Samir Chopra's Blog, page 28

The Republican Party And The Disavowal Of Donald Trump

In response to my post yesterday on the liberal ‘impeachment of Donald Trump’ fantasy, which rests on a fallacious delinking of Donald Trump from the Republican Party, Seth Brodsky writes (over at Facebook):

I agree—passionately—that the desperate attempt to delink the GOP from Trump is…a fantasy. But I don’t think it’s a fantasy held only by liberals, whose very identity as a party of no part, a neutral party, is dependent on it….the GOP has this delinking fantasy too, and it was all too well displayed during the primary. But it’s a fantasy framed in a very different way: Trump is the *essence* of the GOP, but an essence that needs to remain hidden, cached, the principle and not the surplus, something to keep skimming off. He is…the purely libidinal patriarch, the undemocratic king-in-the-flesh, that Republican democracy, always gnawing viciously at its own foundations, has to conceal in order to prop itself up as a kind of democratic subject. In order for the fantasy to operate, and the subject to sustain itself, the object of the fantasy must be held at a distance. It can’t actually show up….Republicans don’t actually want the primal father to show up. They *want to want him,* they want to crow to the ends of the earth about how needed he is, how shameful it is that the world doesn’t give his memory proper respect, how angry he’ll be when he finally returns, how he appeared in a dream to them and demanded, for the love of God, that we stop this nonsense, whatever it is. Which is all to say: they want to enjoy the enormous resentment that comes from His absence.

Brodsky is right here–and I thank him for this interjection of a psychoanalytic take into the proceedings. (I wonder what the Good Doctor would have made of this past election season and of the Trump Twitter feed.) The Republican Party treated Trump like an interloper and a gatecrasher and an ‘outsider’ during the primaries–thus tremendously aiding his election prospects–precisely because he was a rude reminder that this was the true beating heart of the party–just a little too vulgar, a little too overt, a little too clumsy at disguising his plain ‘ol boring Republicanness. This treatment as an outsider allowed Republican Trump voters to feel like rebels and iconoclasts, like pioneers on a new American frontier, one once again populated by hordes of shrieking Injuns (immigrants and Muslims and Black Lives Matter protesters and transgender folk clamoring to use public bathrooms for instance.) If Trump were to come to power, the game would be up; there would be nothing left to complain about. The endless whining and self-pity and moaning would have to stop; conservatives would have to admit they got what they wanted. Their loss would not be special any more. (I am merely amplifying Brodsky’s points here, but it is crucial to make note of how important self-pity is to the Republican image; unsurprisingly, Trump’s twitter feed contains many desperately self-pitying cries. Some of his most overt allies, like the police, are famously afflicted with their own deadly self-pity, the kind that causes them to kill again and again.)

They’ve got their primal father now…it’s a huge threat to their identity. But *not* because it’s external to them. Just the opposite: it’s an alien body at the heart of the party, the basis for their repression, formative and disavowed at once….there are quite a few Republicans out there who are confused as fuck, on the level of action and affect both. They’ve got their daddy now, and are not sure what to do.

Part of the problem, as many Republicans are realizing, is that when the dog-whistle is replaced by the klaxon horn, greater disruption ensues: sure, more of the faithful come out of the woodwork, convinced the Messiah is at hand, but the heretics listen too, and they take to the streets to protest like they never did before.

Where I think Brodsky and I gently disagree is that I think Republicans have begun to reconcile themselves to the presence of this realized fantasy; self-pity and dreams of power are intoxicating but so is power itself. All that accumulated misery of the eight years of watching two beautiful black people in the White House, of the wrong folk getting a little too uppity, has to find an outlet somewhere, and perhaps this regime will provide one.  Self-pity and resentment makes the Republican tumescent; power can bring blissful release.

