A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I watched the 1995 film, ‘Carrington'. Starring Emma Thompson and Jonathan Pryce. It tells the extraordinary relationship between artist Dora Carrington and Lytton Strachey, who was a member of the Bloomsbury group.
The film is, in my opinion, well worth watching. It has aged very well. It is available on Amazon.
One line stood out for me, placed by screenplay writer Christopher Hampton into the mouth of Lytton Strachey, who says this line:
Idealists are nothing but trouble. You can never convince them there's no such thing as the ideal.
That resonates with me.
When I look back on much I have done in my professional life, it has been to map big ideas. As a systems thinker (which I realised I was by the time I was forty), this is what I seek to do. But, a systems thinker cannot be an idealist because, in trying to map ideas onto a terrain - whatever that terrain might be (a company, an economy, a tax system, or whatever else) - the systems thinker has to appreciate two things.
The first is that the map is not the same as the terrain, and the idealist rarely appreciates that.
Second, we have to also appreciate that just because we map, this does not mean that we know exactly what the terrain is. In fact, most often we are, when mapping, trying to actually locate the terrain to which the map relates, and decide what it might mean. The process is, therefore, doubly uncertain. Neither the map nor the terrain is wholly identifiable or understood. That is why the map is needed. It seems to make sense of the confusion. However, there cannot, as a consequence, be an ideal. There is only a search for greater knowledge. That is the most we can aspire to.
This has a consequence for any understanding of reality. The relationship between our understanding, which is represented by the partial and incomplete map, and the terrain we seek to understand is always symbiotic and so mutable. It is impossible to view the map without both altering it and the perception of the terrain that it might represent, whilst the terrain, if that is our starting point, is changed by our understanding of the map. There is no way that these things are independent of each other.
That means that neither has, nor can have, an ideal form. Such a thing does not exist. Both are perceptions. One is just, necessarily, more extracted than the other. That is the inevitable consequence of the way in which we as humans understand what happens around and beyond us. Trump and his cohort might wish to deny that, but they reveal themselves as fools for doing so.
I do, therefore, agree with Lytton Strachey's reported words.
Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
There are links to this blog's glossary in the above post that explain technical terms used in it. Follow them for more explanations.
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
Buy me a coffee!
To me, the real idealists are the Neo-liberals because everything they talk about does not really exist in the way they say it does.
But crucially Neo-liberalism as an ideal is under-pinned by one thing other idealists do not have: money-power. So they are able to achieve their ideals unlike the rest of us.
To me at least, this problem need unpicking a lot more.
Nope – the neoliberals are utopians. & thus what they talk about cannot exist ………&/but, they use circular reasoning to justify it.
As for the ideal – as an engineer, there is a perpetual tension between the big plan and its implementation – where there are always compromises of one sort or another – welcome to reality. Problems occur when systems don’t reflect the reality within which they exist (marginal pricing of elec one such system that is failing).
Agreed
When people try to fit reality to match the theory, as so often happens with economic theorists such as neo-liberals or Marxists, it will end in tears.
Empiricism was the British contribution to Enlightenment philosophy. It is a useful servant.
There is something profoundly wrong in your assertion but I just cannot find the words to express it at this moment in time.
I’m sitting here looking at figures for the growth of wealth since 2010, Richard’s TWR and the corruption of politics by wealth and I’m being told that Utopia is something that cannot exist.
The question is this then?
In whose mind does utopia not exist or is not possible? Because if you’re rich, things must look fucking utopian to them at the moment I can tell you. Have you ever thought that you are actually living in such a Utopia and this is what if feels like?
I’m also sitting here looking at a book about ‘social exclusion’. It looks positively ancient – from another world – , alien, quaint, in fact.
I’m also reading Michael Hudson’s ‘The Collapse of Antiquity’ (2023) which is basically the history of the greed of human elites. And what crops up is the constant violence employed by those elites in order to have everything, to snuff out opposition – a trait that takes us right up to certain meeting at – of all things – a Quaker meeting house in London recently.
Cogitate on those few morsels.
Can one be a “pragmatic” idealist? (I know what I want, but I’ll settle for 65% of it rather than zero).
Of course that doesn’t determine whether your idealism is good or evil but it might enhance your chances of success. It is of course essential in coalition governments.
Agree map is not the territory (Korzybski)
In Family and Human Systems Trump etc assume a first order position – believing their map is the territory, they are the expert and stand outside the system, and so are all seeing and all knowing. It’s a position of certainty. (small children exhibit such thinking)
Whereas a second order position accepts we may have some expertise, but we are in the system, influenced and influencing, knowledge is socially and personally constructed, we cannot see it all, so it’s simply not possible to be all knowing, (maturity is required to manage this complexity and uncertainty).
Quite so.
Would it be fair to argue Neoliberals take a First Order position, that they are the experts and their map is the territory?
Quite possibly
A lateral contribution?
https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=i%27m+an+urban+spaceman+y&mid=E8CD8CB28DC68C171FBBE8CD8CB28DC68C171FBB&FORM=VIRE
A story of Ancient Greece.
Once upon a time there were Plato and Socrates. Socrates commissioned artists to make perfectly proportioned statues of great beauty which astonished everyone in their perfect ugliness, for they were not human, not of the local and therefore not of nature – unnatural. Plato, on the other hand. commissioned artists to make perfectly proportioned statues of great beauty but which were then broken so that arms here, legs there, were missing – beauty in ruins.
Plato, of course, was the smarter, for when they were seen everyone had to imagine them perfect, which whilst reminding them of their own human characteristics – their “imperfections” – would condition them to always look beyond the existing ruin, which is reality, to the perfect model. Unfortunately it came to pass that Plato’s statues were placed all over the country whilst those of Socrates were completely destroyed; and thus began the decline of Western civilisation.
Today we still live with perfectly executed ruins, still dreaming of perfection, which blind us to the terroristic power of absolute beauty which goes about its work of creating “actual” ruins.
https://artinruins.net/debt-trap-kunst-praxis/some-debt/how-to-explain-civilisation-to-a-dead-hare/
🙂
“All models are wrong, but some are useful.”
Generally attributed to George E. P. Box
Agreed