PRAGMATIC IDEALISM — CONSCIOUS EVOLUTION

It is a well-worn piece of wisdom, as summarised in the quote attributed to political thinker Edmund Burke, that if you are not a socialist when you are young then you have no heart, but if you remain one as an adult you have no head.

As an ardent idealist for most of my twenties I have watched with curiosity as many of my utopian political opinions have crashed against the rocks of reality. The older you get, the more obvious it becomes that it is simply much easier to paint a picture of a better world than it is to build one.

However, while some of the “how’s” – my armchair politician’s toolkit of laws, reforms, subsidies etc. – may have fallen by the wayside, the ideals and visions which gave rise to them have not. The flame is very much alive, even if the road is less sure.

I am now 31, and I can see that this position is not common among my peers. As the difficulty of earning enough money to support a family in comfort begins to dawn, the cognitive dissonance of holding onto egalitarian dreams while pursuing financial security, with all the ethical compromises and moral contradictions this normally entails, becomes too great. And as people make more and more sacrifices, of their time, their values and their dreams, at the altar of money, and they begin to surround themselves with more and more people who are doing likewise, their idealism tends to harden into cynicism.

Holding onto ideals while pursuing a career which does not move the world in that direction, would require painfully admitting that you have betrayed those ideals. Cynicism, on the other hand, relieves any such pressure because the cynic comes to believe that the ideals were never realistic in the first place. This allows people to justify their sacrifices without contradiction: they have not betrayed the ideal, they have merely outgrown it.

On the other hand, people my age who have tried to put their ideals into practice in their careers often ending up earning considerably less than those who let them drop. This, in turn, means they are less likely to have the power to enact these ideals at scale in the economic and political systems which determine society’s course. With no means to actually build the world they envisage, other than in pockets and fringes, there is no incentive to think carefully about the messy process of actually taking society from where it is to where they would like it to be. Like a political party in opposition for too long, for those with no access to the levers of power it’s tempting to make promises or demand changes that in practice can never be delivered. That way you get to sound like the nice guy without having to work out any of the grainy details.

While the above is true of people only in the most generalised way, and there is no shortage of inspiring exceptions and rare Pokemon who straddle the divide, you can begin to see how this particular generator function of polarisation emerges from the mist.

One on hand you have the naïve idealists, who criticise the way things are (rightly) but offer overly simplistic and well-intentioned solutions which are either unworkable in practice or would make the situation worse, and jaded cynics who say that things are the way they are for good reason and we better get realistic about that or we’ll make things a lot worse. It is a dynamic which plays out in just about every political debate.

Take farming for example. Virtually everyone knows that intensive industrial farming techniques, complete with factory farms, pesticides, chemical fertiliser etc. is unsustainable and is degrading the soil and the biosphere at an alarming rate.

But the vision advocated by those who campaign most ardently against Big Agra, is of a world studded with low-tech, biodiverse, smallhold farms. These kinds of farms are wonderful places to visit and the food they produce is both healthier and more sustainable. But they’re achievable (i.e. economically viable) only in small pockets and specific contexts, often with the backing of inherited money and land. Ask anyone who is trying to farm in the most sustainable way and they will tell you how hard it is to turn a profit.

Meanwhile your average farmer is being squeezed in a hundred different directions, and simply banning chemical fertiliser, as many activists demand, is akin to financial ruin – just look at what has happened to Sri Lanka in the wake of a recent ban.

But the cynical view – that large monocrops with high pesticide, chemical fertiliser and GM crop use is the only way to feed 8 billion people – are equally wide of the mark. The Netherlands is the second biggest agricultural exporter worldwide, precisely because they have embraced modern technology to reduce environmental impact. To take one example, Duijvestijn Tomatoes use no pesticides and yet produces higher yields with fewer land and resources. As Ad van Adrichem, their general manager explains: “The idea is we can steer everything very precisely. We use all the new techniques and all the innovations with the minimum impact on the environment.”[1]

Still greater promise for low carbon food production lies in precision fermentation which gene edits bacteria in order to get them to produce food at virtually zero environmental cost, potentially freeing up vast tracts of land for rewilding. And yet you don’t hear many environmentalists clamouring for these technologies. Why?

You find similar false dichotomies between naïve idealism and a jaded cynicism in debates around geopolitics, immigration, crime – just about any issue we care about.

I think one of the main reasons for this is that it’s simply more psychologically comfortable to sit at the poles – it requires less thinking, less moral ambiguity, less uncertainty. For the naïve idealists, they can paint themselves as the good guys without any pressure of actually delivering. And the jaded cynics can comfort themselves that all their moral compromises are the only viable course of action. And in these two camps you can find friends more easily – people on your side who will say the same things, and people on the other side who you can blame everything on.

It's like the world is being analysed on two completely different sets of railway tracks – the world as it is and the world as it should be.

I would like to argue for pragmatic idealism and informed naivety. Pragmatic idealism keeps the dreams of utopia and the flame of hope alive, but is not blind to the complexity and difficulty of achieving those dreams, of realising that hope. Informed idealists keep horizon three clearly within view, but do all the hard work on horizon two: it doesn’t matter how pretty the utopian railway track is if you cannot connect it to the existing track where all the trains and the passengers are.

Make no mistake - this is not an easy place to sit. Unlike the cynics you have to continually feel the pain of separation between where the world is and where you would like it to be, and yet unlike the naïve idealists you risk failure and censure when bold attempts to move the world in the right direction are anything but faultless.

A relative utopia is possible, and within our lifetimes. But the pathways there and the hurdles in the way are not simple to understand nor easy to overcome. If you think you have the answer and you can explain it in a sentence then you are almost certainly wrong. If, on the other hand, your cynical friends think you are naive, and your naive friends think you are cynical, this is probably a good sign.

[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/11/netherlands-dutch-farming-agriculture-sustainable/