The Donald Trump Impeachment Fantasy

Wishful thinking is in the air: this presidential incompetence is intolerable, it cannot last. Let us take bets on how long Donald Trump will last before he is evicted from the Oval Office by those who cannot put up with his trigger-happy tweeting, his brazen exploitation of the highest office in the land for personal financial gain, his reckless attacks on the independence of this land’s judiciary, his bizarre, unhinged, deployment of illegal executive orders, his juvenile foreign policy. Trump will be impeached before the year is out, before his term is over.

This is an exceedingly curious fantasy to entertain. Impeachment of a president requires the House of Representatives to vote to do so. (It also requires the Senate to conduct a trial and issue a verdict.) Do the proponents of these bizarre speculations imagine that a House of Representatives which is controlled by the Republican Party will ever float such a motion and act on it? And that a Republican Party-controlled Senate will issue an impeachment verdict to follow up? This the Republican Party that, lest we forget, has voted in lockstep to confirm all of Trump’s cabinet nominees, each one more spectacularly unqualified for the task. (So dogged has its defense of this cavalcade of incompetents been that yesterday, the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell invoked a slavery era rule–during Black History Month–to prevent Senator Elizabeth Warren from reading a letter by Coretta Scott King, written back in 1986, which had opposed Sessions’ nomination to a federal judgeship because of his civil rights record.) This is also the Republican Party that has expressed virtually no public opposition to any of Trump’s policies–they’ve all either been cowed down by his relentless tweeting, or they do not find anything objectionable in his policies. After all, as McConnell put it, ““I think there is a high level of satisfaction with the new administration.”

This is not a party that is going to impeach.

These fantasies remind me, all over again, of the feverish frenzy that broke out during the election season when commentator after commentator wrote about the ‘implosion’ of the Republican Party, its death-throes, its being torn apart by the conflicting impulses that had been induced by the Trump candidacy. Precisely none of that happened. The Republican Party rolled on, won the election, maintained its majorities in both houses, and found itself a new President, who now sits in the Oval Office.

One of the biggest mistakes made by political pundits in writing about the Trump candidacy and the Trump presidency has been to imagine that there is a separation between it and the Republican Party, that this administration represents some radical break with the past, that Republicans of yesteryear were milder, less ideologically unhinged, less racist, less xenophobic, less invested in taking this country to the cleaners. It has let the Republican Party off the hook; but Trump is their creation, he is of a piece with the history of this party. This present moment does not represent a discontinuity or disjuncture with the past; it represents its logical continuation.

Trump will not be impeached by the Republican Party. To hope or wish for it is just that, a fantasy. There are far better fantasies to inform your politics with.

The ‘True Image Of A Writer’ And Online Writing

Shortly after I first began writing on the ‘Net–way back in 1988–I noticed that there was, very often, a marked contrast between the online and offline personas of some of the writers I encountered online. (I am referring to a small subset of the writers I read online; these were folks who worked with me in campus research labs but also wrote actively on Usenet newsgroups.) One of the most stunning contrasts was provided by a pair of young men, who were both brilliant programmers, but also afflicted with terrible stutters. Conversations with them were invariably affairs requiring a great deal of patience on the part of their interlocutors; their stutters very frequently derailed their attempts to coherently communicate. (I had suffered from a stutter myself once, as pre-teen, so I instantly sympathized with them, even as I did my best to decipher their speech at times.)

This was not the case online. Both wrote brilliantly and voluminously online; they wrote long and short pieces; they wrote on politics and technical matters alike with style and verve; they possessed a caustic sense of humor and were not afraid to put it on display. Quite simply, they were different persons online. One of them met his future wife online; she wrote from South America; he from New Jersey; she fell in love with ‘him,’ with his online persona, and traveled to the US to meet him; when she met him in person and encountered his stutter for the first time, she–as she put it herself later–realized it was too late, because she had already fallen in love with him. The unpleasant converse of the situation I describe here is the internet troll, the keyboard warrior, who ‘talks big’ online, and uses the online forum as an outlet for his misanthropy and aggression–all the while being a singularly meek and timid and physically uninspiring person offline. The very anonymity that makes the troll possible is, of course, what lets the silenced and intimidated speak up online. Without exaggeration, my memory of these gentlemen, and of the many other instances I observed of shy and reticent folks finding their voices online, has informed my resistance to facile claims that traditional, in-class, face-to-face education is invariably superior to online education. Any modality of instruction that could provide a voice to the voiceless was doing something right.

