My recent review of the 1929-39 Great Depression opened my eyes to the dangers of idealism, which manifested itself in ideologies
that aggravated and prolonged the misery of millions. And while it was
neocon ideology (either the populist or privileged class variety) that
reigned throughout the Western world (except briefly for FDR and his
New Deal), the fact that many opponents of the status quo were just as
idealistic (calling for the overthrow of the system in favour of true
communism) didn't help the people of the working and middle classes,
driving them into the waiting hands of fascist populists with simpler,
more covert, and more dangerous ideologies.
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. No
idealist, she. |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
