Notes on Idealism – Part One

Since the height of their perfection in the sixteenth century, the arts have shown a steady decline. The cause lies rather in the changes that have occurred in thoughts and manners … the absence of popular taste, the gradual enrichment of the middle classes, the increasingly autocratic sway of sterile criticism, the tendency of men with good brains to study the popular sciences, the growth in material knowledge that frightens away works of the imagination …

– Eugène Delacroix, Journals

In my previous post, I proposed that the decline of art in our modern age can be attributed to the degeneration or loss of a shared ideal for man in our culture – something that represents his hopes and dreams, towards the achievement of which his life can be oriented. With this series of articles I want to expand further on this theme.

My belief is that man always needs an ideal, regardless of his ability to actually attain it. We need something to believe in, something that justifies and gives meaning to the fact that our lives are determined in greater part by fortune (or lack thereof) than any factor that we can consciously influence. If life is suffering, then we need something worth suffering for. This is idealism, and it is the source of all the great works humanity is capable of.

The tragedy of our age is that our idealism, and all the immense energy it is able to motivate, is put in service of goals that propagate a false narrative of technological progress while robbing the individual of other meaningful avenues of creativity and self-expression. The result is that the best minds, the most sensitive souls, and the most creative individuals are either suborned to cynical ends, or are left in a constant state of anxiety, self-doubt, and existential angst, as their need to dedicate themselves to a higher purpose is frustrated by the mendacity of our age.

This idea acquired concrete shape in my head when I stumbled across the social media profiles of some people I knew in school and university. I have very vivid impressions of these people; in my mind, they are somehow frozen in time as the very persons I knew back then, and I somehow resist the thought that they could have grown to become someone else. I couldn’t help but compare their current avatar as working adults to these youthful impressions, the contrast being all the more evident since I hadn’t been in touch with them in the meantime.

These people, when I knew them, were smart and idealistic. They were among the best in class, and undoubtedly had a bright future ahead of them. They (and myself, for that matter) belonged to that generation of young people who had grown up watching the world be transformed by the internet. We were the first ones to be initiated into the cult of technology, believing that innovation – the persistent application of technological acumen to any problem – was the most superior form of human activity, and could be done with nothing more than a laptop. Here was the Holy Grail, the means to attaining the impossible trinity: a life that was financially, socially, and morally rewarding. The arts or any other kind of works were far from our consideration, being unfashionable and non-remunerative in a technological age. Besides, wasn’t software development an art in itself, and wasn’t it in service of larger social goals, by making things easier and more efficient, the world more connected and accessible, etc.?

So how did this go? One of my erstwhile acquaintances, I found, after obtaining a Ph.D. in Robotics and AI, is working in the self-driving car research division of a major car manufacturer, with a focus on developing autonomous lane detection. A few others have joined together to found a start-up that – hold your breath – uses AI to help users make better presentations (think Powerpoint).* And these goals, in their own words are apparently the highest aims to which people of their calibre could aspire to. Oh, how the mighty have fallen!

Does this mean that no one is doing anything of worth in the field of science and technology? Of course not. But one thing is not like the other – standards as to value exist, and we are meant to apply them. The diversion of the energy of some of the brightest minds of our age to such futile endeavors is a disaster, doubly so as those involved are not even aware of this perversion of their talent and potential. In fact, triply so, because these unwittingly acolytes propagate the same false narrative to the next generation, who are now reliably informed that working in some such company or startup is the pinnacle of their hopes and aspirations.

The modern technological corporate world has realized that to claim the energy and talent of young people for itself, it must cater to their inevitable idealism, as the work they are required to do involves the same faculties that would otherwise have been used to pursue an ideal in some other field like art, religion, science, etc. That is to say, the application of talent and effort demanded by modern corporate jobs is possible only if the worker is made to believe that the goals of the organization are in alignment with his own, and oriented towards the achievement of an ideal. Indeed, no modern corporation exists today that does not espouse a social goal or commitment of some sort. The corporation has taken over the role of the arbiter of our ideals from its predecessors – the church and monarchy – and has the same cynicism and moral hypocrisy at the root of its actions. The difference now is that the actual ideals these institutions are meant to embody are even more hopelessly abstract and beyond our personal scope of action.

Is it any surprise then that as an increasing amount of our intellectual and moral energy is directed towards futile and ephemeral goals, our lives become proportionately uglier, impersonal, and fatuous? If these are the highest ideals of our age, what is there really to strive for?

I have an unrelenting faith that people want to live deeply meaningful lives, characterized by simplicity and beauty. Many are prevented from doing so by objective financial and social constraints – what we can refer to as environmental factors. But what about those of us who don’t have these constraints, and who have intellectual and emotional ability besides? By propagating a narrow form of technological utilitarianism, are we making the best use of our abilities, resources, and innate sense of idealism?

You may think I am making more of this than is deserved, but I consider this development a defining event of our 21st-century, an implicit betrayal of our ideals that has impacted not only us but the generations to come, for whom technology will be the primary means of interacting with the world. Many of those belonging to our generation saw their parents sacrifice their lives in unrewarding careers and domestic lives for the sake of providing for a family – this was an ideal worth cherishing. We, having bloomed in an age of even greater possibilities, inherited that moral sense and enlarged the scope of our action from our families to the world. We wanted to do good both for ourselves and the world we lived in, and we saw the means to that in the promising field of technology. And yet, once on the bandwagon we never stopped to reconsider whether the promise was still being fulfilled; whether we had not just been taken for a ride and had our youthful innocence perverted into adult cynicism; whether we are leaving any ideal of self-sacrifice or greater purpose to our successors to cherish and propagate.

* For a more general example, think of the effort it must have taken to replace the “Typing” indicator on Whatsapp, the instant messaging platform, with the animated bubble.