I think of myself as an idealist but not a fool. That's not to say that I'm incapable of foolishness. There have been times when I've been foolish about one thing or another, but the trick is to learn from the mistake and to adjust your thinking without becoming a cynic.
A cynic is a likely former naive idealist, someone whose idealism had been simplistic. Once such a person's idealistic notions about the way he thinks things ought to be is disappointed, he becomes convinced that all idealism is wish fantasy and a refusal to look at reality as it is. Cynicism becomes a new belief system, a new ideology for people who have a hard time dealing with ambiguity and need to have things neat and orderly. Naive idealism and cynicism are the opposite sides of the same coin.
But a mature idealism accepts that evil and delusion are real. But it's not one or the other–one's ideals and the forces in the world that are obstacles for their realization live side by side. A mature idealism is realistic, that's to say it is skeptical, but not cynical. It understands the difference between the counterfeit and the real, and lives in the hope that the possibility for real truth and real goodness and real beauty is there ready to break in if we work to promote hospitable conditions for their appearance in our lives.
Mature idealism has nothing to do with ideology. Ideology is a rigidification of thought. It's freeze-dried thought, thought that has lost touch with whatever truth might have originally been its inspiration.
The kind of idealism that I would promote has nothing to do with being nice. Conventional niceness is a counterfeit of genuine goodness, and has more to do with getting along, with being accepted. Genuinely good people are kind, but they can also become outraged at needless, foolish, destructive behaviors of others and they will call them on it.
Mature idealism is unsentimental. Sentimentality is form of alienation; it's false feeling, forced feeling, programmed feeling, the indulging in emotional cliches. And sentimentality has nothing to do with the deep, authentic feeling that comes with any encounter with what is genuinely good. Such encounters are what I described in Monday's post as "cognitive moments". They are not everyday experiences. They are simply moments when we are privileged to hear the Great Song of goodness, mercy, love, and beauty that is always being sung, but which most of the time is just out of earshot.
There have been stretches of time in my life when I've gone without any encounters with what is genuinely true, good, or beautiful. Their absence was not a proof that they didn't exist. It just taught me that such experiences are rare. And during such periods, one might also be overwhelmed by the phoniness in things–everywhere you look there is this pretending of one thing or another to be what it's not, and it's insufferable. But if the counterfeit is more common, it points to what it parodies. The counterfeit is a cheapened version of the real thing, which nevertheless is a testimony to the real thing. A naive idealism accepts the counterfeit as the real thing.
So the kind of idealism that I would promote will not settle for the counterfeit, although it recognizes that the counterfeit points to something that it is not.
[See also Naive Idealism, a 2005 post that describes a third possibility for naive idealism when it is confronted by the intractability of evil in the world: violent angelism.]
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