Ideology is not science

Science is about determining definite facts in a wide field of interests. It is painstaking work, delving into ever more detail. No human can store all scientific knowledge.

Ideology doesn’t compete with science when the task is to explain every aspect of the world. The purpose of ideology is to provide intellectual guidance on how to conduct one’s life, and why to conduct it in a specific manner. In providing such a manual, ideologies are in one category with religions.

But modern ideologies draw on science. And the Kreutz ideology does. I have a keen interest in several scientific fields, ranging from biology to neuroscience to linguistics to philosophy. I am also interested in a wide range of practical solutions to all kinds of problems. .

No way can I be right in all my ideas on scientific findings. And apart from that, science evolves. Many scientific convictions of decades ago have been modified to a degree that they appear unrelated or contrary to previous beliefs.

But ideologies, in spite of being prone to error in every detail, are more enduring than the science of the day because ideologies provide an overriding principle only.

Furthermore, ideologies encompass more knowledge than just the scientific one. Knowledge is also a linguistic quality because most concepts are expressed in sentences. Knowledge for which a language has no terms would be hard to grasp. And then there is knowledge that is more beautiful to express in one language than another. The German “Das Sein bestimmt das Bewusstsein” would be an example. The standard English translation is “Existence determines consciousness” but this translation falls way short of the concise wisdom, and the poetic beauty, of the German original which has the syllable “sein” in the subject and the object of the phrase.

Constructs of thought that deserve to be called Ideologies have to use language to create verbal art, apart from citing scientific fact. It is an inherent feature of any ideology that it doesn’t just want to inform. It wants to convince.