The word philosopher means “lover of wisdom.” The Greeks who first coined the term really meant and lived it: They were passionate about discovering the truths of human nature, wanting to create a culture that would represent the highest human achievement. That was then. Today, several millennia later, how many of us hear the word philosopher and think of love and wisdom? I certainly don’t. With some rare exceptions, the academic study of philosophy seems more about fine-tuning the obscure and arcane rather than exploring significant questions about living our lives. But within a few moments of meeting Susan Neiman—with her strong handshake, extraordinary alertness, vivaciousness, and passionate responses to my every question—I knew I’d met someone who truly fit the bill. The wide range of her knowledge and interests pours out of her unselfconsciously in a heartfelt torrent. Neiman is doing something rare and gutsy for philosophers these days—she’s asking questions about things that matter to all of us. In her latest book, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists, she invites us to think carefully about the divisions that have fractured our culture so that we can realize the possibility of our moving forward together.

Neiman has an unusual capacity to uncover our differing philosophical assumptions and, simultaneously, our shared humanity. She suspends her own political judgments to get inside the hearts and minds of fundamentalists on the right, and she reveals the deeper longings that not only motivate them but motivate us all. And Neiman shows powerfully how idealism, which is what ignited the Obama campaign, is neither naïve nor empty but may be the deepest and most significant aspect of our humanness. In this period just following the U.S. presidential election, her gripping and trenchant analysis of the philosophical underpinnings of the fundamentalist right and the progressive left provides us with the kind of understanding we need to chart a new and potentially unifying course into the future.

Neiman, needless to say, is not your usual academic—despite her impeccable credentials. After training at Harvard with John Rawls, one of the leading philosophers of the twentieth century, she taught philosophy at Yale and at Tel Aviv University. These days, she is increasingly stepping outside the academy to play a public role. Currently she is director of the Einstein Forum, an international interdisciplinary public think tank near Berlin. After the success of her previous book, Evil in Modern Thought, which was in essence a history of philosophy, her readers asked her to write about good and evil in response to the events of our time. “This,” she comments, “is of course something that a person with formal philosophical training has absolutely no training to do.” But with the election of George W. Bush in 2004, she was “absolutely floored” that many people said they voted for Bush because he represented “moral clarity.” She then felt she had to write about morality for progressives, who, she notes, “have a very hard time talking in moral terms.” She is thrilled at how much Obama has transformed and reinvigorated progressives, and her hope is to provide a philosophically sound basis for progressive idealism that could change the nature of our political and social debates.

In the following interview, which I conducted before the election, Neiman explores how important idealism is to our finding a new kind of heroism that can change the world.

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.

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.”

A HEROISM TO LIVE FOR

EN: In Moral Clarity, you observe that because progressives themselves have an ironic or skeptical relationship with moral ideals, they don’t think that people on the right are truly acting from moral concerns. Can you speak about what you see as the deeper motivation of fundamentalists, both here and abroad?

SN: Both jihadists and many fundamentalist Christians are motivated by a desire that makes people want to be heroic, to transcend what is base within us, to transcend those desires determined by material things and animalistic impulses. There’s a strong human desire to transcend what is given to us, and as Immanuel Kant says, that is the only moment in which human beings know their freedom—the moment when we’re actually able to defy our material interests, even to the point of risking our lives. That’s the only moment at which we know we’re free, because normally we’re motivated and pulled by a lot of different claims on us. People often yearn to know that they’re acting in a more transcendent, absolutely free, and deeply human moment. They don’t see enough opportunities to do that in contemporary secular culture, so they turn to fundamentalist views and now, indeed, to things that go as far as suicide terrorism. Of course, that’s a devastating conclusion. But we need to develop new notions of heroism that don’t involve the idea that you actually have to die and be a tragic hero in order to express freedom. Right now, that is the model of heroism we have, and it goes back to the ancient Greeks.

EN: So you’re saying that an ideal is actually something that you want to live for, but if push comes to shove, then it is something that you would die for.

SN: Yes, but we need to get out of that mode of thinking, actually. We ought to view idealism as something you want to live for, something that you’re willing to make sacrifices for, which is harder. You have to take risks and make sacrifices—there’s no question about that. Otherwise, you’re not doing anything heroic. The model that the only true hero is a tragic hero is actually just another trick to dissuade us from ever taking any risks or doing anything heroic in the first place. If you view people as having to die tragically in order to do something heroic, it lets you off the hook, so we need to get away from that view.

I have not spent as much time studying fundamentalist Christians. But the other day I was watching a movie, Jesus Camp, with one of my seventeen-year-old twin daughters. My daughter was looking at these kids who were going to this evangelical summer camp and she kept saying, “Aren’t they crazy? Aren’t they crazy?” I didn’t see craziness in the least. In a couple of the characters who were being portrayed there, I saw a deep sense of commitment, of wanting to do good in the world, of wanting a sense of dignity that I would not see in a kid who is obsessed with wanting the latest iPhone.

EN: What you are pointing to as grown-up idealism, then, is just what you are describing—having a foundation of values that one would truly be willing to sacrifice for, risk for, and live for?

SN: Exactly. And I have to say that while I have been using the phrase “grown-up idealist” for a long time now, I did not think I would ever find a politician who so completely exemplified it the way Barack Obama does. He is exactly that—a grown-up idealist. He’s got his eye on reality—whether it’s using constitutional law or knowing what it’s like to be on the South Side of Chicago—but he says that that reality is not the world as it ought to be. I believe that this is what millions of Americans have been inspired by in the last year.

As somebody who grew up in the middle of the civil rights movement in Georgia, I think our having the chance to elect Obama represents the best that America can be. The civil rights movement was the last great historical event that Americans can be unequivocally proud of. We really changed the world, and we did it with comparatively little violence. There was some violence, but there wasn’t civil war, even though there might have been. The civil rights movement was an example of Americans being forced to look at the conflict between our own ideals and the reality that was America. My mother was involved in the campaign to desegregate the Atlanta public school system, so I really grew up in the thick of this. My kids don’t get it. My kids are already living in a better world than I grew up in. I tell them that in our most idealistic, most optimistic days in the 1960s, we could not have imagined being able to elect a black president in our lifetime. It is a sign that although there’s still racism and we still need to work on it, in my lifetime the world has gotten better in a really significant way.

Yet there’s still a lot of cynicism about that. The book Stuff White People Like says that white people like Barack Obama because he makes them feel good about themselves. Forget it. He makes all of us feel good, and that’s right. We’re right to feel good! You cannot make progress unless you see some examples of it, unless you believe it is possible. You can’t do anything to improve the conditions we have now unless you occasionally see some signs that things have gotten better. And forty-five years after the March on Washington, they have.