In Moments of Reprieve: A Memoir of Auschwitz (Penguin, New York, 1986) Primo Levi writes:

Anyone who has the opportunity to compare the true image of a writer with what can be deduced from his writings knows how frequently they do not coincide. The delicate investigator of movements of the spirit, vibrant as an oscillating circuit, proves to be a pompous oaf, morbidly full of himself, greedy for money and adulation blind  to his neighbor’s suffering. The orgiastic and sumptuous poet, in Dionysiac communion with the universe, is an abstinent, abstemious little man, not by ascetic choice but by medical prescription.

The ‘true image of the writer’ is an ambiguous notion; online writing has made it just a little more so.

Note: I wonder if Levi had Nietzsche in mind in his second example above.

Chaim Potok’s ‘The Chosen’: Talking About Religion, Identity, And Culture In A Philosophy Classroom

Last week, the students in this semester’s edition of my Philosophical Issues in Literature class began reading and discussing Chaim Potok‘s The Chosen. (We have just concluded our discussions of Chapters 1-5 i.e., Book One, which details the initial encounters between Danny Saunders and Reuven Malter, the book’s central protagonists.) I had not read the novel before the semester began, and had placed it on this semester’s reading list–the organizing theme is ‘the religious novel and its intersections with identity and culture’–on the recommendations of some friends who had. Thus far, this has been an exceedingly good move; I can wholeheartedly recommend the book to any other philosophers looking to place fiction on their reading lists.

This is because, as might be suspected, the book provides ample material to spark philosophical discussion in the classroom–Potok was a philosopher by training, and it shows. I had not looked at his biography too closely before the semester began, but once I began reading the book, it was blindingly obvious to me that the author had either studied philosophy extensively or was an academic himself. (The central give-away for me was the mentioning of Russell and Whitehead‘s Principia Mathematica by Danny Saunders as he describes his intellectual interests and career plans to Reuven.) Literary critics might complain about the heavy-handedness of the symbolism employed in these preliminary chapters but philosophy teachers will not complain about the fairly explicit invitation to delve into the questions of how religious faith and practice inform our sense of self, what their limits are, and how intra-group differences can be more sharply drawn than even inter-group ones. Many of my students come from backgrounds where religion has formed an integral part of their upbringing; some have attended Muslim, Catholic, and Jewish parochial schools so they can relate quite easily to the yeshiva-educated central characters of The Chosen. (It does not hurt that the novel is set in Brooklyn itself.). These students have a diverse set of reactions to the influence of their parochial education on their identities; their discussion of the themes The Chosen focuses on lets them draw upon their personal experiences in their reactions to it.

The selection of The Chosen for a philosophy class also makes an acute topical sense in these times, for the opening chapters permit an examination of the peculiar position of a minority culture–one made up of refugees and their descendants–surrounded by a dominant one, one to which it feels it must prove itself in times of war and greater patriotism, even if at the cost of having to make adjustments to its dominant sense of priorities and norms. The use of a baseball game, the playing of which takes up the entire first chapter, allowed for a discussion of the intersections of nationalism and sport too–how and why does the sport field function as a proving ground for ideological claims?

I’ve often written on this blog on how fiction helps my teaching of philosophy; the opening weeks of this semester have offered a gratifying confirmation of that claim.

