On the death of idealism

[Morley]

Is doing what is right to do part of Idealism? Could you or someone else define Idealism?

Jersey, you have some solid ideals around child development. You would follow those even against your own self interest.

Perhaps I’m not making any sense. If not, I’ll step back.

[Jersey Girl]

Is doing what is right to do part of Idealism? Could you or someone else define Idealism?

Jersey, you have some solid ideals around child development. You would follow those even against your own self interest.

Perhaps I’m not making any sense. If not, I’ll step back.

You're exactly right. I got let go (at will contract) from a (back then very well paying) job where I worked for more than a dozen years, because I refused to incorporate violent and developmentally inappropriate Bible stories into my curriculum when the new Pastor wanted me to. Yes, I negotiated by presenting more appropriate Christian curriculum. Kindness, loving thy neighbor, being a good friend, I am wonderfully and fearfully made, how to be a helper, what is prayer? Go figure. I'm very proud of what I wouldn't do.

Example...

Imagine teaching the story of Cain and Abel to 4 year olds? Girls and boys do you have a brother or sister? Do you ever feel angry or jealous of them? You do? What do you do about it? Talk it out, that's a good idea! Try to calm down your feelings? That's another good idea! Well, I have a story to tell you about a brother who had those feelings and you'll never guess what he did about it!

I kid you not at all. That story was on their list including crucifixion and I wouldn't lead prayer before snack because I didn't want the LDS children criticized by other children for the way they arranged their arms in prayer, didn't want children from atheist families to feel left out and the school was always a community school from it's inception.

My entire staff voluntarily left their own jobs when I was let go. A year later, the church regional/state office conducted an investigation into the pastor and demanded that he resign or return with a pscyh eval. I am NOT joking here. He had breached confidentiality of members of his own congregation, tried to smear my professional reputation (don't worry I wrote a well documented response letter for their board), and was an all around crackpot. The final determination letter was read to me over the phone by a parent. They also found that I was let go without cause and without proper procedure.

When I took on a new position (not administrative) and had a report for CPS, I would give it to the administrators as requested and unbeknownst to them, I made the call myself because I knew they didn't want to make waves with their higher ups. So yeah, you are right about me.

[Gadianton]

I’m not seeing it, Gad. I can’t figure out what idea or ideal the January Sixers would be after. Loyalty to Trump, yes. Loyalty to some abstract ideal? I don’t know what it would be.

Freedom. An epic battle of light and darkness, good and evil, fashioned after all of the movies they've loved over the years. The QAnon guy in my neighborhood was completely pumped over his opportunity to fight for God and all that is good and holy, freedom, prosperity. He was ready to take a bullet the very day I spoke with him and die if need be. It's as much about the evil of the Empire as it is the good of Trump. The nefarious common enemy. The assault on family values and right-thinking protestantism. It's living your own TV mini-series written by Hollywood liberals.

The abstract ideal though, is freedom.

[honorentheos]

Is doing what is right to do part of Idealism? Could you or someone else define Idealism?

Hi Jersey Girl,

At its core, idealism proposes that the most true form of reality is not one that we can touch or experience. We best approach it through reason and intellectual thought. Like the reality outside the cave in Plato's Republic, the most pure form reality takes is objective (meaning, undefined by our subjective experience or interpretation) whole in itself. We come closest to it by taking the less perfect "shadows cast upon the wall" from this ideal that we do subjectively experience and interpret, and through intellectual effort only, work out the nature of the things casting those shadows.

Contrast this with realism which proposes that the true nature of reality, while still masked by subjective barriers, is deducible through experiment and attempts to feel it out, not just reason towards it. Realism maintains that there is some separation between the true, objective nature of reality and what we experience or subjectively hold to be true, but we aren't trapped in the cave looking at shadows of reality. Instead, we need to work at removing the barriers between us and that objective reality.

Contrast this further with pragmatism which posits that whatever the underlying cause may be, everything outside our own experience is unapproachable when inquiring into the nature of what it true, good, beautiful, just. What we are left with is to look at the results, somewhat like realism suggests, but then accept that our experience and the results of that experience are our only guides.

To use an example of this, consider the response of many members of the LDS church after they discover and find themselves conflicted over Joseph Smith's polygamy. Those who choose to stay in the church at this point often get accused of turning a blind eye to his terrible behavior, but most often I think they really end up weighing the evidence and determining that they can't really access what happened when Smith was alive so they can't really make a moral judgement about Smith. But they can absolutely weigh how the church has affected them and their family. And if in their opinion that is largely good, the choice isn't to ignore Smith's sins, so to speak. Instead it is to determine that they can't judge the truth value of the rightness or wrongness of those actions as they occurred in the 19th century because that isn't accessible to them to judge soundly.

In the above case, there is no moral ideal regarding marriage or adultery that they feel exists that can be used to put on the scale of judgement and weight Smith against. Pragmatism tells them that what they know of Mormonism is good, so Smith was also likely good, and maybe someday before God it will all make sense in the end when the ideal and perfect is revealed.

