In Defense of Idealism

As R.E.M. might say, it’s the end of the world as we know it, and we feel fine. No, dear reader, the following is neither a forecast of the apocalypse nor an elegy for the state of rock music today. But have you ever noticed how we often go through life as if we are living at the end of the world, as if the world—whether or not we like it—is going to keep looking like this forever?

As one of the first generations to grow up largely beyond the shadow of the Cold War, we seem to have implicitly accepted that we are living at the end of history. The hidden curriculum of our decade-plus of education has been that the world from now on will simply consist of democracy and capitalism ever-continuing, ever-expanding.

This writer has nothing but love for the former and no beef with the regulated latter. Without a critical eye, however, it is too easy nowadays to accept other aspects of our world as permanent as well. Widespread hunger, devastating epidemics, intolerable unemployment, savagely unequal schools that lead to the mass incarceration of people of color—all these horrors come to be seen as inevitable, or even natural.

So many of us here have already abandoned our youthful idealism, have implicitly accepted the futility of imagining alternatives to the world that exists—never mind attempting to bring them to fruition. What dreams we are allowed to have are simply manufactured, ready for our willing consumption. Enticed by fifty-cent fantasies, more than a few of us fall for these “get rich” dreams and would rather die before trying to envision another world.

Yet how can we ever achieve a more beautiful world if we dare not imagine it? Take the following thought experiment: the world is a big block of marble, and you are its sculptor, wishing to carve it into a stunning sculpture. You have your tools all ready to go, but like any great artist, what must you do before you even make that first cut on the stone?

You need to have a vision for your final product; without one, you risk cracking—if not entirely shattering—the piece of marble before ever realizing your masterpiece. Too often, I fear, we start chiseling away—at our own lives, at our own world—without taking that essential first step. Yet without it, monkeys pounding away on typewriters have as great a chance of writing the next great American novel as we do of making the next Michelangelo.

Certainly, much of our world is determined, molded by forces completely beyond our control. Our chances of affecting meaningful change may be extremely slim or nonexistent altogether. Nevertheless, we forfeit any such opportunities if we abandon our hope in their existence. I often think back to the MLKs of our history—mere mortals who lived in eras of similar, implicit hopelessness—and wonder what our world would look like today if they had given in to those who argued that their fights for freedom were futile.

Against such fatalism it is our responsibility to dream and articulate alternatives. I apologize for the perhaps rampant idealism manifest in these words, but here at Harvard there is no excuse for its opposite. We, who are given more opportunities in four years than many will receive in a lifetime, should be the most hopeful; we have no right to take cowardly comfort in the fiction of our own powerlessness.

The irony is that our generation—with our resources, technology, and historical hindsight— theoretically could be the one that actually frees this world of a lot of its ugliness. We could be the generation that ends pervasive hunger, that wipes out HIV/AIDS, that finally levels the educational playing field for tomorrow’s youth.

Yet no such dreams are even imaginable if we, resigned to the world as it is, are content to merely enter into the system rather than place ourselves in a position to change it. Harvard does such a good job during our four years here to cultivate a certain restlessness, an insatiable longing to join the “real world” of Wall Street or to have a guaranteed, positive influence on others as doctors or the like. These routes are often the most obvious, most comfortable channels for our eager and well-meaning spirits but not necessarily the ones by which we can potentially affect the greatest good.

I do not intend any elitism by these words—that we, as Harvard students, have a higher calling than any other fellow human who inhabits our earth. Yet over my four years here, I have never met so many individuals who possess not only beautiful hearts but also beautiful minds for problem-solving. I just hope that we are not dodging some of the largest and most important problems of our world merely because we are too afraid to imagine and pursue their solutions.

Blind optimism is perhaps the surest route to true pessimism; hope alone will leave us, in the end, with mere hopelessness. But an educated, critical hope is essential to transforming our world, and if we relinquish it, we relinquish our humanity as well. There are simply too many untested feasibilities, possibilities for a more just world, for us to simply accept the present as our infinite future.



Henry Seton ’06 is a social studies concentrator in Adams House. His column appears regularly.