Sporting Ability Does Not Correlate With Virtue: The Superbowl Confirmation

It was pretty easy cheering against the New England Patriots yesterday. I’m a New York Giants fan, and the Giants specialize in breaking Patriot hearts, in shattering Patriot dreams–think Superbowl XLII and Superbowl XLVI; the Patriots are a New England team, and New Yorkers dislike all New England teams; the Patriots and their coach, Bill Belichick are notorious benders and tweakers of the rules of the game–think ‘Deflategate‘; the Atlanta Falcons were the underdogs, aiming to bring sporting success to a city that could use some good news–Boston is blase about all its sports championships. And so on. (Bear with me while I make note of these marketing clichés.) And then, this year, there was the political subtext–which wasn’t so sub, after all. Tom Brady and Bill Belichick are Trump fans; the former has been used as campaign fodder by Trump himself.

Say no more.

Apparently, we had an unambiguous moral universe set up for us. Good vs. Evil. And Evil triumphed. Moreover, Evil did so thanks to an amazing, unprecedented comeback that ensured its quarterback, coach, and team have good claims–statistical and otherwise–on being anointed one of the greatest of all time. (The Patriots’ win also allowed the obnoxious Richard Spencer‘s crowing on Twitter about how he was cheering for one of the ‘whitest’ teams in the NFL to be fruitfully rewarded.) The arc of this moral universe is long and its local curvature doesn’t seem to indicate that it is bending in the right direction.

Sporting ability does not seem to correlate with virtue–of any sort. This sad fact has often been noted and commented on by sports fans; moral reprobates win championships and prize money galore all the time; good guys often finish last.  Indeed, the playing of sport itself does not seem to make the world a better place. Football, the particular sport under scrutiny here, has done a great deal to suggest that it does not deserve spectatorial attention, indulgence, or tolerance so long as it continues to be an inherently unsafe activity organized and managed in an unsafe fashion. There are, after all, good reasons to believe NFL owners have systematically misrepresented the long-term dangers of the sport and will not allow an open, unbiased investigation into its longstanding concussion and traumatic brain injury problems. (The systematic misrepresentation of masculinity, the glorification of violence, the tolerance of domestic violence by the NFL’s commissioners, its serving as a propaganda arm of the military, are but some of the many other sins that are laid at the NFL’s door. The loud, sexist, drunk, NFL fan is a well-known American archetype–a frat boy in a team cap.)

This is all pretty disappointing stuff but it is also enlightening. We should not expect too much when we look at a sports field; least of all should we expect to find moral or political arguments justified there. The right of a people to nationhood will not, despite many wins for their sports teams, receive confirmation on a sports field; the success of a national ideology will not be confirmed by a win in a World Cup. The good news for the sports fan and the sports marketer is that this warning is not an easy one to take on board; sports fields are symbolic battlegrounds, and they’ll remain that way. At least till we find another domain of human endeavor that lends itself so easily to such easy exploitation by story tellers and myth makers.

The Joys Of Crying

I cry easily; so I cry a lot. Many, many things set me off: movies, songs, talking about my parents, a sportsman’s death, showing my daughter music videos of songs that I listened to as a teenager, Saturn V liftoffs, the misfortune of others in the world’s ‘disaster zones,’ witnessing random acts of kindness on the subway, a busker hitting all the right notes, political disaster–the list goes on, and it doesn’t seem to settle into a coherent pattern. Nostalgia features prominently here; as does a new-found vulnerability and fearfulness made vividly manifest after my daughter’s entry into this world. I’m an immigrant and adult orphan, so memories are especially precious; and I suspect they color my perception of most things I encounter on my daily journeys through work and parenting and the usual reading and writing. (A beautiful turn of phrase, a fictional character’s terrible, tragic fate can also get the tear glands working overtime.)

As I wrote here a while ago:

I’ve become a better, not worse, crier over the years. Growing up hasn’t made me cry less, now that I’m all ‘grown-up’ and a really big boy. Au contraire, I cry–roughly defined as ‘tears in the eyes’ or ‘lumps in the throat which leave me incapable of speech’ even if not ‘sobbing’–more. There is more to cry about now, more to get the tear glands working overtime: more memories, more days gone by, more nostalgia, more regrets, more friends gone, never to return, more evidence of this world’s implacable indifference to our hopes and desires–for ourselves and ours. I cry in company–sometimes, when I’m trying to tell a story and realize I cannot proceed; I cry when I’m alone. I cry on my couch when watching a movie. And just to make sure I’m a genuine New Yorker, I’ve cried on the subway.

