17. Beware Ideals
‘This word is a hidden word and comes in the darkness of the night. To enter this darkness put away all voices and sounds all images and likenesses. For an image has never reached into the soul’s foundation where God herself with her own being is effective.'
Meister Eckhart
’All that was once directly lived has become mere representation.’
Guy Debord — Society of the Spectacle
Compassion, freedom, equality, justice and love are all ideals. They are useful and inspiring as images, as all images can be inspiring. However, we need to remember that these ideals are only realised in particulars. Treating ideals as aspirational risks them becoming ideology rather than a living reality. This thought is well expressed by Erich Fromm in his book, The Art of Being:
‘It is striving that is rooted in the ambiguity of man’s existence and that has the aim of finding an answer to the uncertainty of life by transforming a person, an institution, an idea into an absolute, i.e., into an idol by the submission to which the illusion of certainty is created. It is hardly possible to overestimate the psychological and social significance of idolatry in the course of history, that great illusion that hobbles activity and independence.’
Ideals will always stand outside the real world - that is their essential nature. We need to recognise this, embracing ideals, whilst understanding that they are only images of what might be. Ideals then can easily become idolatry or idealism. Ideology deduces reality, or makes sense of the world, via representations rather than directly. Grand notions of compassion, freedom, equality, justice and love are ultimately useless then unless they can cope with the mundane, workaday concerns of real lives. To miss this is to succumb to a patronising and pious dead end. It is maintaining a conversation, an interaction with ourselves, our communities and ultimately with all of nature that prevents ideals from becoming ideology. Hence hospitality — or conviviality — is a good way of seeing the outworking of compassion and fairness in society. Love is affectionate kindness as well as passion. (Again our ‘economy of ascendancy’ and ‘economy of descendancy’ are useful here. Love in particular is portrayed in heroic, aspirational terms by both religion and society at large. It is ascendant, spirit-led, erotic. It is all passion — whether that is the passion of God for humanity or the passion of young lovers. The economy of descendancy can seek to make love manifest in the particulars of everyday life. Eros tempered by Agapé.)
It is difficult to escape from idealism though and to find ways of grounding ideals in real life and real relationships. Much of the rest of this work takes up this concern. One ideal we will consider is that of intrinsic value. Beyond that, we can conclude that being the means of grace is the practice of making ideals manifest in the world — of making an economy of grace.
