PITTSBURGH (TNS) — The expensive designer suits struck me, as did the very high end stereo. I’d heard him speak on world hunger in college a few times, where he’d speak in faded jeans, sandals, and a peasant work shirt. His politics were correspondingly leftwing.
His appeals to help feed the world’s hungry included calls for his affluent American audience to live simpler lives. He implied that the world’s poor lacked food because we all had too much. He cried sometimes.
SURPRISING DIFFERENCE
We were not friends, but he asked me to his room one day, and showed off his things, suits that each cost more than my entire wardrobe and a stereo that would cost my dad two or three weeks’ pay. I dimly remember pairs of really nice shoes to go with the suits.
When I, naively thinking one’s practice ought to fairly closely follow one’s preaching, asked him about the difference, he laughed. I remember the laugh, but not exactly what he said, except that he described his dress as part of a performance, done for effect.
And it worked. Amazingly, it worked. Not so much for the world’s poor, but for him. Other students talked about him as a great man, a kind of saint, a caring guy who felt so deeply for the world’s poor, a model for us all. They admired his idealism.
Some of those students knew about the suits and the shoes and the stereo, including girls who knew him from home and told me about their evenings together in very expensive Manhattan restaurants and night clubs. (He was from northern New Jersey. I will forbear making a snarky remark.) They knew he didn’t practice what he preached, but adored him for the performance alone.
I tried, maybe unkindly (I may have had a crush on one of the girls), to point out that you couldn’t praise someone for being a kind of person he wasn’t, just because he talked as if he were. They didn’t argue the point. They just insisted on his wonderfulness.
Not surprisingly, the late spring of his senior year, he suddenly became an ardent free marketer, gleefully quoting a famous sociologist who said that socialism was nonsense, though with a more pungent word than nonsense. He was going, as you might expect, to law school.
A formative experience
This was a formative experience for me. It taught me how much of public life is performative and how successful one can be by appealing to people’s ideals, so much so that they will credit you for being the person you claim to be even when they know you’re not. Orwell began his essay on Gandhi, “Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent,” and I knew exactly what he meant.
It explains a lot about America’s mass politics, not least why people of obviously low moral character are so admired and adored: because they articulate ideals. Maybe bad ones, but that doesn’t seem to matter.
But the common abuse of idealism says nothing about the value of idealism. We need a lot more of it, but in refined form.
An old saying runs that if you’re not a socialist when you’re young, you have no heart. If you’re still a socialist when you’re older, you have no brains. It assumes that we idealistically believe dumb things when we’re young and give up our dumb beliefs when we’re older, trading idealism for realism.
I think that’s wrong and misses something important about human beings. It’s not realism, it’s more like despair about our ability to keep pursuing the good we saw in our youth.
Our youthful ideals are usually right. We may not understand them well and we may bungle their political expression, but the ideals of the genuinely idealistic person points to a human good, and a human good that needs defense or promotion.
Unless, that is, you’re a bad human being, whose ideals are inhuman. A social Darwinist, for example, who believes that the weak should go to the wall or (at its best) that they should be allowed to go to the wall for humanity’s greater good. The kind of belief taught by that still popular moral disaster Ayn Rand, who thought selfishness a virtue and felt contempt for those who had less than she.
The idealistic
The idealistic young socialist who sees people suffering and wants to better their lives and the idealistic young capitalist who sees people kept from using their creativity to make a better world are both right. They both want something good and should be encouraged.
The old cynical saying should read instead: He who doesn’t live by an ideal — a humane ideal — when he is young has no heart. He who has not learned to apply his ideal when he is older has no brain. And he who has given up his ideal has no soul.
David Mills is the associate editorial page editor and columnist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: dmills@post-gazette.com. His previous column was “Live not by lies, but on Thanksgiving, whose lies and whose truth?.”
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