Ideals and Idealism

I admit it; this whole rant was an overlong and rather bizarre love letter to my wife.




It should come as no surprise to any of you that I’ve always thought of myself as an idealist. Throughout my life, I’ve sought a cause to identify myself with. I’ve wanted, as the song says, something good to die for to make it beautiful to live. I’ve also been of the opinion that such idealism is invariably a good thing. As such, I’ve ranted and argued for my beliefs to a truly ridiculous and more than slightly obsessive degree. But I’ve never found one unifying cause that I could 100% identify with. However, I’ve had cause recently to think about just what my motivation is for such romanticism. Is my idealistic viewpoint due to a genuine desire to do what is right and to make a difference? Or is it (like an awful lot of my motivation) down to having an ego the size of a solar system?

One of the things that set me thinking along this path has been the stunningly inept morass of death and failure that constitutes the occupation of Iraq. When this invasion took place, if one were being charitable to the Neo-Conservative advocates of the war, it did so as a result of boundless idealism. In this case, the ideal was to free the people of Iraq from an indisputable goatrimmer of a dictator and to bring democracy and freedom to an area of the world that is littered with totalitarian regimes.

So much for the idealism. What has actually happened is that a vast army blundered it’s way from one disaster to the next. Misery upon misery has heaped upon the Iraqi people, and the optimistic justification behind the invasion now sounds more and more like a fig leaf trying and failing to hide the big fat cock of failure.

In this instance it would seem that idealism, something we are all taught can only lead to good things, has led to disaster. Rather than making realistic decisions about what needed to be done to ensure stability in Iraq, idealism has blinded those in a position to make those decisions. “The people of Iraq will be so happy to get their freedom that they will welcome us with open arms! We won’t need to keep the Iraqi army, or guard facilities rammed full of explosives; there won’t be many Iraqis who want to do anything other than celebrate their newfound freedom!” This view persisted in the face of a fast growing unease (and faster growing body count) about the stability of the country. It’s only in the last week or two that a sense of pragmatism seems to have been injected into considerations on Iraq.

That said, I’m not going to simply dismiss idealism as blinkered conceit on the basis of an unholy balls-up caused by a man who can’t be relied on to chew and swallow without assistance. When one looks throughout history, it is littered with examples of the idealism of a few changing the world for the better; the abolition of slavery for example, or the creation of the National Health Service. The Emancipation Proclamation, and the Civil Rights Movement, or the advancement of Women’s Rights; all of these things were given momentum against the opposition and indifference of the many thanks to the idealism of a few.

It’s just that I cannot shake the notion that, to many of the idealists responsible for these great things, the motivation of “I want to change the world for the better” is inextricably bound up with “I want everyone to know that it was me who made this change”. What’s more, I’m still undecided as to whether that egotism is a bad thing; does the result, the ideal that one is fighting for, matter so much that the fact that it’s being done for reasons of self-aggrandisement become irrelevant?

Another example springs to mind at this point; The 1916 Dublin Uprising. Patrick Pearse, one of the leaders of the rebellion, was determined to free Ireland from British rule. He wanted freedom for his people, and you may well agree that there is nothing wrong with that. Yet his method of achieving this was to begin a rebellion that, by his own admission, had absolutely no hope whatsoever of success. He told outright lies in order to get the Irish Volunteers to assemble for the uprising, and he got well over a 1000 of them killed. This was idealism splattered with blood and dripping with gore, and there are those who say that he did it entirely because he wanted to be seen as the martyr who won Ireland it’s freedom. If that is why he orchestrated the uprising, then my own view is that he was romantic fool who was happy to sacrifice anyone on the altar of his own ego and who would have been equally as happy had Ireland never been freed. Just so long as people remembered him.

I would contend that this example, as with that of Iraq, is a situation where the idealism that provided the driving force was gradually eclipsed by ego. Whereas in the case of, say, Martin Luther King, the ego was the engine behind the idealism and never obscured the whole point of the ideal.

That’s not to discount the possibility of living humbly for a cause rather than dying nobly in it’s furtherance. There are countless people out there working quietly and effectively in the furtherance of causes both good and bad. That said, one shouldn’t discount ego being a driving factor there. One may only want to lord it over ones friends and colleagues or simply feel smug about ones own innate goodness rather than assure themselves of a place in history, but it is ego that drives them to do this (at least partially).

So what am I driving at? Well, in the main I’m trying to say that ego is almost always a big factor behind ones pursuit of an ideal. And in itself that is not a bad thing. The problem only arises when the ego that drove the idealism in the first place becomes more important than the ideal itself. In other words, as can be seen from the examples of Iraq and the Dublin uprising, idealism can lead to one become blinkered to the actual facts of a situation and, far from improving it, can actually make it a lot worse. Thus, idealism can lead to bigotry (when one is idealistic about ones own country or culture and blind to any of it’s failings), or to ignorance (such as when people who are adamant that multiculturalism will work do their best to ignore the issues that stop it from doing so, such as people’s natural unease about that which is different). In that respect, we should beware idealism and ensure that we don’t ruin our lives to become its slave. After all, it can also lead to one becoming a lonely and friendless person who has driven ones friends away because they’ve failed to live up to the ideal that drives that person on.

That last one is most pertinent to me. If I could be allowed to wallow in sentimentality for a moment, I’ve spent my life searching in vain for something good to die for. And to the annoyance of pretty much all of my friends, I tackled all of those things with equal vehemence. I’ve lost count of the number of people who have patiently sat through whatever I was haranguing them about, and I’m astonished at the number of people who have subsequently remained my friend. It never occurred to me that maybe I could find the cause I was searching for to complete my life in the form of a person. Since getting married, I’ve come to realise that I have someone good to die for and it truly is beautiful to live.

You may all begin vomiting now…