Value for Thursday of Week 03 in the season of Dormancy

Living with Ideals

Without ideals, practicing justice is impossible.

Far away there in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them, but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them, and try to follow where they lead. [Louisa May Alcott.]
The measure of a society is not only what it does but the quality of its aspirations. [Attributed to Wade Davis.]
In a constitutionally ordered state, where laws are derived from broad principles of right and wrong and where those principles are enshrined and protected by agreed upon procedures and practices, it can never be in the long-term interest of the state or its citizens to flout those procedures at home or associate too closely overseas with the enemies of your founding ideals. [Tony Judt, Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century (Penguin Books, 2008).]
I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves. The ideals that have lighted me on my way and time after time given me new courage to face live cheerfully, have been Truth, Goodness and Beauty. [Albert Einstein, The World As I See It (1949), Chapter 1, Part I.]

An ideal is a conception of a state of justice. An ideal can be modest but usually it is associated with a bold and dynamic vision for the future. Ideals seem to provide energy to personal quests and social movements. This infusion of energy is a main value of an ideal.

The other value of an ideal is in moving a person or a society toward a more just state. The emphasis here is on the direction of the impetus and movement. Our system of justice favors ideals that respect and honor all people. This is the element of harmony, which is a necessary companion to the element of strength.

We will see these two elements – strength and harmony – in many other values. In each case, the quality of the value (whether it works for good or for ill) depends on whether the value is in harmony with justice, i.e., the service of the well-being of living beings. As a counter-example, Javert’s idea of justice wasx misguided. The twentieth century saw the rise and fall of two movements with epically misguided ideals: Nazism and Communism. On the other hand, the idealism of the civil rights movement in the United States went a long way toward liberating a race of people who had been mistreated for centuries. The democratic ideal has helped to bring about a more widely shared prosperity than was possible in the age of kings. Having ideals is important; having good ideals is essential. A society with bad ideals is like a child who wishes for an end to bedtime and restrictions on candy consumption, and does everything he can to realize his infantile notion of utopia. An ideal is a little like love: the desire to be in love may drive us but only a responsible conception of love can drive us forward.

This section on ideals refers not to the German, Briti sh, Russian, or other schools of idealist philosophy but to idealism as a matter of conscience, grounded in reality. This topic is an extension and an amalgamation of the first three – conscience, objectivity and fairness – sometimes called pragmatic idealism, or an idealism firmly grounded in reality. “Pragmatic idealism is the notion of having lofty, idealistic goals but also understanding and accepting that those goals need to be achieved within practical, real-world constraints.” “Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition that – very broadly – understands knowing the world as inseparable from agency within it. . . . all philosophical concepts should be tested via scientific experimentation, that a claim is true if and only if it is useful (relatedly: if a philosophical theory does not contribute directly to social progress then it is not worth much), that experience consists in transacting with rather than representing nature, that articulate language rests on a deep bed of shared human practices that can never be fully ‘made explicit’.” In other words, the idealism of a scientific naturalist imagines a new reality, grounded however, in the realities of nature.

Real

True Narratives

In the United States, the person who most comes to mind on the subject of idealism is John F. Kennedy. Having attained the presidency at the age of forty-three, he challenged a nation to address its challenges, challenged the American people to volunteer in service to their country and put the dream of landing men on the moon first into words and then into action. Politicians from both political parties continue to invoke his legacy.

Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963 (Little, Brown and Company, 2003).
Richard Reeves, President Kennedy: Profile of Power (Simon & Schuster, 1993).
Richard Reeves, Portrait of Camelot: A Thousand Days in the Kennedy White House (Abrams, 2010).
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (Houghton Mifflin, 1965).
Terry Golway and Les Krantz, JFK: Day By Day: A Chronicle of the 1,036 Days of John F. Kennedy's Presidency (Running Press, 2010).
Chris Matthews, Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero (Simon & Schuster, 2012): “. . . a valuable reminder of Kennedy’s skill at uniting toughness with inspirational leadership.”

Other books on ideals and idealism include the following.

