Idealism is not dead in the world

Press, 16 January 1979, Page 7

Idealism is not dead in the world

By 1

DAVID GUNSTON

People say idealism is dead. They suggest that the increasing materialism of our age is sufficient evidence of this. They feel — and there are many of them — that the old noble ideals have largely been finally abandoned by the majority for day-to-day materialistic self-interest, chiefly as a result of outside pressures. Whenever I hear this view put forward and indeed it is regrettably popular nowadays — I think of the wise words of that great humanitarian Albert Schweitzer.

“Our humanity,” he wrote in his ‘Out of My Life and Thought,’ is by no means as materialistic as foolish talk is continually asserting it to be.

Just as the water of streams is small in amount compared to that which flows underground, so the idealism which becomes visible is small compared with what men and women bear locked in their hearts, unreleased or scarcely released,” and I am sure this is just as true today.

He added: “To unbind what is bound, to bring the underground waters to the surface: mankind is waiting and longing for such as can do that.” It is waiting still, perhaps less patiently than before. That is all very well, cynical pessimistic folk retort. The world has changed. Wars, upheavals, social revolutions, differing ideas of what is of value, religious apathy — these put a rather different complexion on things now.

To which that great, much-suffered Russian, Boris Pasternak, provides the answer: “In this era of world wars, in this atomic age,” he tells us, “values have changed. We have learnt that we are the guests of existence, travellers between two stations.

“We must discover security within ourselves. During our short span of life we must find our own

insights into our relationship with the existence in whicu we participate so briefly. Otherwise we cannot live. “This means, as I see it, a departure from the materialistic view Of the nineteenth century. It means a reawakening of the spiritual world, of our inner life Of religion. I don’t mean i eligion as a dogma, or as a church, but as a vital feeling.” It is my belief that this vital feeling, fed as always by the secret fount of

idealism and hope deep within the hearts of almost everybody, is not only still there but is stirring.

It is trying to reach the surface, almost as if it senses the crying need for its influence and direction in the modern world. Silently and unnoticed by the great bustling, seemingly callous world at large, perhaps; but still stirring.

After all, as the pointed enigram reminds us, what Les behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared with what lies within us; and it may be from an unconscious feeling for this great and important truth that much o‘ the cynicism and contempt for existing society stems, especially in the young. Never in human history ' as there been such concern for, such focusing of attention on, young people Equally I think it true to say that never before has youth been so sceptic-

al about the world in which it finds itself. Nevertheless, whilst young people may no longer feel .ny reverence for the past or for their elders, irrespective of the virtue or the wisdom of either, they do retain their own vitally important brand of idealism.

The trouble with those who are young is simply that they are young: it is their greatest handicap. It means that they can measure the wo. Id they know in only one direction —

from things as they are, forward to their own ideal of what things ought to be.

They s'mply cannot measure backwards to the past, to things as they used to be with their ingredients of good and bad, simply because they have not lived long enough. And their sideways measuring of the world, into other races or societies, is at best superficial and inevitably limited: they just have not had time and opportunity to know them well, and place them into the human perspective.

It is older people who must try to add these two measurements — without seeking to kill or quash any of youth’s latent idealism. This is the root core of the inevitable generation gap that is at once one of the world’s greatest tragedies and one of its greatest opportunities. But age must hei,> by example, not by preaching. As Abraham Kaplan tells us: “Fullness of years may bring wisdom, but

ve of wisdom is more passionate in the young. It is they in whom the sense oi wonder is most intense, whose horizons spread the widest, whose determination to make, something of themselves and this great world is unflinching. I do not know what better task our philosophers can set themselves than to restore the youthful hope in this brave new world,”

Many people die, as Oliver Wendell Holmes pointed out, with their music still in them. Why should thij be so? Very often it is simply that they are always getting ready to live instead of living in the here and now.

But increasingly today it is because they have ceased to live hopefully and idealistically. They have given up, can’t be bothered any more, have retreated into a form of monasticism, not the high-minded and dedicated monasticism of tne early chu"ch, but the modern monasticism, ‘the withdrawal into work, hobbies, sport. making money, watching TV, mindless pursuits like bingo.

They feel with a certain sincerity that the best way out is inwards, to view politics, public life, religion, high aims with studied contempt, that the less they have to do with them the better.

Yet surely deep inside these very same people the flame of idealism is not extinguished. In the inspiration of nature, of form and colour and scent, in the uplift of music and literature, and above all in the love of human beings for one another, idealism of the pu-

rest and finest sort lives on, and will always do so. The difficulty is to fos» ter it and bring it cAit into the open, because people with ideals, however modest or humble they may consider them, willing to stand up and fight and above ail to work for them, are pitifully needed everywhere in the world today.

For the true idealist is not simply a dreamer. He seeks always to pursue what his hope leads to long for, what his heart tells him is right, in a way his head says will work. Of course, in a sense we are all of us, in Charles Lamb’s words: “only what might have been,” insofar as all our lives fall far short of the hope d-for achievement even the humblest of ideals and expectations once aroused in us.

And sometimes this feeling grows so strong in people that they jettison all idealism in a passing mood of despair. Yet is not this feeling an intended part of life on this earth?

Is not the basic longing for better things, the open or secret yearning for deeper fulfilment, evidence of some higher purpose doing its best, however incompletely, to lure us towards itself — a great shining magnet drawing the pygmy particles upward?

No, as Carl Schurz says: “Ideals are like stars: you will not succeed in touching them with your hands. But, like the seafaring men on the desert of waters, you choose them as your guides, and following them, reach your destiny.”