 I
have always been an
idealist. Even as a young child I imagined worlds that were, in every
way, perfect and simple. I had a paper cutout dial pasted on my bed's
headboard that, in my imagination, could give me anything I wanted with
the push of a button, instantly -- long before Star Trek came up with
the
idea. While the other kids were playing games of conflict and
competition, I was encouraging them to play collaborative games that
everyone 'won', or playing, quite happily, by myself.
As I learned (mostly in school, outside the classroom) about greed,
pettiness, jealousy, vindictiveness, anger, and power politics, I
retreated more and more into my head, dreaming of worlds of peace,
happiness, balance, beauty and generosity. In my poetry and short
stories, there
was no grief, no violence, no suffering, no unhappiness. An idealist
was born.
There is a problem with idealism, though. In fact, the contemporary
ideas of 'ideal' and 'perfection' seem to be relatively new inventions.
Ideal
originally meant
merely something
imagined,
and perfect
originally meant
merely made
complete. When
Thomas Moore conjured up the word Utopia in the 16th century he quite
deliberately chose a combination of two Greek words meaning no place.
An idealist, then, has
always been someone who deals with the unreal, the impossible. And
Voltaire told us "the perfect is the enemy of the good".
In the face of criticism (such as accusations that an ideal is,
tautologically, 'unrealistic') the idealist can quickly become an
ideologue (in the modern sense of someone who espouses a set of
inflexible doctrines, regardless of their logic). And with ideology,
too often, comes a willingness to defend or confront conflicting ideals
with violence. The result has been religious wars, political and
economic oppression and suppression, brutal authoritarianism, and
countless acts of murder, theft, assault and cruelty. To the idealist, what is
real is never
good enough.
So the idealist dreams of living in a perfect place, where everyone is
always and forever happy, safe and beautiful, and lives in perfect
harmony, doing only and always things that are blissful. Even in my
youth, my impossible romantic and sexual fantasies, for example, would
put even
the most well-crafted romances and erotica to shame. And today I'm
searching the world for a perfect place that
cannot possibly exist, full of a diverse and stunningly beautiful and
talented multiplicity of people and creatures who cannot possibly
exist, except in my imagination.
As long as it's kept in its place -- the worlds of art and fiction and
dreaming -- there is nothing wrong with idealism. We live, as I am so
fond of saying, in a world of terrible imaginative poverty, and much of
the complacency of our world in the face of so much violence, waste,
corruption, misery and poverty, is due to most people's inability to
imagine any other, better, way to live or make a living than the 'real'
one they see all around them. Ironically, many of these ills were
perpetrated by idealists, who imagined the impossible and tried,
insanely, to realize it.
Because as soon as we imagine something better, it is in our nature to
aspire to make it real. And there's the rub. Einstein, who asserted
that imagination was more important than knowledge, also observed that
the more the people of his acquaintance knew, the more pessimistic they
became. Is
that because they
realized the hopelessness of achieving anything close to the ideal,
precisely as they were discovering just how ghastly the real really
was?
Is it because they came to understand, by studying history, that humans
(and any creatures) are incapable of radical change without slaughter?
Social and political change only occur as the generation with old ideas
dies off and the younger generation, infused or propagandized with new
ideas, new knowledge, takes its place. Even in business, we discover,
the only way to bring about comprehensive organizational change in less
than a generation is by firing everyone and hiring all new people.
As an idealist and as a student of history and human behaviour, I am
increasingly convinced that only an impossibly radical change will be
enough to save our planet from the sixth great extinction that is now
nearing its point of no return, its tipping point. My instinctive,
visceral response is an unbearable
grief for Gaia, an anxiety and
sense of hopelessness that is beyond
reason or logical explanation, a disconnection from this terrible
'real' world. And an affection for those who have chosen to fight, no
matter what the risk or consequence, no matter how impossible, with
every bone in their body in every waking moment, for the type of better
world I can imagine (and abhorrence for those fighting, with equal
vigour, for equally impossible ideals opposed to my own). And, finally,
affection for those who live stoicly with the sadness or blackness of
the noonday demon, or who cannot bear to do so and simply and quietly
give up, and end their lives.
Had I been a bit more foolish, a bit more ambitious, a bit more damaged
by this modern culture, I might today be doing something much more
dangerous than searching for the impossible ideal in a terrible real
world. I might be leading a political or social movement, working to
force my ideals on others, or on the whole world. Instead of a
pathology born of disengagement and withdrawal from an unacceptable,
unbearable real world, I might be afflicted with a pathology born of
anger and fury and megalomania and self-adulation or self-loathing, and
trying as a result to impose my particular brand of perfection on
everyone else.
