Growing up, we’re taught that the world is filled with the idealists and the pragmatists; those with lofty visions of what the world should be and those who make the world what they want it to be. Somewhere along the waywe’re told that you have to choose. Keep those immutable ideals and be cast as irrelevant to the world around. Seek to affect change in the world around you and be reduced to a moral vagabond. All too often, the choice is forced by human mortality; we take the bait, choose to survive and are controlled by those that lord a higher ideal over us, not by an inherent superiority of being, but rather the stroke of luck that grants them the privilege to face a different reality than our own. We grow up with a finite, absolute set of ideals and allow them to be sullied by our circumstance. We are then told that this series of events are merely a sign of our weakness and we are to feel guilt due to our lack of choice. We may go even further and mute that background hum of guilt that informs us that we’re not being the people we expect of ourselves. This adds the convenience of avoiding disappointment in ourselves.

I refuse to accept this.

A possible solution that we sometimes choose is to alter our ideals, allow them to flow with the very time that threatens to cause us to betray our ideals in the first place. You solve many problems this way; no longer can circumstance be the cause of contradiction because circumstance automatically corrects your ideals to avoid the conflict. We never have to feel guilty again. Arguably, this is the balance that many find today. Those that so violently protest the use of racial profiling, yet clutch their handbags just a little closer to themselves as they pass by a person in an ethnic minority group. You change your ideals based on the circumstance you’re in. However, you do this, and suddenly an entire host of problems emerge, beginning with the question of why these ideals are necessary in the first place. By attempting to correct one inconsistency in your ideals, suddenly the inconsistency is the ideals themselves. I reject this notion.

I view the problem not so much as one of idealism versus pragmatism, but rather, we grow and mature, but we expect our ideals to remain the same. The same as when we were 7 and the greatest moral judgements we had to make were about sharing a pail in the sandbox with the kid that ate paste. These schoolground morals are a great place to start, to learn, to investigate, but they’re not the end of that process - a process that it seems most of us do not progress through.

Largely I argue this in this fashion because much of human growth is stimulated by the incredible notion that we are not the only living, breathing entities in this world with free will. There’s a whole world of people out there that we have no direct control over, many of whom we don’t even have the slightest influence on. This excludes further the physical world, which we have even less control over minus the modern pieces of flint that we rub together for the sparks that we live by. Why, pray tell, do we base our ideals on entities outside of our own control?

This is what I’ve come to believe is the next stage of growth, but by no means the final stage of growth. Our ideal world isn’t one based on circumstance or especially things we have no control over; it makes no sense to place avoiding death as an ideal, as at the very end, we have no choice in the matter. Further, our ideals cannot reflect a reality that does not exist; it cannot deny inherent emotions and desires that exist within our species, good or bad. My ideal cannot be to live a life where even the sense of a negative emotion, be it malice, jealousy, anger, or hatred, is considered contrary to my ideals.  Rather my ideals must be based on the action or reaction to my reality. I’m not assuming I’m something I’m not, thus I can’t expect myself to do something I can’t. At the end of the day, isn’t that the definitive ideal circumstance?

The beauty of this situation is that a number of difficult conflicts resolve themselves; no longer is there the question of whether the ends justify the means as the ends are the means.

What this doesn’t do, however, is make life inherently easier – in this circumstance, you need to be very thoughtful about your set of ideals and ensure that they are self-consistent. This also doesn’t eliminate guilt entirely. Rather, what it does is force you to live by your own self-consistent ideals and the sense of guilt only comes when what I choose to do conflicts with these notions I have developed. I do not feel guilty because of the outcome of the choices, but only do I feel it when it assists me in making those choices.

In my world, the ideal world already exists; we live in it. What this paradigm of idealism allows me to do is fulfill my life and affect change around me without subjugating myself to a more juvenile notion of ideals that no living person can stand up against.

Peace,

Mubdi