Is Idealism Good for Society?

I grew up in the 1960s, and I saw idealism as a force for good — ending the War in Vietnam, opposing the neocon excesses, and creating some community-based models for living, and making a living, that we would be wise to study closely as the world charges towards a series of complex crises that none of the prevailing political orthodoxies has the faintest idea how to cope with. Not surprisingly, I became an idealist. Maybe I always was.

So idealism in the 1930s impeded desperately needed change, and helped prolong the Depression and propel the world into global war, but idealism in the 1960s helped bring about needed change, and brought an end to the regime of a deranged ideologue (Nixon) and an end to war. So is idealism a good thing or a bad thing, in general and specifically in today’s context?

Just to be clear, I’m referring to idealism in the common ‘dictionary’ sense of thinking about and aspiring to achieve things in ideal terms, not the narrower meaning of the word in philosophic and religious taxonomy. In its extreme form idealism becomes utopianism, a belief in striving for an impossibly perfect society, and a fierce, uncompromising, intolerant belief in a specific ideology or code of beliefs as superior to all others. Its opposite, depending on your point of view, is either pragmatism or realism. Pragmatism, a belief in incremental, practical, readily achievable change, has the advantages of often being consensus-driven and more easily achievable, but carries the risks of ‘end justifies the means’ rationalization. Realism (again, referring to the term’s use in common parlance not its technical meaning) is, of course, in the eyes of the beholder, and can serve as anything from a sturdy defence of the status quo (“you can’t change it, it’s been going on for ten thousand years“) to an excuse for defeatism, resignation, even suicide.

A lot of the world’s most inspiring and enlightening books are ideological — they imagine, and assert as possible, something ‘better’ than what exists today. They stretch our minds and force us to challenge the myths of our current culture, the myths that, as long as everything appears to be going reasonable well, entrench us in our thinking, reinforce our narrow frames, make us like everybody else. Ideologies carry with them implicit moral codes of what is ‘right’ and ‘good’, how we humans should behave. They become our frames, the lenses through which we ‘see’ the world and which make us (at least unless and until the next compelling ideology shatters that frame) blind to other ideologies. Even pragmatism (though not the end-justifies-the-means variety) can be viewed as an ideology — an ideology that is opposed to any ‘idealistic’, ‘extreme’ ideologies.

Are non-human creatures idealistic, ideological? My answer would be that they are not — not because they are not capable of such intellectualization (many creatures evidently have rich imaginations), but because they don’t need them. If that’s the case, why would the human species have evolved idealism? What need does idealism serve that it would be selected for in the evolution of our species? Wouldn’t our society be more peaceful, more content, if we all thought the status quo ideal, or didn’t think of ideals at all?

My theory is that idealism is a stress reaction, the intellectualization of an intuitive acknowledgement that something is very wrong and needs to be changed, much like the instinctive reactions of mice, when they find themselves in conditions of overcrowding, to hoard, to attack each other, to create hierarchy, and hence to reduce their numbers quickly to sustainable levels. If the status quo were ‘ideal’, there would be no purpose for idealism. I would guess that at some point thirty thousand years ago, with much of the large game on which humans had lived a leisurely life suddenly extinct, and with the sudden onset of the final ten thousand year expansion of glaciation of the last ice age, life became something much less than ideal, and some people idealized a less vulnerable world of agriculture and settlement, and set about creating it. They did so, I would suggest, because they had to — there was no other choice except to perish.

We now live (despite the efforts to deny it by those at the top of the hierarchy that agriculture and settlement necessitated) in another time in which life is, and will certainly be for our children and grandchildren, once again much less than ideal. We now have some very limited knowledge that agriculture and settlement, and subsequent human innovations and technologies, each designed ideally to make life better and to solve immediate problems that had to be solved, have in fact created as many new problems to be solved as they have solved themselves. So we are now living in a complex human society with millions of ideologies, each ‘imagined’ to direct us to solve perceived urgent and threatening problems. And because there are now so many of us living so closely together, these ideologies conflict violently with each other. We have devised political systems that allow us to vote, somewhat democratically, for the ideology that we think has the best chance of working, but these systems are increasingly breaking down as many grow impatient and overthrow or subvert the democratic vote in favour of their own personal, selfish ideology, or opt out of the process as they perceive their ideology to be unrepresented by any of the people at the top of the social hierarchy.