Truth is, crying feels good. It is actually intensely pleasurable; to cry is to feel alive, powerfully so. I am not jaded and cynical, impervious to things that should hurt or feel good; crying tells me I’m still capable of powerful emotional responses, that I have not become blasé to this world’s offerings.  Crying slows things down; for its duration, there is an intense concentration on the engendered emotion. All else falls away; in a world of eternal distraction, in which time has sped up, where all is a whirl, crying is a blessing.

But crying isn’t just a reaction to an external event or stimulus; it’s an act of communication with oneself. Crying is informative, a message from self to self. It tells me what hurts, what feels good, what I remember, who I miss, what got under my skin, and stayed there. It informs others too, of course, about who I am, but that is not its most important function. That honor is reserved for the self-knowledge it makes possible, the picture it completes of me, the reminder it provides that I’m many things and many people, spread out over time and space, still trying to hang together.

On Apologizing To Your Child

On Thursday morning, I inexplicably, irrationally, and ultimately, cruelly, lost my temper at my four-year old daughter; I wanted her to do X; she did not; I thought my request was reasonable; she didn’t think it was; and then, when on my demanding reasons for her decision and denial of my request, she could not comply, I snapped. I stormed off, fuming; she was left in tears. Even as I did so, I knew I had fucked up, and spectacularly. And yet, perversely, my irritation and frustration–which was really what my anger amounted to–continued to cloud my mind for a minute or two. As those feelings receded, I walked back into my daughter’s bedroom, picked her up, gave her a hug, and asked her if she was hungry and wanted breakfast. She perked up, and said she did. A second or so later, as I carried her into the kitchen, she said she was ‘sorry’; I said I was too; and we hugged again. A minute or so later, she was smiling and happy. (Her mood improved even more when I told her I would get her a ‘pizza treat’ later that evening.) An hour later, she had left for preschool, and I headed to midtown Manhattan to get some work done at the CUNY Graduate Center library.

But all was not well; I was beset with a series of nagging thoughts all day. My daughter hadn’t done anything wrong; she had said ‘sorry’ because she knew a parent was angry at her, and that’s what you do when your parental figure is upset with you. I had been in the wrong all along; once my initial request had been denied, I should have backed off. Instead–like a petulant child–I had insisted, and then later, browbeaten her with a series of badgering demands for clarification of her reasons, all the while intimidating her with my tone of voice and body language. My daughter had never needed to apologize; she should have demanded one from me. I was the offender here; my perfunctory apology and ‘make-up’ in the morning was not enough.

That evening, I picked her up from pre-school, bought some pizza, and we returned home to eat and watch–as promised–a couple of short videos on lions and tigers in the wild. As we ate, I offered a more elaborate apology: I said I should have listened to her and respected her wishes, that she had been right, and I had been wrong. She listened rather solemnly–or about as solemnly as four-year olds can–and on my asking if she understood what I was trying to say, nodded her head. We then went back to watching big cats do what they do best.

I knew there would be times when I would have to apologize to my child; error-free parenting is impossible. I’ve done so before, but I don’t think I’ve ever quite made my admission of wrong-doing quite as explicit as it was on this occasion. Truth be told, it was a curiously uplifting experience.

Fighting The Gorsuch Nomination Is A Lost Battle; Fight It Anyway

Rather predictably, news of the Gorsuch nomination to the US Supreme Court has been greeted by considerable head-scratching among Democratic Party–and associated progressive–circles: should we fight or should we roll over, keeping the proverbial powder dry for the next battle? ‘Pragmatism’ and ‘realism’ apparently bid us to not fight this already lost battle, to not expend valuable political energy and resources on this skirmish, and to take the long view, the strategic one, the sensible one, so that the next really–I mean, really–important battle can be fought with the appropriate street-fighting intensity and fervor. (After all, if you filibuster, the Republicans will simply change the Senate rules on voting, and just nominate him anyway; give up already.)

