What Is American Idealism
Words are symbols that convey meaning; each word refers to a certain thing. Like all words, the word idealism has more than one meaning. In common use, it refers to the pursuit of an ideal. It often implies aiming for something very good but falling short, perhaps because the absolute good is too pure to be achieved. A more obscure meaning of idealism refers to a philosophical school of thought that seeks truth in the metaphysical structures that arise when thinking and describing reality. Many of the world's greatest minds have contributed to idealism, including Plato, Descartes, and Kant. Idealism is a systematic philosophy, building from the ground up. It offers both ideas and ideals that are capable of curing America's postmodern malaise. And cure the malaise we must.
To some extent, we Americans have the power to define America's ideals as we see fit, but ideals are also shaped by our past and even by the nature of reality. Things like space, time, genetics, and language are given to us. We are mentally and physically conditioned by this shared history. Our history is that of Western Civilization, and it is also our shared inheritance. It is our past, substantially our present, and, to a shrinking degree, it is our future. Americans often fail to recognize Western Civilization as our own because we have been led to believe that we cut the cord with Europe in the course of the Revolutionary War. We are told that America is nothing more than an idea, which implies something ethereal, ever changing and vague, in our materialist postmodern age. We are told we are a propositional nation, and that we are not a people the way our European cousins are a people.
These are poisonous lies. We have been a people, and we will be a people, if we choose to, but we must make a conscious choice to be so. Currently, we are unconsciously choosing not to be a people, in any meaningful sense of the word. This is a grave, even suicidal, mistake. If America has any will to survive left, we must summon it, choose to be a people, and act in accordance with that choice.
Only after we are resolved to identify as a people can we begin to rediscover our true ideals. Coherent ideals can come only from a coherent people group. An incoherent people group, which America threatens to become, will necessarily have incoherent ideals. When incoherent ideals are locked into a shared political system, its various groups will come into conflict as they compete to control the state and the culture. The more divergent the people groups within the system are, the fiercer their political battles will be. Neither society nor the government can be two things at once.
History abounds with examples of conflict along the lines of race, religion, and systems of government. Wars that appear to be fought over territory or resources are actually fought over competing identities, seeking to control territory or resources. The American Revolution, for instance, was not primarily fought over the issue of taxation without representation. It was fought because the patriots identified as self-governed, but the loyalists and British identified as subjects of the King. These two identities could not coexist peacefully on the same land. This is a subtle but critically important distinction, because it reveals that man's greed is not the driving force of history; his identity is.
Identity groups in conflict stop fighting when they are placed out of competition with one another. If states and societies are organized by generally homogenous concentrations by religion, ethnicity, and political philosophy, there is little to fight over. Implementing this sort of revanchism has often led to bitter conflict in the past, but it does not have to be that way. There are counter examples of peaceful separation, such as the democratic partition of Czechoslovakia into the westernized Bohemian Czechs in the Czech Republic and the eastern-oriented Slovaks in Slovakia. The self-removal of the U.K. from the European Union offers another example. It can be done.
When people groups are organized more organically in this way, according to identity, the ground is cleared for their own unique ideas and ideals to blossom. The idealism America was founded on is unique to America and America's defining events. America's identity was forged in the American Revolution, and it crystallized in Manifest Destiny. We lose this identity when we become less like the generations who accomplished these feats. In the process of forgetting, we lose connection with the spirit that animated the conquests of these foundational events; we lose our societal coherence.
America is coherent as America only when we can stand proudly as direct descendants of the people and principles that created the nation. As America's diversity dramatically increased in the postwar period, our idealism became increasingly confused. It now teeters on the edge of extinction. To save American idealism, we will need to rediscover it and even redefine it. More precisely, we will need to rediscover the definition it once had, identify the points at which we lost it, and reinterpret it for the world we find ourselves in now.
