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Realistic Idealism: The Highest Expression of Hope

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The muscle of realistic hope gives us the power to climb out of the pit of cynicism, bitterness, and helplessness. When the muscle grows stronger and transforms into participation, the collective action it generates has the power to solve our national and global problems. When the muscle of realistic hope reaches the height of its strength, it becomes realistic idealism.

The highest expression of hope is realistic idealism. Unlike naive idealism, it is based on evidence, experience, and the three kinds of trust (trust in yourself, trust in other people, trust in your ideals). It exists when the cup of hope overflows and spills into the world around us. Realistic idealism is hope that spills into our actions, the way we treat people, our commitment to something larger than ourselves, our determination to make a difference, every corner of our personalities, and every aspect of our lives. Participation is hope transformed into action; realistic idealism is hope that transforms us into the people our world needs most.


Figure 1.2: The Muscle of Hope

Not all who have realistic hope choose to participate in solving our national and global problems, and not all who participate are realistic idealists. Like any muscle, strengthening the muscle of hope toward its highest expression is not easy. Because most of us are never taught how to exercise the muscle of hope, it has atrophied and left us weak. While my father was on military duty in Germany during the 1960s, he purchased a hand-drawn portrait of Albert Schweitzer, a great idealist of the twentieth century, who transformed his hope into action. Since my earliest memories that picture has hung in the hallway of my parents’ house. Schweitzer said:

In my youth I listened to conversations of grown-ups which wafted to me a breath of melancholy, depressing my heart. My elders looked back at the idealism and enthusiasm of their youth as something precious that they should have held on to. At the same time, however, they considered it sort of a law of nature that one cannot do that. This talk aroused in me the fear that I, too, would look back upon myself with such nostalgia. I decided never to submit to this tragic reasonableness. What I promised myself in almost boyish defiance I have tried to carry out.

Adults take too much pleasure in the sad duty of preparing the young for a future in which they will regard as illusion all that inspires their hearts and minds now. Deeper life experience, however, talks differently to the inexperienced. It entreats the young to hold on to the ideas that fill them with enthusiasm throughout their lives. In the idealism of his youth, man has a vision of the truth. In it he possesses a treasure which he must not exchange for anything …12 So the knowledge about life which we grown-ups must impart to the young is not: “Reality will surely do away with your ideals” but rather: “Grow into your ideals so life cannot take them away from you.”13

Schweitzer grew into his ideals, and they gave him a vision of the truth that allowed him to help countless people. He said he did not want to preach the ideal of unconditional love taught by Jesus; he wanted to practice it.14 According to Albert Einstein, Schweitzer “is a great figure who bids for the moral leadership of the world … He is the only Westerner who has had a moral effect on this generation comparable to Gandhi’s. As in the case of Gandhi, the extent of this effect is overwhelmingly due to the example he gave by his own life’s work.”15

Following the cruelty and devastation of World War II, Schweitzer showed the world how we can all embrace humanity’s highest ideals such as compassion, service, and peace. By embodying the ideals many had forgotten during Hitler’s reign, he represented the new European who no longer agreed with brutal colonialism, violence, and oppression. When he was awarded the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize it was for the ideal “reverence for life” that defined his life. This ideal began to form during his childhood. He explained:

It struck me as inconceivable that I should be allowed to lead such a happy life while I saw so many people around me struggling with sorrow and suffering. Even at school I had felt stirred whenever I caught a glimpse of the miserable home surroundings of some of my classmates and compared them with the ideal conditions in which we children of the parsonage at Günsbach had lived … I could not help but think continually of others who were denied that good fortune by their material circumstances or their health …. As I awoke, the thought came to me that I must not accept this good fortune as a matter of course, but must give something in return.16

In my earlier books I explained how Gandhi, who was a soldier in the British army and served in the Boer and Second Zulu Wars, embraced the warrior ideals to always place the mission first, never accept defeat, never quit, and never leave a fallen comrade. These ideals can be used for good or evil, and as a soldier of peace they gave Gandhi the strength to accomplish his peaceful mission. Although Schweitzer did not serve in the military, he too embodied these ideals.

Born in 1875, Schweitzer received his PhD in philosophy at the age of twenty-four. Over the next nine years he published several books, including The Quest of the Historical Jesus, Johann Sebastian Bach, and The Art of Organ Building and Organ Playing in Germany and France. Then, after a successful career as an organist and theologian, he decided to dedicate his life to a new mission: serving humanity by becoming a doctor and opening a hospital in Africa to care for the sick. Schweitzer received much criticism from friends and family. Today if someone decided to help the sick in Africa he or she would be applauded as a humanitarian, but Schweitzer lived during the era of European colonialism, a time when many European rulers supported violence and oppression around the world. Many of Schweitzer’s relatives criticized him for pursuing a path that would waste his talents as a scholar. Nonetheless, he was determined to pursue his dream. At age thirty he began his medical studies and by his late thirties had raised enough money to build a hospital in Africa.

Despite the many obstacles and setbacks that challenged him, Schweitzer embodied the Warrior Ethos by never accepting defeat and never quitting. In 1914, a year after he opened his hospital, World War I began. He and his wife were captured by the French in 1917 and held as prisoners of war. During his imprisonment Schweitzer almost died of dysentery; his hospital was shut down and his humanitarian dream seemed ruined. Schweitzer and his wife were not released until 1918, as the war was ending. Despite being deeply in debt, he remained undeterred. Fueled by his ideals, he worked for many years to raise enough money to reopen his hospital. Many would have quit at the first hurdle, but Schweitzer’s idealism allowed him to triumph against tough odds. In 1924, after years of struggle, he returned to Africa at age forty-nine.