Or something like that.

A greater misunderstanding of politics, a poorer read of the current American political situation, cannot be imagined. The Democratic Party rolled over last year to let the Republican Party carry out a wholly illicit refusal to even consider Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland; it has, thus far, in its responses to Donald Trump’s cabinet nominations performed a passable imitation of a somnolent jellyfish. It seems to care little for the passion and ire of those who are calling upon it to resist the Trump administration; it seems obsessed instead, with performing political harakiri, by refusing to indicate that it has the stomach or the gumption for politics as it is currently performed in America.

Sometimes political battles are fought, not because they will be won, but because fighting them communicates valuable information to those engaged in it. In this case: that the theft of the Supreme Court seat has been noted as such (there is no need for scare quotes around “theft”); that this party has heard its constituents and can be counted on to represent their interests; and so on. Call it virtue-signalling if you like; that is not a pejorative term in this context. Rhetoric is an indispensable component of political struggle; fighting this battle has immense rhetorical value.

Talk of premature exhaustion–before the supposedly great battles that lie over the hill, over the horizon, that will be upon us tomorrow–is premature. Those battles are yet to be fought; there will be time for recuperation and renewal. That recharging of political batteries will be aided by an inspired political base; there won’t be any powder left around for the next battle if your ammunition carriers have, at your refusal to man the ramparts and open fire, thrown their stores down the nearest ravine in disgust, telling all and sundry that their soldiers were a bunch of undisciplined lily-livered no-hopers and do not deserve their allegiance or commitment any more. (These military metaphors are getting out of hand here.)

The nation-wide response to Donald Trump’s cabinet nominations, the visible and loud street protests, the social media coordinated and fueled opposition which has led to an unprecedented number of people calling their elected representatives for the first time, all to make known their unvarnished opinions, has sent the loudest and clearest message possible to the Democratic Party: this nomination must be resisted.

John Forbes’ ‘Love Poem’: War As Entertaining, Compensatory, Lullaby

Reading Kath Kenny‘s wonderful essay on the Australian poet John Forbes–a personal and literary take on his life and work–reminded me that because I was introduced to Forbes’ poetry by his close friends, I came to feel, despite never having met him in person, that I had acquired some measure of personal contact with him. Her essay reminded me too, of a Forbes poem that is my personal favorite:

LOVE POEM

Spent tracer flecks Baghdad’s

bright video game sky

as I curl up with the war

in lieu of you, whose letter

lets me know my poems show

how unhappy I can be. Perhaps.

But what they don’t show, until

now, is how at ease I can be

with military technology: e.g.

matching their feu d’esprit I classify

the sounds of the Iraqi AA—the

thump of the 85 mil, the throaty

chatter of the quad ZSU 23.

Our precision guided weapons

make the horizon flash & glow

but nothing I can do makes you

want me. Instead I watch the west

do what the west does best

& know, obscurely, as I go to bed

all this is being staged for me.

I am not comfortable offering literary criticism of poetry so I can only point, dimly, in the direction of what it is that makes this poem such a pleasure to read for me.

Forbes skillfully invokes an iconic image of the early nineties–that of the aerial bombardment of Baghdad which kicked off the First Gulf War, and set the stage for the second–to remind us that we were spectators and consumers of that war; we watched its images as entertainment, divorced from the brute reality of what the tangible realizations of those armaments on the ground were; we were given a ‘video game’ and we remained content with it. The lovelorn narrator of this poem has come to find in this spectacle consolations not available elsewhere in more amorous pastures; in this regard, he differs only mildly from all those who find in the fantasies of war a compensatory substitution for the failures, absences, and losses of daily life. Forbes’ invoking of the sounds of war is especially clever–especially the double ‘th’ sound in the sixth stanza. War’s images are beautiful and evocative; so are its sounds–think of the awe-inspiring aural and auditory spectacle the lighting of a jet’s afterburner provides, for instance. These sights and sounds beguile us; they take us away from the aching gaps in our lives. We grew up  on a diet of war comics and war heroes; now, as adults, the play continues. Elsewhere, its realities still hidden from us. We amuse ourselves by memorizing, in awed tones of voice, the impressive technical specifications of the gleaming armaments that do so much damage to flesh and bone, to life and limb, to hope and aspiration; we look forward to these toys being used for more than just play.

