hezbollah, feature ideas relevant to zero-sum political-military struggles for dominance. They are exceptional in having explicit tenets and requiring overt commitment from followers. Most ideologies are invisible to us and ask for our tolerance of the status quo rather than active commitment. They still require assent to be reproduced over time, but that assent can be cashed out as public indifference. They do not fail in ways as decisive and visible as military defeat and can persist as long as the barriers to alternatives are prohibitively high. ↩
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Nathan Leites posited that Soviet Communist ideology functioned as a top layer above instrumental rationality. The “operational code of the Politburo” was a set of (sometimes informally) codified “rules…necessary for effective political conduct” derived from the Soviet distillation of Communist ideology. These rules simplified the search for optimal actions and functioned as a coordination mechanism between disparate personalities and factions. ↩
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Some call it “Caesarism” but I prefer to call it Bonapartism in recognition of the integral role played by both Napoleons in developing it. ↩
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That goes back to the theme of this site’s first post: it takes as ship to make a shipwreck. ↩
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One ought to be careful not to blow everything up with the proverbial box of ACME TNT. However doing nothing is not an viable option either. ↩