Schweitzer detested violence, but like Gandhi, he understood that the warrior ideals can be used for good or evil. When Schweitzer felt overwhelmed he drew inspiration from warriors, in particular the Carthaginian general Hannibal Barca and his father Hamilcar: “Whenever I was tempted to feel that the years I should have to sacrifice were too long, I reminded myself that Hamilcar and Hannibal had prepared for their march on Rome by their slow and tedious conquest of Spain.”17

Schweitzer also embraced another ideal from the Warrior Ethos: never leaving a fallen comrade. He saw people of all races and nationalities as his brothers and sisters, and treated our global family as his comrades. Journalist Norman Cousins explained that “for more than fifty years the Hospital of Albert Schweitzer in Lamberéné, in the Gabon, became something of a contemporary shrine … Despite the absence of modern plumbing and other conventional aspects of modern sanitation, the recovery rate at the Schweitzer Hospital compared favorably with hospitals in the Western world … The main point about Schweitzer is that he brought the kind of spirit to Africa that black persons hardly knew existed in the white man. Before Schweitzer, white skin meant beatings, gunpoint rule, and the imposition of slavery on human flesh. If Schweitzer had done nothing in his life other than to accept the pain of these people as his own, he would have achieved moral eminence.”18

As we run the marathon of life, we all experience adversity. When we are emotionally dehydrated and want to collapse, realistic hope is a cup we can drink from and realistic idealism is a lake we can swim in. As I mentioned earlier, realistic idealism is hope that spills into our actions, the way we treat people, our commitment to something larger than ourselves, our determination to make a difference, every corner of our personalities, and every aspect of our lives.

In Schweitzer’s case, his realistic idealism poured into so many aspects of his being that he fully embodied his ideals of compassion, service, peace, and reverence for life. When discussing death, he said that humanity’s highest ideals can never die, and when we become those ideals we too will never die. He said: “No one has ever come back from the other world. I can’t console you, but one thing I can tell you, as long as my ideals are alive I will be alive.”19 The army knows that realistic idealists are powerful human beings capable of overcoming unimaginable odds, and that is why it trains its soldiers to be idealistic. In addition to selflessness, service, sacrifice, and the ideals expressed in the Warrior Ethos, General Douglas MacArthur said that warriors must also embrace the ideals of duty, honor, and country. General MacArthur, who made mistakes in his life, changed as a person and grew closer to his ideals during his final years. In a speech given at West Point in 1962, two years before his death, he expressed the importance of idealism:

Duty, Honor, Country: Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be. They are your rallying points: to build courage when courage seems to fail; to regain faith when there seems to be little cause for faith; to create hope when hope becomes forlorn. Unhappily, I possess neither that eloquence of diction, that poetry of imagination, nor that brilliance of metaphor to tell you all that they mean.

The unbelievers will say they are but words, but a slogan, but a flamboyant phrase. Every pedant, every demagogue, every cynic, every hypocrite, every troublemaker, and, I am sorry to say, some others of an entirely different character, will try to downgrade them even to the extent of mockery and ridicule.

But these are some of the things they do. They build your basic character. They mold you for your future roles as the custodians of the nation’s defense. They make you strong enough to know when you are weak, and brave enough to face yourself when you are afraid.

They teach you to be proud and unbending in honest failure, but humble and gentle in success; not to substitute words for action; not to seek the path of comfort, but to face the stress and spur of difficulty and challenge; to learn to stand up in the storm, but to have compassion on those who fall; to master yourself before you seek to master others; to have a heart that is clean, a goal that is high; to learn to laugh, yet never forget how to weep; to reach into the future, yet never neglect the past; to be serious, yet never take yourself too seriously; to be modest so that you will remember the simplicity of true greatness; the open mind of true wisdom, the meekness of true strength … They teach you in this way to be an officer and a gentleman.20

West Point and the army not only trained me to be hopeful, they also trained me to be an idealist. West Point’s motto is “Duty, Honor, Country.” For me, duty means taking responsibility for my actions and the problems I can help solve, and knowing I have a duty to serve others and make a difference. Honor means having integrity, being honest with myself and others, and treating people with respect. Country means being committed to and willing to sacrifice for something larger than myself. Although I am dedicated to serving America, my country extends beyond our national borders. Thomas Paine, one of America’s Founding Fathers, said “My country is the world.”21 In the twenty-first century, our global community has become so interconnected that our country truly is the planet earth.

As General MacArthur said, cynical people will quickly criticize our ideals. One reason is that they lack the experience necessary to understand what an ideal really is. The word ideal comes from the word idea, and an ideal is the fullest expression of an idea. When we internalize ideas to the point where we not only think them but live them, they become ideals. When ideas dwell not only in our mind but also our heart, they become ideals. When ideas become an inseparable part of who we are and increase our compassion, they become ideals.

Schweitzer explained: “The maturity to which we are called means becoming ever simpler, ever more truthful, ever purer, ever more peaceful, ever gentler, ever kinder, ever more compassionate. We do not have to surrender to any other limitation of our idealism. Thus the soft iron of youthful idealism hardens into the steel of adult idealism which will never be lost.”22

Peaceful Revolution

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