John Singleton with Bob HowardRip Van Australia (Stanmore: Cassell Australia, 1977), pp. 127-28, under the heading “Idealism versus Crackpot Realism”.

In our society, people who talk about goals, or ideals, or visions, or utopias, are usually called idealists. As you know, it is not a compliment. If you want to compliment somebody, you call him a realist. A hard-nosed realist says, “I don’t mess around with all this vague, woolly, abstract idea kind of stuff, I’ve got problems to solve. I’ve got to take these problems as they come, you know I’ve got to get things from the ‘in’ basket to the ‘out’ basket.”

And, indeed he does. But you can’t be a realist unless you are also an idealist. You can’t find sensible solutions to day-to-day problems unless you have some kind of vision or sense of what it is you really want. If I were to say to you, “What’s the best road out of Cambridge?” you’d say to me, “Where do you want to go?” If I said, “Oh, I don’t care where I go, I just want the best road”, I can think of a lot of things you might call me. You wouldn’t call me a realist. Now our country, indeed our world-wide society … is full of so-called realists — what C. Wright Mills called “crackpot realists”. They stagger and lurch from crisis to crisis — do you know enough physics to know what Brownian motion is? Just generally, what mathematicians call “drunkards walk”. I think we have to have goals before we think about tactics.1

We who believe in the ideas presented in this book are often called “idealists”. We often hear the sentence “Your ideas are terrific, but they’ll never work”. Whether you are an idealist or not, will depend on your answer to one simple question: Can a wrong idea be made to work in the long run? The only possible answer is a resounding, absolute NO. If it could be made to work, then contradictions could exist. Wrong ideas and right ideas both work. Two plus two equals four and two plus two also equals five.

If we say that wrong ideas can work, then the whole structure of scientific knowledge would collapse. There is, however, a more central problem. To say that wrong ideas work, is to utter a contradiction anyway. What does “wrong” mean?

In science, we can show that things are wrong by carefully designed experiments. If it doesn’t work, we conclude it’s wrong. Philosophically and scientifically, the ideal and the practical are one and the same thing. They are both that which is correct, or right, or true. By and large, that is generally accepted. When it comes to economics, politics and social affairs, however, we do an about face and declare that nothing is absolute, everything involves compromise, and that the ideal is impractical. But why? Does nature have one set of rules for science, and another for the affairs of people?

We certainly don’t believe so. We believes that there are principles to govern human behaviour. There are laws of economics, and these cannot be violated without consequence. The empirical evidence that this is so is overwhelming. Our present society most truly is in a state of “drunkards walk”, and it gets worse every day. Surely that means something? That somewhere, we have made a most fundamental error?

Nature, that is, reality, is a hard master. There is nothing we can do to change its basic laws. We have no choice. We might wish and hope that the law of gravity won’t work when we fall out of a window, or that the laws of economics will suspend themselves and allow us to print money without consequences, but they won’t. They are impervious to our desires. “Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.” Never a truer, more idealistic, more realistic, sentence has ever been spoken.

Therefore, the ideas presented in this book are idealistic. But they are also realistic, because they are consistent with the facts of reality, and natural principles. Because they are idealistic, they are the only ideas that, in the long run, have a hope of succeeding. Short-term expediencies may allow us to buy time, but not without a price. Nature always collects her due.

Because wrong ideas cannot be made to work, why bother trying? In this sense, we are idealists, because we are realistic enough to know that anything else but the ideal is ultimately pointless.

Footnote
  1. John Holt, “Deschooling Society”, Reason, April-May, 1971.