Idealism in this case says that there is a form of fidelity, inaccessible to humankind, that exists beyond the confines of crude materialism that we ought to still intellectually grope towards in order to better recognize the good and true. Whatever aspects of that ideal that we miss in our attempts to read the shadows, it isn't difficult to realize that Smith's behavior regarding polygamy doesn't align with it so it can't be considered good or true. Realism differs in that it suggests what we know about fidelity and its most pure form comes from what we observe and can understand through experience, behind which there is still a perfect concept of fidelity to be understood through more than just reason.

Or something like that.

[honorentheos]

On another thread:

Sorry, I skipped over some of my thinking in making that comment. In the course of the discussion it appears to me that critical theory is essentially post-modern critiques of legal and social structures. Given idealism is anathema to post-modernism, well.

I've lived my life based on certain Idealistic premises. I joined the service, got married, got divorced, participated in religion, left religion, chose my profession, attended university, and chose another profession, all based on what I thought was a set of "what is the right thing to do" principles. Though not all of these panned out, I still maintain a sort of idealist framework that I work from.

Increasingly, I've come to fear that we live in a post-idealistic world. I see the 6th of January as a signpost on this road. What happens to us when everything, every concept, every ideal, every fact, is up for grabs and subject to redefinition and subsumed by relentless, spur-of-the-moment reframing? (I'm thinking, for example, of a fellow poster's insistence that 'nuance' will excuse anything.)

Heh. Maybe I'm just profoundly depressed by the anniversary of the capital insurrection. I dunno.

What are your thoughts?

Hi Morley,

I'm actually glad to see our populist friend emerge and offer his shadow to allow us to better see the light in this discussion.

in my opinion, the challenge of the 21st century is that we have become almost entirely defined by what we are against and lack values and principles that define our aims. Above, Gad suggests that the populist insurgents rose up in favor of freedom. I strongly disagree. They rose up because they are against. They are against liberals. They are against change. They are against whatever their handlers point them at and snarl, "This thing, thou shalt HATE it!" They make light motifs their causes, glosses their muse, demand government reduce spending one year and cheer it the next because whatever they are against didn't require them to be against spending that year.

We need idealism like never before because we have to be for something in order to create, to progress, to relight the fire of true freedom on principles and values just as the nation was founded on principles and values. If we fail over and over again to achieve perfection in the ideal, that is not the fault of ideal or even of us. Reality is that perfection is out of our grasp...but we must reach for it nonetheless. Ours is to strive for the ideal, to understand it better, to live for it better.

Or, you know, post-modernism something-something, critique is sufficient something-something, this, instead, is the better thing to hate.

And then...not with a bang, but a whimper. Or, maybe an AR-15. Something, anyway. Or nothing.

My 2cents on the subject.

[honorentheos]

I should add something that will be controversial on this board. That being, the pulling down of religion as a socially ordering form of instilling ideals and values has absolutely contributed to this problem. Yes, religion has also been the tool of the hateful and those equally lacking in principles to tear up the foundational and replace the ideal values with idol gods. But we haven't figured out how to build a truly principled multi-cultural pluralist society. And that demands a bit of humility rather than conceit when it comes to the exposure of religion for what it has proven to be.

The US was, at its founding, an experiment. Our successes inspired others to take them, innovate on them, expand the experiment even further. Internally, we continued the experiment, challenging our own biases and failings through the creation and defense of laws. We outright failed in some cases, engaged in genocide and empire-building, oppression and classism. But the trajectory of the experiment proved the momentum of the ideals had weight.

We're the third most populace nation on the planet. The first two are communist and theocratic authoritarian, respectively. And the first, China, is still 90% racially homogenous while the second, India, is defined by its old ties to a caste system and identity that defies comparison to the melting pot that is the United States of America. When we compare our failings with other nations, we do so often by holding up small, largely homogenous nations that often still hold on to the vestiges of their monarchy and religious rules mere centuries ago, inspired by a centuries-old national identity.

The model for the future has to come from within. It HAS to. There is no model outside that compares that shows how to successfully navigate the perils facing us as our empire dwindles. We can use them to reason out our ideals better, look to the past for lessons. But the path out of the darkness isn't a traveled road. It has to be hewn.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

I’m not seeing it, Gad. I can’t figure out what idea or ideal the January Sixers would be after. Loyalty to Trump, yes. Loyalty to some abstract ideal? I don’t know what it would be.

Freedom. An epic battle of light and darkness, good and evil, fashioned after all of the movies they've loved over the years. The QAnon guy in my neighborhood was completely pumped over his opportunity to fight for God and all that is good and holy, freedom, prosperity. He was ready to take a bullet the very day I spoke with him and die if need be. It's as much about the evil of the Empire as it is the good of Trump. The nefarious common enemy. The assault on family values and right-thinking protestantism. It's living your own TV mini-series written by Hollywood liberals.

The abstract ideal though, is freedom.

Until he gets shot in the dick.

For some reason these guys think they’ll die a glorious death, or take out a bunch of bad guys or whatever. They never really think things through do they? They don’t understand that at best an armed insurgency, a widespread one, will radically alter the things they purport to love like freedom of assembly, freedom of movement, freedom of commerce, and freedom to stick “See You in Valhalla” stickers on the back of their 10-year-old truck as they drink espresso and listen to Pandora. At worst, the country devolves into Iraq or Mexico where warlords and cartels run the show and the corruption is so thorough that it makes today’s bad guys look like goofballs.