This journey of rediscovery and renewal will bring us to the second definition of idealism, idealism as philosophy. The idealist philosophy seeks to ground ultimate reality in mind and thinking. In idealism, the words thinking and thought mean more than just the inner mental dialogue we have running in the background. Thought in idealism refers to the structures that form when we use language to represent things. These structures include things like grammar, mathematics, and rationality. Idealism also considers the direct experience of consciousness to be an inescapable aspect of mind and thought. Later idealists described the evolution from consciousness to self-consciousness as the means by which humanity achieves free will.
When an individual becomes acutely aware of his own consciousness, he gains the ability to train his awareness on anything he desires and to direct his thoughts at will. These mental abilities create free will and allow for the recognition of spirit. Just as consciousness can recognize itself in one person, it can also recognize itself in another conscious person, forming a kind of bond. Consciously bonded people in groups form a collective consciousness. When the collective consciousness of a people becomes aware of itself within the group, it rises to the level of a national spirit. When a people group is coherently organized and harmonious, their spirit manifests positively. When there is disharmony, however, the spirit becomes sick. And when consciousness falls, the spirit fades. These are the signs of a weak and decaying people.
The spirit of the American people is ailing. America's enemies are well aware of that fact. They celebrate it. The enemies at the top of the pyramid understand the relationship between consciousness and spirit very well. That is to say, they are conscious of it. Sadly, very few patriotic Americans have this knowledge. As a people, we suffer in ignorance, struggling to explain our demise, but it will be laid bare in the pages that follow. Philosophical idealism is the path to America's revivification because it will give us the tools to become conscious of that which we were led to forget. So empowered, we will spread the light of consciousness everywhere. As we rediscover the American spirit in our newfound idealism, we will do so with a much greater degree of consciousness than when it first came into being. If we succeed in spreading this ideal, we will make it much harder to be made to forget again. There is no getting this genie back in the bottle.
Sadly, idealism is all but absent from the modern marketplace of ideas. There are vestiges of it, but the philosophical order of the day today is empiricism and scientism. Empiricism and idealism have generally been at odds in philosophical debates. Empiricists promote the idea that the material world is all that there is, and the only way to learn about it is by the scientific method. This empiricist scientism is not really a genuine worldview, even though it is a sincerely held belief of many people. In truth, it is propaganda, designed to cut us off from the spiritual bonds that unite us and make us collectively strong.
The direct experience of spirit is a vitally necessary step in the idealist path to rediscovering national ideals. The concept of spirit in idealism does not rely on any one particular religious interpretation or definition. It is intuited and experienced, rather than described by a verbal doctrine. It transcends religious entrapment. The Tao Te Ching describes the inadequacy of language to encapsulate spirit in its opening lines: "The way that can be spoken is not the eternal way. The name that can be named is not the eternal name[1]." Christianity renders it, "I am the way and the truth and the light[2]." And equally, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God[3]." These passages point to the direct experience of spirit, made possible by the thought structures that allow consciousness to turn back on itself in reflection.
If it strikes Christian ears as uncomfortably syncretic to equate the spiritual truths revealed in the Bible with the spiritual truths revealed in philosophy, recall the Apostle Paul's letter to the Romans. According to Paul, the law of God was written on the hearts of the unbelieving Gentile races when their consciences led them to do the law[4]. From this point of view, no truth is secular. Whatever one thinks of organized religion, the existence of spirit is an observable fact. More importantly, it is an experienceable fact.
As we journey through philosophical idealism, we will find meaningful answers to fundamental questions about the acquisition of knowledge, the nature of being, the universality of moral norms, and the spiritual experiences that bond us to these truths. We will use these philosophical tools to analyze the political ideas and beliefs that have shaped America up to this point and prescribe new ones for our future. Our new ideas will then be rooted in idealism, in the optimistic sense of the word. They will also be rooted in idealism in the philosophical sense. By the end, these two meanings of the word idealism will converge to form the uniquely American Idealism that is to be our path forward. That is, if we choose it.
[2] John 14:6, ESV
[3] John 1:1, ESV
[4] See Romans 2:14-15