As we now see everywhere, idealization and ideology have ceased being evolutionary advantages that allow us to imagine and collectively institute adaptations that can improve our quality of life. As human society has grown larger and more complex its adaptability has waned proportionately, and idealization and ideology are now mostly just wishful thinking and noise, imaginings that make us unhappy, angry, impatient, and ultimately violent yet offer no real hope of realizability.

This is why I believe there is such growing interest in rediscovering community, a ‘political’ unit that is much smaller and less complex and hence more adaptable, where idealism is realizable and therefore still has value. Pioneers have always recognized this. The great challenge today is that there is no place left to go where our large, massively complex and dysfunctional global political cultures do not hold sway. We can run but we cannot hide.

John Gray is an idealist who essentially espouses reducing the degree to which idealism and ideology drive our actions and behaviours. He argues that it is too late to achieve idealistic changes in our society — human society is now too vast, interdependent and complex to be ‘saved’, and we will have to leave it up to nature to correct our excesses. Despite this belief, or perhaps because of it, he urges us to refocus our lives on things we can ‘realistically’ change: Our own impact on the Earth and on our communities, physical and virtual, and our own awareness and understanding of, joy in, and belonging to, these communities. He suggests we do this for our own sake and for the sake of those we love and care about, rather than because he thinks this will spread virally to create a new and enlightened human consciousness. Our role, he is saying, is simply to be models, for those close enough to learn from and be inspired by, and to be aware of and happy with life’s astonishing joys. This does not mean denying our ideals, but rather putting them in their place, and not being consumed by them.

I was ready to realize this and, while I am still and will always be an idealist (we are what we are) I am trying to learn to inflict my idealism less on others, and on myself, and instead be real, do what I can, and what I love, and what makes a difference in important small ways. I want to be a model, not a preacher.

Our only choice, ultimately, is the choice between which of three masters to follow: (1) The organisms that make up our bodies, which make most decisions on ‘our’ behalf for us, and which evolved our minds for their collective well-being; (2) Our culture and society, which is trying to make us sacrifice ourselves for the benefit of all the human mice in this horrifically overcrowded and violence-ridden laboratory; and (3) Gaia, the Earth-organism that is quietly telling us what our place is as part of all life on Earth, and how to behave accordingly. We have no choice but to obey the first master, and we are brought up to follow and even lay down our lives for the second, where our idealism holds sway. There are those who believe, of course, that Gaia, a life-world self-organized for its own collective benefit, is also an ideal and an ideological construct. There is no arguing with such people, since their argument is circular and hermetically sealed inside their own frame of understanding. I don’t believe Gaia is an ideal or ideology, any more than the Earth revolving around the sun (once such a heretical idea, so threatening to prevailing ideology, that merely espousing it could get you killed) is. Gaia simply is. You can observe it at work, and see how it makes sense, and made sense for billions of years before we arrived on the planet, and will make sense long after we’re gone. It is an adaptation that works.

I also don’t believe that following Gaia is spiritual — she (I use the female term endearingly and metaphorically) meets none of the definitions of spiritualism: she is not immaterial (on the contrary!), she is not deific or supernatural (merely natural), she is not religious (tied to a single set of values — as the wonderful cartoon above shows, she does not even care about values) or even sacred (in the sense of demanding worship or idolizing). She is physical. She is connected and connecting. She is all of us, all of life on Earth. She just is. When the sun goes nova and obliterates all life on Earth, she will be no more.

I choose to follow Gaia, the third master, because I no longer believe the second master works or can be made to work. It is broken beyond repair. And Gaia is different from the other two masters in that she does not make demands of us, all she asks of us is that we pay attention, listen, and learn. And if we don’t, she will cut us a lot of slack in our youthful folly, and only correct our excesses when it is the consensus of all the life on Earth that is is time to do so. Noidealist, she.