Gary Tillery, The Cynical Idealist: A Spiritual Biography of John Lennon (Quest Books, 2009).
C.W.R. Long, Bygone Heat: Travels of an Idealist in the Middle East (I.B. Tauris, 2004).
Robert Coles, The Call of Service: A Witness to Idealism (Houghton Mifflin, 1993).
Williamjames Hull Hoffer, The Caning of Charles Sumner: Honor, Idealism, and the Origins of the Civil War (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), about an attack on the Senate floor because a Senator openly opposed slavery.
Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels (Random House, 2018): “At a time when liberalism is besieged by populisms of both the right and the left, these portions of Meacham’s book offer a strong if unfashionable reminder of all that progressive American government has achieved.”
Michael Kazin, American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011): “According to Kazin, the American left has never been much good at building institutions, or getting people elected or seeing its economic programs realized. But it has been enormously effective at shifting the nation’s moral compass and expanding its sense of political possibility.”
Jill Lepore, This America: The Case for the Nation (Liveright, 2019): “Purging American identity of nationalism and refounding it on a purified liberalism is her purpose in this brief but ambitious book, based on essays in Foreign Affairs and The New Yorker.”
Samantha Power, The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir (Dey Street Books, 2019): “People told me she was a real idealist — not a tortured one like me. But then she had to eat some heaping plates of realism in public, like defending Obama’s nonintervention in the genocidal Syrian civil war.”
Alexander Vindman, Here, Right Matters: An American Story (Harper/HarperCollins, 2021): “. . . the story of an ordinary man placed in extraordinary circumstances who did the right thing.”
Robert A. Gross, The Transcendentalists and Their World (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2022): “One learns a great deal in this book — about religious history, the railroad’s influence on smaller-town living, changing theories of education, tensions between individualism and collectivism that still bedevil the country today.”
Mark Clague, O Say Can You Hear? A Cultural Biography of “The Star Spangled Banner” (W.W. Norton & Co., 2022): “. . . it’s a song for a country that is still in the fight, for its existence and its ideals, and it offers an invitation to any and all — the ‘you’ of the first line —- to join that fight, even if in Key’s time the 'you' was hardly inclusive.”
Eliza Griswold, Circle of Hope: A Reckoning With Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2024): “. . . a story that countless millions of Americans might instantly relate to — about how political disagreements can fracture the closest friendships and break the best institutions. . . . about a collection of people who possess great conviction and endure and inflict immense hurt in the face of conflict.”
Stephanie Gorton, The Icon and the Idealist: Margaret Sanger, Mary Ware Dennett, and the Rivalry That Brought Birth Control to America (Ecco, 2024): “In her gripping double biography of these two foremothers of the American birth control movement . . . Stephanie Gorton skillfully depicts the grueling decades-long struggle of Sanger (the icon, in this telling) and Dennett (the idealist) to make birth control available and legal.”
Greg Grandin, America, América: A New History of the New World (Penguin Press, 2025): “A Bold New History Highlights Latin America’s Humanist Ideals - . . . a fresh account of the region as an incubator of internationalism and commitment to the common good.”

Query whether Communism, with its focus on economics, was truly an idealistic system.

Francis Spufford, Red Plenty: A Novel (Graywolf Press, 2012): about "the dream that mobilized a generation, created one of history's largest industrial monsters and ultimately doomed it to failure."

Technical and Analytical Readings

Thomas Hofweber, Idealism and the Harmony of Thought and Reality (Oxford University Press, 2023): “We are special since there is an intimate connection between our human minds and reality itself. This book defends a form of idealism which holds that our human minds constrain, but do not construct, reality as the totality of facts.”
Alan Khazei, Big Citizenship: How Pragmatic Idealism Can Bring Out the Best in America (Public Affairs, 2010): “Khazei offers a touching memoir of what young entrepreneurs with vision can do to change not just communities but the world.”
Nicholas Rescher, A System of Pragmatic Idealism, Volume I: Human Knowledge in Idealistic Perspective (Princeton University Press, 1992): “. . . dedicated to epistemology, the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of nature.”
Nicholas Rescher, A System of Pragmatic Idealism, Volume II: The Validity of Values (Princeton University Press, 1993): “. . . this second volume of the trilogy has as its theme the utility of values for a proper understanding of ourselves and the world we live in. Rescher’s key thesis, which is argued from various angles and points of departure, is that rationality as such and in general is bound up with the theory and practice of rational evaluation.”
Nicholas Rescher, A System of Pragmatic Idealism, Volume III: Metaphilosophical Inquiries (Princeton University Press, 1994): “. . . a sustained defence of philosophy in our "post-philosophical era" and a cogent argument that rationality and pluralism authenticate its pragmatic vitality and idealistic nature.”
Axel Wustehube & Michael Quante, Pragmatic Idealism: Critical Essays on Nicholas Rescher’s Pragmatic Idealism (Brill Rodopi, 1998): “The contributions which are presented here for the first time and Nicholas Rescher's responses cover the most important topics of philosophy and give a deep and detailed insight into the strength of Rescher's pragmatic idealism.”