Forbes’ killer lines, the ones that haunt me, are the ones that close the poem. They bite, and they bite deep and hard. War is where the west reaches its zenith, its summum bonum, this is where it all comes together. The beautiful machinery of science and technology, the west’s proudest achievement of all, its signature triumphs of rationality, speaking to an unassailable mastery of nature, its domination of world history and its peoples, now pressed into the service of mass killing, putting on a spectacle for its citizens to reassure them that all is well, that old hierarchies remain, that the uppity ‘other’ has a long way to go before catching up with the master. The sounds of war are a lullaby, lulling us to sleep, bidding us turn to dreams while the dirty work carries on outside.

We know this is a show we paid for; we know this is ‘staged’ for us; we own it. All we have to do is buy the popcorn, settle down, and watch. Especially if there is no love to be found elsewhere in this world we have built for ourselves; let us be seduced by this instead.

Wendell Berry On The ‘Real’ And The ‘Ideal’

In ‘The Loss of The Future’ (from The Long-Legged House, Shoemaker and Hoard, 2004 (1965), New York, p. 48) Wendell Berry writes:

One of the most damaging results of the loss of idealism is the loss of reality. Neither the  ideal or the real is perceivable alone. The ideal is apparent and meaningful only in relation to the real, the real only in relation to the ideal. Each is the measure and the corrective of the other. Where there is no accurate sense of the real world, idealism evaporates in the rhetoric of self-righteousness and self-justification. Where there is no disciplined idealism, the sense of the real is invaded by sentimentality or morbidity or cynicism and by fraudulent discriminations.

Berry seems to employ both meanings of ‘idealism’ here. It may be understood as ‘systems of thought in which the objects of knowledge are held to be in some way dependent on the activity of mind’ and, of course, ‘the practice of forming or pursuing ideals, especially unrealistically.’

Be that as it may, Berry is on to something here in his suggestion that the ideal–a kind of non-substantial, immaterial counterpoint to the real–acquires the form that it does because it is informed by our impressions of the real. (Plato thought of course that the sensibly real or the ‘apparent’ was informed by this ‘ideal’ as a kind of imperfect, incomplete, and prone-to-decaying manifestation of it.) Our sense of what the ideal is formed by a kind of extrapolation from the real; the ideal suggests in turn how the real falls short. In the second sense of the word, idealism informs us of possibilities and horizons and limits visible from our actual placements in the here and now; and in doing so, it lets us demarcate and circumscribe the immediately tangible and realized. The real in turn suggests what ideals we could possibly aspire to.

Berry’s claim that without an ‘accurate sense of the real world, idealism evaporates in the rhetoric of self-righteousness and self-justification’ is now clarified; here, our idealism becomes a kind of solipsism, uncorrected by any contact with the real; our ideals, always straining under the burden of their elevated rhetoric, now begin to fall apart; we seek and find confirmation within ourselves for their validity; with nothing substantial to map on, or be applied, to, the ideals become incoherent. An ideal aims to elevate the real world; with no sense of its ‘target of improvement,’ the ideal runs blind, and aground. (A reformer must know what he or she aims to reform; a prophet must have a sense of his potential flock, of what it is that is to be corrected; otherwise their sermons become mere fantastic ramblings.) Conversely, without the elevating ideal, we remain mired in ‘sentimentality or morbidity or cynicism’ because these offer us easy compensatory consolations in its place. Each is readily available at most turns in our lives; without idealism to draw us up and away from them, we are content to wallow in their depths.