IDEALISM IN POLITICS

EN: Does idealism have a role to play in politics?

SN: As long as it’s what I’m calling grown-up idealism, yes. Think about where we would be without idealism!

EN: Where would we be?

SN: Well, we wouldn’t have outlawed public execution by drawing and quartering, for one thing. Banning such torture was one of the great achievements of the eighteenth century. But even some of the major figures of that period, like the French philosopher Voltaire, were not initially sure that this was the right thing to do. They were outraged by particular instances of torture that they felt were unfair because some innocent had been tortured. But torture was a normal part of the judicial process, and it was a normal part of execution. You see, even someone who was as critical and brilliant as Voltaire wasn’t able to step out of the reality he took for granted in his time and say, “No, this is absolutely something that has to be condemned.” It took a period of time to work out Western society’s position on torture.

Without idealism, we would still have slaves in this country. During the period when we had slavery, many people in the South made what looked like moral arguments to defend it. They would argue that they actually took care of their slaves better than people in the North took care of the people in the factories. And in many instances, that was true. But I think that owning another human being is actually much worse than exploiting them—because slavery is an absolute evil. People in the South had arguments to say that it wasn’t, and they appealed to the Greeks. They said, look at the great Greek society. It was a slave society, and it was a flowering of culture.

There was no sense of racial equality at the time of the Civil War. Lincoln did not ever believe, alas, in racial equality. He was a great man, but if you had told Abraham Lincoln that a brilliant African-American man would be quoting him one hundred fifty years after his death in a bid to run for president, he would have shaken his head. He wouldn’t have thought it possible. This step forward is the result of ideals.

To move any further in getting rid of the racism that still plagues us, we have got to acknowledge how far we have come on the backs of this ideal of the fundamental equality of human beings. Without ideals, politics would still be stuck in the Dark Ages.

EN: So idealism has functioned in politics to move culture forward toward—

SN: —a greater good, a greater sense of justice, and a greater sense of decency, yes. You know, it’s very simple. Most really great ideas are so great that once you get them, they sound rather ordinary, even banal. But Kant’s perspective—what I’m calling grown-up idealism—took serious thinking to come up with. It’s important to realize that idealism is not a matter of rhetoric. It’s not a matter of wishful thinking. It’s not a matter of youthful dreams. It’s important to recognize that there is hardcore philosophy behind it because there’s such a tendency to dismiss idealism as, again, something only a kid who doesn’t understand enough about the world would come up with.

If you recall the first debate between Barack Obama and John McCain, McCain said about five times that Obama didn’t understand, implying that he was being naïve—that things cannot possibly move forward in a serious way and that it’s fuzzy-headed to think that they can. I want to offer people the chance to say, “Actually, you know what? First of all, it’s not fuzzy-headed. It’s been worked out in the most solid philosophical way possible. And secondly, you guys have a metaphysical viewpoint yourselves. You’ve got a philosophical viewpoint yourselves that you’re not looking at.” You see, to imply that the way things are is the way they have to be is to be blind to philosophical developments, to be blind to historical developments. People make it sound like common sense, but of course it’s not. It conceals a whole set of philosophical views.

EN: When someone says that reality is simply the way it is and that it is naïve to try to change it, what philosophical assumption is that based on?

SN: They’re talking about a view that you can trace back to seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes: that people are fundamentally in a state of war with each other; that human beings necessarily tend to greed and to a desire for power and self-assertion; and that without a strong authoritarian military force, we are not going to get anywhere. That’s a very common conservative view.

However, that makes me think of something else: There are an awful lot of people on both the left and the right who seem to take a perverse pleasure in suggesting that if you’re smart, sophisticated, and not naïve, then you’ll focus on the worst things about humankind and human history. There’s a kind of solace and relief in looking at the worst among us because not too many of us are really awful. If you focus on people who are worse than you are, then you can pat yourself on the back and go home and put your feet up. It’s much easier to focus on the worst than to focus on a case like that of Wesley Autry, for example, the New York construction worker who dove into the subway to save the life of a stranger who fell onto the tracks. People were fascinated with his story—and rightly so. It was a wonderfully heroic act. But ordinary cases of heroism that are smaller than that don’t typically get a lot of attention because they make us uncomfortable. They make us feel like there’s something that we could be doing that we aren’t. Whereas if we focus just on how bad humankind is, well, then there’s not really much we can do about it except watch it go downhill.

Of course, a lot of things have gone wrong in human history. I think we’ve lost certain things that we ought to retain, that we ought to try to rediscover—one of them being a wholehearted confidence in words like moral and noble and hero. I’m far from thinking that every kind of advance is genuine progress, but it’s striking how ungrateful we tend to be. We tend to focus on the ways in which we’ve gotten worse, and we just take for granted the ways in which we’ve gotten better.

EN: You’re saying that people on both ends of the political spectrum tend toward this kind of bleak realism, this sense that idealism is naïve, and that there’s no point in aspiring for change. However, in your book you also say that there is a fundamental difference between the right and the left in terms of moral conviction. You aptly note that the right—particularly the fundamentalist right—is perceived as having moral values and ideals, whereas progressives are often seen as lacking in moral backbone.

SN: Yes, fundamentalist Christians and many who join fundamentalist Islamist movements are motivated by moral views. They reject things that I’m assuming you and I also reject in Western secular culture. They don’t want their kids to look at Paris Hilton or Britney Spears as role models. They see Sex and the City or Beavis and Butt-Head—a whole host of things aimed at their children—as really quite terrifyingly nihilistic and base. They do not see their own lives as being fulfilled by the ideal of success represented by the slogan “Whoever dies with the most toys wins.” That’s not what they think life is about, and when they look at the vast majority of television channels and tabloids and websites, that’s what they see as our secular society in the West. What they don’t see is a robust, loud, wholehearted condemnation from enough progressives. I know there have been examples. All I’m arguing is that there are many decent people out there who have moral concerns, and no one has offered them an alternative. There’s a strong feeling that contemporary Western secular culture has not paid attention to moral values—that it has become ironic, suspicious, and skeptical about them and believes that the economic bottom line is the only bottom line. I’m not the only person who’s ever made this argument, but I do think that I may be the first person to try to propose an alternative that goes very deep into the heart of modern philosophy.

I don’t believe, however, that people on the right generally have true moral clarity. I’d say that they have moral simplicity. By and large, they don’t form good, complex, solid moral arguments. Take what is called “the right to life.” Millions of people in this country have fastened onto that as what they see as a question of moral clarity. People who hold up what they call the right to life are looking for a moral Archimedean point. They’re looking for a place where they can say: “Here I stand. I’m looking for a rock-bottom good action that gives meaning to my life because I don’t want my life simply to consist of bread-and-butter issues.” But they’re not asking any of the hard questions about the right to life in any larger sense. What about the rights a baby has to a decent life after it’s born? What do you do about collateral damage, which means killing civilians in order to pursue a legitimate war? What do you do about capital punishment?

Nevertheless, those on the right are able to do one thing that progressives are seldom able to do: They can use words like moral and noble and hero without using air quotes and turning them into “moral” and “noble” and “hero.” Philosophers call them scare quotes. A number of things are being said with this: “Don’t take me too seriously.” “I mean it a little ironically.” “I’m worried about looking sentimental or sappy or kitschy.”