EnlightenNext: In your book Moral Clarity, you argue for a new kind of idealism that can guide and inspire us, particularly in the political arena. You call it “grown-up idealism.” What do you mean by that?

Susan Neiman: Well, let’s first step back and ask ourselves what we mean when we say, “Be realistic.” It’s an expression people use all the time to point to what it means to be mature. They certainly don’t think that they’re making a metaphysical statement when they say it, but actually they are. What they’re saying is, “What you see is all there is,” which means that there is no sense in trying to live one’s ideals in order to create the world as you think it ought to be. As a matter of fact, the real message of “Be realistic” is “Decrease your expectations; don’t expect much from life.”

Let me illustrate this with a very common example. Young people between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five get told quite often that this is the best time of their lives. Why do we do that? Almost no one I know would want to be sixteen or twenty-two again. When you are young, you’re always getting this message blasted at you, which makes you feel, “Oh god, what am I doing wrong? All of the grown-ups are telling me that this is the best time of my life, and I’m miserable. I’m trying to figure out who I am. I’m trying to figure out what I want to do with my life. I’m trying to figure out what my strengths and weaknesses are.” This isn’t just anecdotal. There are empirical studies that show that people tend to get happier as they get older. When we tell young people, who tend to be idealistic and want to affect the world, that “this is the best time of your life,” we are preparing them to decrease their expectations of both what they can get from life and what they can give to it. In doing that, we’re telling them to devalue idealism and look at it as a product of being naïve. We’re saying that to grow up means to move from being idealistic to being realistic.

What I call “grown-up idealism,” which you can trace back to eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant, is simply the idea that the claims of reality and the claims of the ideal should be given equal weight. Kant recognized how important ideals are to us—that we are made to create ideals that we cannot completely fulfill and to set out for horizons we know we will not reach. Human beings find their lives to be empty if they’re not always looking toward the horizon. Ideals are like horizons—goals toward which you can move but can never attain. You see, transcendence doesn’t necessarily mean something mystical. It means wanting to go beyond yourself and the world as it’s given to you, which is a very deep human need.

Kant tells us that we have to pay attention both to reality and to the ideal, and that we ignore each at our peril. When we are acting and being in the world, we always need to keep one eye on what is and one eye on what ought to be—as we perceive it in relation to our ideals. The world being what it is and our being finite, we will never really get to the absolute ideal. But if we keep our eye on both of them and always keep both of them in mind, we can move what is closer to what ought to be. So being a grown-up is not about abandoning your youthful ideals, which is what we’re told all the time. That’s what is implied in the admonition to be realistic. Growing up may be about abandoning a youthful belief that one’s ideals are very easy to fulfill, but it’s certainly also about keeping them in your mind throughout your whole life.