What I have learned is that the energies and imagination of idealists
are best exhibited and discharged in art and story, and, infused with a
bit of humility, in self-examination and
self-change. So I have given up on politics, which has never succeeded
in making anything better anyway, and now focus my imaginative energies
on writing that incites nothing more lethal than understanding,
recognition, appreciation, and perhaps a smile.
For disenchanted idealists, there are two ways forward. The
first, and most tempting, is to live with one foot in each world. One
foot in the real world, whenever and wherever we can find beauty, love,
hope, peace and joy; the other foot in our own ideal, imagined,
impossible world of fantastic perfection -- a world of dreams. The
artist in me is content with this schizophrenic way -- when the real
world disappoints, or hurts, or the grief becomes too great to bear,
there is always safety and refuge (and creativity!) in this other,
imaginary place. That is, as long as I don't hope, or try, to make the
imaginary real.
The other way is to let go of the ideal and live fully in the real
world -- to let yourself change and accept what is, immerse yourself
and revel in it. Evelyn has embraced this second way, and she recently tweeted:
My
innate idealism is imploding (as no ideas, ideals, deals big enough to
contain truth); aha.. innate innocence is surfacing under debris.
and then elaborated:
i
went to meditate by a big lumbering live oak and realized that having
my innate idealism destroyed was not such a bad thing...
when and if i don't have so many notions and ideas about what is
preferable, i am finding that under
those mental skyscrapers (metaphorically--) once they imploded, under
that debris was this shimmering intelligent innate innocence -- the
ground that had been built over with constructs -- that is intricately
life itself and it does know how to evolve "heaven on earth" or
whatever our wildest grandest ideals are....so i feel more like i am
getting out of my own way, and letting it lead, and i mean lead as in
dancing more than lead as in politics!
When I read this I was reminded of the advice of the Indian philosopher
-- that, in order to be authentically ourselves, we must first rid
ourselves of all the gunk we have accumulated over our lifetimes, stuff
that we have attached to ourselves or allowed others to attach to us.
And I thought about how my own life has been "built over with
constructs".
I was also struck by Evelyn's implication that the opposite of idealism
isn't realism, but rather innocence
(from the Latin words meaning harmlessness)
-- seeing the world through unclouded, non-judgemental eyes. Seeing and
accepting the world for just what it really is.
But how do we do this? How do we "get out of our own way", and let go
of our ideals and pretenses to knowledge and control? How does "just
being a space through which stuff passes",
and living in Now Time, become more than an ideal, an intention, and
instead become a way of living, of being?
How
do we become innocent again?
Recently I wrote,
optimistically, that I was ready to "start over", and that starting
over would entail:
- Letting
go of my beliefs, my stuff, my responsibilities and obligations and
expectations and all sense of control and power over people and
situations.
- Giving
up on the illusion that language conveys any precise meaning, and using
it instead as a purely creative and imaginative tool.
- Being
fearless. There is however a tension here between fearlessness (being
free from insecurity), which is liberating, and recklessness, which can
be hurtful.
- Not
belonging anywhere. This doesn't preclude a reverence for place, but
rather acknowledges I can be a part of any place that can naturally
sustain me.
- Trusting
my instincts and my senses as much as my emotions and intellect, and
relearning when to be guided by each. Jung love.
- Understanding
that we are all, even in crowds, even in the company of those we
imagine we love and who we imagine love us, utterly alone.
- Understanding
that no one is in control.
- Realizing
that freedom to be nobody-but-myself is more important than anything
else, even health. Even love.
- Appreciating
that time is chimera; it doesn't exist. Animals live in 'now time', a
time that stretches out forever, except in moments of stress. Time to
be wild.
- Giving
up my 'wants', while being skeptical about my 'free will'. Stewart and
Cohen in Figments
of Reality:
Living
species, including humans, are emergent properties of the 'pandemonium'
of the body's semi-autonomous processes -- We are a complicity of the
separately-evolved creatures in our bodies organized for their mutual
benefit i.e. we are an organism. And our brains, our intelligence,
awareness, consciousness and free-will, are nothing more than an
evolved, shared, feature-detection system jointly developed to advise
these creatures' actions for their mutual benefit. Our brains, and our
minds (the processes that our neurons, senses and motility organs carry
out collectively) are their information-processing system, not 'ours'.
Conceptually, I can see doing these ten things, but it's hard for me to
see who/what I would become if I did. Is letting go of our ideals
really as simple as that? Is it even possible? Or are our ideals like
addictive drugs, and do they need to be shattered before we can let
them go?
I've said before that we are each the author of our own story, and
that, as Thomas King tells us, our story is all we are. I'm convinced
that human idealism is one of the root causes of many of the ills that
afflict our society. Perhaps idealism is also the key to our own
personal affliction, the fictional story that casts a shadow over our
lives and prevents us from being who we really are. Perhaps it's time
to rewrite our story, and, this time, make it true.
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