The Decline Of Idealism
by Rebecca Bynum (Nov. 2008)
There is ground for declaring that modern man has become a moral idiot.
– Richard Weaver
“Will you set your eyes on that which is not? For riches certainly make themselves wings; They fly away like an eagle toward heaven.”[1]
“Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal;
but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal.”[2]
“So He humbled you, allowed you to hunger, and fed you with manna which you did not know nor did your fathers know, that He might make you know that man shall not live by bread alone; but man lives by every word that proceeds from the mouth of the LORD.”[3]
And yet the rot is so deep in American society today that we seem to think we live in a world apart from the natural human condition, a world where property values will rise effortlessly and predictably, where our investments will steadily swell, and where our jobs will remain ever secure as our economy expands forever like the universe itself. This world owes us a living and it is expected of our demagogic politicians to ease our anxiety and boost our confidence in the clock-like regularity and certainty of our mechanistic world. If the machine doesn’t run, it is their job to fix it.
Modern man is fond of blaming some person or persons for everything that goes wrong and will no longer tolerate those who claim there are forces outside his control. Witness the Senate hearings on the economic crisis and their frantic search to find someone to blame, some particular someone who was asleep at the wheel of the great economic machine at the crucial time; someone who should have foreseen that unforeseeable something that, if it had been altered in time, could have prevented the current catastrophe. Witness the effort to assign blame for not preventing the 9/11 attacks or even to blame those attacks on people other than the Muslim terrorists themselves, people more under our control, such as those in the U.S. government. This reflects a primal need to reclaim the certainty that there is nothing outside human direction in the great machine known as the material world. Babies, of course, see themselves as the center of the universe and imagine they are in control of everything. They cry and their needs are met. Have we so elevated wanting over deserving that we have forgotten what maturity means?
Maturity must entail a sense of gratitude for the very hardships so deplored by the young, because it is mainly through adversity that meaningful growth is achieved. Maturity also comes with the growing conviction that it is wrong to live only for oneself and that for life to have value, it must be lived for something greater – for others. Maturity also comes with increasing personal identification with values.
When seasoned by experience, the idealist is an extremely potent force in the world. He is loyal to his ideals to the point of self-effacement. He is not moderate when it comes to virtue or belief. He is an extremist, but not a fanatic. He repudiates the anti-hero and shames the cynic. Consider the following scene, one which can only be described as heroic.
Jesus was obviously not engaging in the “spirit of dialogue.” He did not care if Pilate understood him or not, he would not compromise the truth as he saw it; whereas Pilate, in the modern spirit of the true cynic, expressed doubt in the very existence of truth. He asked his question and did not wait for the answer because, like the modern man he represents, truth to him was a relative, fungible commodity. But for Jesus, truth was absolute and his loyalty to truth was also absolute.
The man of moderate virtue would be appalled, for it must seem to him that in his refusal to defend or explain himself, Jesus was throwing his life away. Indeed, he handed Pilate ample cause to put him to death. He admitted to being a king: a king in the world of the transcendent surely, but a king nonetheless. Pilate clearly thought Jesus was delusional, but probably harmless. But who in the end should be judged delusional: Pilate, who washed his hands of the affair and went on with his life as though nothing had happened, or Jesus, who went to his death refusing to compromise with evil, loyal to his ideals to the end?
Today, however, we are steadily counseled that solutions to our problems mostly lie in compromise and that there is really nothing worth dying for, actually nothing worth risking much for. “Moderation in all things” is really advice to seek grounds for complacency, to elevate comfort over virtue and to bury our ideals in the graveyard of materialism.
[1] Proverbs 23:5 Bible, New King James version
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