Naivety, Thy Name Be Idealism

Despite the seeming jubilation of Barack Obama’s hope/change/yes we can campaign, it seems as though idealism is on the outs in today’s political discourse. There have been a couple of issues that I’ve written on the last little while that have drawn the response, “That sounds nice, but I think you’re being too idealistic about all of this.”

The charge of idealism has always been an interesting critique for me. When leveled, I usually take it to mean that while people might not disagree with the essence of what you happen to be arguing, they believe the context of your arguments to be naive and lacking in contact with the reality of the situation. In itself, I don’t have much of a problem with the critique, which is to say that I don’t necessarily disagree with its use. But neither do I think it often fundamentally undermines the thrust of the arguments I present.

First of all, I think that in our contemporary political discourse people tend to underestimate the influence and effect that idealism has and has had on the world around them. Many of our most cherished institutions arose out of idealistic notions of how countries and societies ought to organize themselves. In many ways, the American project itself is an exercise in idealism and it is to the spirit of that idealism that many proponents of American exceptionalism point when rallying the citizens of the country, much beloved Barack Obama included. Notions of universal human rights, democracy, and self-determination, these were all once considered idealistic flights of fancy. And yet now these notions underwrite the quality and way of life that we all enjoy and in many ways take for granted.

It is in this regard that I think idealism offers its greatest strengths to us and ought not be dismissed quite so quickly as many would see fit to do: idealism often offers the arena in which some of our best ideas are born. In some senses I think that a failure to cultivate a sense of idealism is one’s intellectual pursuits functions as a sort of intellectual dishonesty. Even political and social intellectualism isn’t a wholly pragmatic affair, there is an element of creativity and visioning that we admire of those who engage the exercise most exceptionally. Closing one’s self off to the possibilities of idealistic intellectual pursuit is not unlike cutting one’s self off at the knees before even beginning to run a race. Banishing idealism from the race is in many respects to deny that the best part of the race even exists. Doing so fundamentally limits what we might expect to uncover from the creative thinking process and at its worst promises to provide a cadre of mediocre options as a result.

To my mind, the fact of the mater is that societies tend to benefit from having people engage in intellectual analysis and exploration free from borders and limitations and so we ought to encourage such an environment to the best of our ability.

Of course, while idealism in intellectual pursuit might be something to be encouraged, its unrelenting presence in terms of practice or application can become something of a hindrance. But here I think the problem is a confusion about what domains we take idealism and realism/pragmatism to best operate and imagine a tension that needn’t necessarily exist because of that confusion. As a self-avowed idealist of sorts, while I may engage in a thoroughly idealistic intellectual exercise about certain issues and ideas, I don’t tend to carry that idealism over into the application component of ideas or addressing certain issues and certainly don’t fall back on a dogmatic reliance on idealism to accurately sum up the circumstances of said application. To do so is to misunderstand the domain in which one is operating. But so too, I think, is the case with the rigid demand for realism in the intellectual exercise of examining and exploring different ideas and possibilities.

While the open creativity of idealism might best serve me in intellectual pursuits, the sober assesment of realism is best equipped to inform me about the circumstances and contexts on the ground. Which is not to say that one doesn’t or shouldn’t take the realities on the ground into consideration when engage in intellectual theorizing. But one not necessarily allow one’s self to be constrained by those realities in the theorizing/exploration process for fear of missing out on some the best possible ideas for discovery. In this sense, the tension between idealism and realism is only real insofar as we misunderstand the values of one or the other to be pervasive across all domains.

Rectifying that potential misunderstanding stands not only to better clarify our discursive project, but also, I think, to cultivate a more productive applicative landscape.

Tagged as: aplication, idealism, intellectual exploration, political discourse, practice, pragmatism, realism, theory