I mean, we saw it on this forum. The thought of actually having to get into a real, honest to goodness physical altercation with the enemy so unmanned one of these larpers he offered to [deleted] while cooking for me. That’s who they are, and if they were smart (spoiler alert: they’re not), they’d shut the “F” up, hold Trump accountable for his crimes, and participate in the democratic process before they lose all that’s holy in their lives -> Applebees.

- Doc

[Chap]

For some reason these guys think they’ll die a glorious death, or take out a bunch of bad guys or whatever. They never really think things through do they? They don’t understand that at best an armed insurgency, a widespread one, will radically alter the things they purport to love like freedom of assembly, freedom of movement, freedom of commerce, and freedom to stick “See You in Valhalla” stickers on the back of their 10-year-old truck as they drink espresso and listen to Pandora. At worst, the country devolves into Iraq or Mexico where warlords and cartels run the show and the corruption is so thorough that it makes today’s bad guys look like goofballs.

The problem is that their idea of what the kind of violence they contemplate can achieve is based on watching movies (which, funnily enough, show their viewers a nice neat conclusion after a couple of hours at most, when the good guys have done their stuff and there have been lots of car chases, firing of automatic weapons by cool guys who don't get shot much, and explosions), not on the study of what actually happens in societies radically disrupted by internally generated non-state violence.

To put it in broad-brush terms: these people imagine America 1776 replaying (colonists successfully organise to reject continued control by an inefficiently organised colonising power on the other side of an ocean). Instead (if they carry their project through) they are much more likely to get France 1789: widespread violence disables central state power, and years of vicious factional struggle follow, including a deliberate reign of terror with mass executions, until something like a military dictatorship brings relative peace to a society that just wants it all to stop.

[Physics Guy]

I'm not sure how reliable any lessons from history are likely to be for the United States in the coming decades. Social collapse of a superpower in the internet age has no precedent.

[Physics Guy]

There seem to be two different meanings of "idealism". One is the moral attitude of having high expectations for how people and societies can behave; this kind of idealism is opposed to things like pragmatism or pessimism. The other kind of idealism is the belief that ideas are real, as real as rocks; it may even extend to believing that only ideas are real, to the point that even rocks are somehow really only ideas. This second kind of idealism is opposed to things like materialism (in the sense of believing that only matter exists) or dualism (in the sense of believing that matter and spirit are different substances).

Believers in both kinds of idealism are called idealists, but I think that only the first kind talks about ideals; the second kind of idealism cares about ideas, not ideals. The adjective for believing in the first kind of idealism is idealistic, but I think the adjective for the second is just idealist, the same as the noun for the believer.

The first kind of idealism seems to me to be only an ambitious or optimistic attitude, while the second is at least trying to be a radical philosophical theory. I don't really think that the second kind of idealism succeeds though, because I can't see any difference between idealism and materialism besides an insistence on using certain sets of words. A materialist says that we are all just made of matter and that even our most lofty thoughts are just patterns in large groups of atoms. An idealist says that the whole universe is just a simulation running on some alien computer, or a daydream in the mind of God. I say, what difference does it make? I don't see any.

Even if there is no fundamental difference between materialism and idealism, though, I reckon that the two views may tend to encourage different attitudes, as when optimists and pessimists look at the same glass and call it with equal accuracy half-full or half-empty. Materialists are perhaps more inclined to be uncertain and cautious; it's hard to expect the few lumps of atoms that make up our brains will somehow get an inside line on how all the other atoms are going to behave. Idealists, on the other hand, seem more likely to be confident that the ideas they have in mind will apply to the real world.

Idealism in that sense can of course be naïve, but I think it's important to remember how valuable that kind of confidence is when it is in fact justified. A primitive tribe is frightened by the growling in the bushes, but a stranger tells them confidently that from the particular sound of the growling that unseen beast must be a wumpus, and that if they just distract the wumpus with singing, the stranger will sneak around and stab the wumpus in its vulnerable tail and they will have wumpus fritters. Half an hour later they are all munching wumpus fritters with their new leader. That to me is the powerful source of idealism, to see beyond the unseen growling to the idea of a wumpus, which is easily distracted by singing, has a soft tail, and fries well. If wumpuses are a real thing and that growling thing is one, then strangers like that one are the leaders we want. This is the stuff that got humans out of the trees.

And I think that's one way in which the second kind of idealism connects to the first kind: it encourages confidence and makes people believe that just having an idea about how things should be is a step towards making them that way. Someone who is idealistic usually thinks their ideals are real enough to have power. Confident in that, they may actually do things.

The downsides of the first kind of idealism are probably also related to the second kind of idealism: inadequate attention to practical details; complacent confidence that saying and believing counts as doing; and enthusiasm for abstractions that can mask apathy about individuals. An idealist who feeds a hungry child may think less about the child than about Justice; will they even remember to feed the child, next time?

Maybe it's not just a linguistic accident that these two different concepts are both called "idealism", because they do seem connected.