During much of the twentieth century and into the new millennium there has been an unfortunate tendency to undermine some of our loftiest ideals merely to replace them with the ideal of the absence of ideals – that is, to substitute for positive values, the negative or utter absence of values of the permissive society.
I think that this is a mistake. I also suspect that this effort cannot succeed anyway.
In the first place, it may be impossible to live without ideals of some sort. Those who dismiss ideals – whether aesthetic, ethical, romantic, political or other – have simply adopted one set of ideals over others: in other words, they favor the ideal of a life of brutal “factuality.” (I call this the “Joe Friday” view of life: “Just the facts, mam.”) Needless to say, there are many kinds of facts. Whether ideals are truly believed or espoused may be a fact too. The question of whether an ideal is “true” may itself be factual, depending on how it is understood and discussed.
This denuded conception of life without higher ideals seems excessively bleak, to me, and also unsatisfying. The debunking mentality and “anti-ideals” attitude is itself based on one set of subjective and arbitrary ideals, as I insist, which are no more sophisticated or true than the “unrealistic and impractical” values of the nineteenth century’s Romantic poets.
To my mind, today’s popular dismissiveness towards values and ideals is a symptom of an impoversihed emotional life, not to mention indicative of a lack of imagination and intelligence. It is the attitude of the college sophomore who discovers that his first love has been disappointing. (Real love deepens with pain, including the pain of loss and betrayal.)
If all of life is correctly described as a process or movement towards death, then it does not necessarily follow that death is the purpose or meaning of life. This assumption is a version of the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy. By the same token, all romantic love between a heterosexual man and woman may have an underlying physical explanation and a corresponding possibility of fulfillment, but this does not make the love of men and women something which is reducible to copulation or, worse, to a matter of genitals only. Come to think of it, the same may be said of sex – sex is not (and this should be on the obvious side of things by now) necessarily or always about “love.”
It has been suggested that a “cynic is a disappointed idealist.” (Wilde) Perhaps the currently fashionable cynicism in Western culture may be explained as the result of disillusion: it has followed upon the collapse of nineteenth century Romanticism in the hyper-industrialized and technological society of the twentieth century and beyond. Humanism and the optimism of the Enlightenment ran headlong into two world wars and the experience of the Holocaust, giving rise to a sense of moral exhaustion which is still with us.
Yet to abandon the highest values of our civilization in the relatively affluent and successful period that has followed upon these wars is to give the victory to the enemies who were responsible for those horrors in the first place – enemies who were defeated, with great effort and sacrifice, in those struggles of the last century.
It is precisely the view of persons as “things,” or “meat puppets,” as someone once said to me, to be used and discarded, to be thrown away, and the ideologies of power to which such views of the person give rise (which are certainly not scientific) that have led to wars and genocides. They are what lies behind the forms of State-totalitarianism and terrorism that we fight against now.
In the recent incident in Beslan, Russia – and this cannot be invented – several of the children who were hostages were made to witness the murder of their fathers and then made to dance afterwards, for no particular reason, by persons claiming to protest, in this exemplary way, Russian and Western “cultural hegemony.” I do not envy the inner lives or emotional level of the people who did those things. I shudder to think of what “cultural hegemony” under such persons might be.
Beyond what Freud called “ordinary unhappiness,” is the emptiness and lack of meaning that characterizes the lives of so many of today’s aging hipsters, who remain much “too cool” for values of any kind, for whom others are either chumps or sexual objects. The idea of self-sacrifice is “an idiotic illusion,” they yawn, while the lack of taste or joy in life is just “the way things are,” they add with a shrug, rather than the obvious result of this morbid and false philosophy of anti-idealism or nihilism which they advocate.
There is no shortage of horror and suffering in the world, but (if you search for them and hang on to them) there are also beauty and generosity, joy and meaning. Most of all, there is love. Any man who has never felt an ideal or passion for which he would give his life – a woman he loves, an idea, a value, or the safety of a child – is a deeply impoverished and sad excuse for a human being. For such a person one feels not so much anger nor an inclination to engage in debate, but only pity and disgust.
These lines were written more than a century ago:
Is this verse sentimental and unrealistic? Perhaps. Yet the poet expresses perfectly (and forever) what it feels like to love someone. The words are true, in any case, and they always will be – like the ideals which inspired them.[/i]
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