Photographs

Documentary and Educational Films

Imaginary

Fictional Narratives

"I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been. It had committed suicide. It had set itself steadfastly towards comfort and ease, a balanced society with security and permanency as its watchword, it had attained its hopes--to come to this at last. Once life and property must have reached almost absolute safety. The rich had been assured of his wealth and comfort, the toiler assured of his life and work. No doubt in that perfect world there had been no unemployed problem, no social question left unsolved. And a great quiet had followed. . .” [H.G. Wells, “The Time Machine” (1895).]

Novels:

Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1900): “Beyond the immediate details and the effects of a shipwreck, this novel portrays, in the words of the story’s narrator, Captain Marlow, ‘those struggles of an individual trying to save from the fire his idea of what his moral identity should be. . . .’”
George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1874): “The novel’s subtitle – ‘A Study of Provincial Life’ – suggests a serious project guided by ethical and scientific principles. This aim was a far remove from the conventional marriage plots and melodramatic style of ‘silly lady novelists’, as Eliot snarkily called them. She offered her readers multiple perspectives and ways to study the lives of others.”
Edwidge Danticat, Claire of the Sea Light: A Novel (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013): the author imagines her childhood Haitian village in glowing images.
Matt Gallagher, Youngblood: A Novel (Atria Books, 2016): “We come to understand just how young many of the American soldiers are; how duty and idealism and doubts blur together in combat; and how ‘the ambiguities of the desert’ could blunt or undermine the best intentions of even the most determined soldiers.”
Mary Gordon, There Your Heart Lies: A Novel (Pantheon Books, 2017): “A Novel Looks Back at a Woman’s Idealistic Days in the Spanish Civil War ”
Lawrence Osborne, Beautiful Animals: A Novel (Hogarth, 2017): “Of the central character, an entitled young Englishwoman named Naomi, her father observes: 'She wanted to be a Samaritan: the easiest job in the world, and perfect for the useless European middle classes.'”
Salman Rushdie, Victory City: A Novel (Random House, 2023), “is about a kingdom that is founded on pluralism but fails to live up to its ideals.”
Joseph O’Neill, Godwin: A Novel (Pantheon, 2024): “To Lakesha, Mark is an ambiguous figure in a dark workplace comedy that escalates into a farce of organizational toxicity. Her portion of ‘Godwin’ mostly chronicles the unraveling of the Group and the testing of her own idealism, as turf battles and procedural squabbles turn into a nasty power struggle waged in memos and meetings.”
Michelle de Kretser, Theory & Practice: A Novel (Catapult, 2025): “This revolution is in full swing when the 24-year-old narrator . . . leaves her job in market research and moves from Sydney to Melbourne in 1986 to attend a graduate program in English literature. She buys a vintage dress in ‘Intellectual Black,’ finds a feminist scholar to supervise her thesis on Virginia Woolf and falls in with a loose circle of ironic creatives: a sax player in a feminist band, a sculptor who “looked like Patti Smith but with much stormier hair” and a Marxist lecturer in art history who throws a party for his brand-new Apple Macintosh . . .”

Poetry

I followed you like a rainbow of peace
along the paths of heaven;
I followed you like a friendly torch
in the veil of darkness,
and I sensed you in the light, in the air,
in the perfume of flowers,
and the solitary room was full
of you and of your radiance.

Absorbed by you, I dreamed a long time
of the sound of your voice,
and earth's every anxiety, every torment
I forgot in that dream.
Come back, dear ideal, for an instant
to smile at me again,
and in your face will shine for me
a new dawn. 
[Paolo Tosti, “Die Ideale” (The Ideal)]

Over the carnage rose prophetic a voice, / Be not dishearten'd, affection shall solve the problems of freedom yet, / Those who love each other shall become invincible, / They shall yet make Columbia victorious.

Sons of the Mother of All, you shall yet be victorious, / You shall yet laugh to scorn the attacks of all the remainder of the earth.

No danger shall balk Columbia's lovers, / If need be a thousand shall sternly immolate themselves for one.

One from Massachusetts shall be a Missourian's comrade, / From Maine and from hot Carolina, and another an Oregonese, shall be friends triune, / More precious to each other than all the riches of the earth.

To Michigan, Florida perfumes shall tenderly come, / Not the perfumes of flowers, but sweeter, and wafted beyond death.

It shall be customary in the houses and streets to see manly affection, / The most dauntless and rude shall touch face to face lightly, / The dependence of Liberty shall be lovers, / The continuance of Equality shall be comrades.

These shall tie you and band you stronger than hoops of iron, / I, ecstatic, O partners! O lands! with the love of lovers tie you.

(Were you looking to be held together by lawyers? / Or by an agreement on a paper? or by arms? / Nay, nor the world, nor any living thing, will so cohere.)

[Walt Whitman, “Over the Carnage Rose Prophetic a Voice”]