If We Set Aside Ideology, Is There Anything We Can Agree On?

Just the experiment of setting aside ideological certainties for a moment would be instructive.

Humans are hard-wired to prefer simplicity over complexity, and this is the foundation of ideology, which like mythology takes a complex world and radically simplifies it to an easily digestible construct. (I tease all this apart in my book The Mythology of Progress.)

Being social animals, humans are also hard-wired to quickly form loyalties to groups an…