In order to make some sense of my above paragraph I will start with what an ideology is. Many people associate the word 'ideology', with 'ism' such as communism, fascism, or anarchism. All words do denote ideologies but in some ways 'ism' may suggest artificially constructed sets of ideas, somewhat removed from everyday life, and are manipulated by the powers that be - and the powers that want to be. But...an ideology is much much more broad. We consume ideologies every day, whether we are aware of this or not. We may draw different ideologies in mind depending on our interpretation as well as how we decode context. How we interprete as well as decode context can have alot to do with our own understanding of situations and how it relates to our beliefs as well as how we perceive what we see. Perception is another variable that is as well an interesting topic (see article on perception: Inception was a great movie but what about another realm of smoking mirrors).
Ideologies map the political and social worlds for us. We simply cannot do without them because we cannot act without making sense of the worlds we inhabit. Poltical facts may be an input into a political ideology as data is an input into a report. One data point does not consitute much value but perhaps many would construct a new way of thinking....a new ideology.
Alas, another way of organizing higher forms of understanding context emerges...
An article that I read called," Democracy Labratory: Are Science and Politics Interrelated? " states that political claims are not ideologies. Ferris, author of science classics such as Coming of Age in the Milky Way and The Whole Shebang, asserts that Liberalism and Science are methods and not ideologies. Both methods incorporate feedback loops through which actions can be evaluated to see whether they continue to meet with general approval. Science obtains knowledge and liberalism produces social order generally acceptable to free people. This leads me to understand that within this type of thinking ideologies can be inputs to methods and methods can be much more practical and useful within context.
Democratic elections are scientific experiments in which every year you would alter the variables within and election and observe the results. Changing the variables changes the results. "The founders often spoke of the new nation as an 'experiment,'" Ferris writes. Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1804:
"No experiment can be more interesting that what we are now trying, and which we trust will end in establishing the fact, that man may be governed by reason and truth." Many of the forefathers were scientists which adapted their method of data gathering, data interpretation, hypthesis testing and theory formation to their nation building. In many ways I cannot help but think that a belief that all people should be treated equally under law (political belief from John Locke) is very much so a strong part of the liberal-democratic ideology that in many ways lent itself to a method such as Liberalism.
Now I find myself looking at situations around the world by understanding that science is a messy messy method. Anyone that has seen the scientific method in progress has seen that science is indeed a messy reality. It is much more trial and error than anything else.
With this being said I look at the development of efficiency and effectiveness of a goal within context as a method that is best constructed with multiple ideologies constructed from beliefs and facts as well as many other variables that can be altered. Aristotle set the precendence for the scientific method with logical reasoning (~384-322 BCE) as well as his belief that democracy was not the best form of government. As the Scientific Method was perfected with other known key figures it wasnt until the twentieth century that a method was formally introduced. Now the question that I would like to understand is a bit more in depth...
If Aristotle saw democracy as an unsustainable ideology I wonder what method he would suggest in today's world. I also wonder what other ideologies he would suggest to build that method.