The Two Models

There are two primary models of seeing the world that have been duking it out for a long, long time. They were most famously embodied in the rift between Plato and Aristotle, well over 2,000 years ago. Both men had their errors (this was a long time ago, after all), but each came up with a basic model of viewing the world. I'm simplifying, of course, but here they are in essence:

Aristotle: We should look at the things that are (reality), make sense of them and draw useful conclusions from them.

Plato: Everything we see is a weak version of the real and glorious things that are beyond us. We should seek the ideal, and bring ourselves toward it. (Fundamentally, this is a belief that abstracts are more real than concretes.)

Our Western civilization, as it formed in late antiquity, was something of a philosophical mix. As the Roman Church gained influence it took a very Platonic course, but the Church eventually had to give up Plato, at least in a large measure, due to the influence of Thomas Aquinas and others.

And so we inherited a civilization more in tune with Aristotle than with Plato. Idealism, however, reverses that, bringing people back to Plato's way. And while it tends to sound good ("lets hold to the higher principles"), it leads to dark and deadly places.

To explain why this is so, I'm going to use a wonderful but very academic passage written by Harry J. Hogan, from his introduction to The Evolution of Civilizations by Carol Quigley. I'll pull pieces out of the quote and then elaborate:

"In a Platonistic society, social arrangements are molded to express a rigidly idealized version of reality."

People who look to and revere a higher power, purpose or principle, tend to become rigid, and to define their principle rigidly. Those who espouse a variant of their belief are immediately seen as an enemy. You can find this in more or less every idealistic group; it's why, for example, the Bolsheviks killed the other socialists.

If your higher ideal must be the great one, whoever distracts from it is pulling people away from truth… is destroying those who listen and the future of humanity as well. This is how we got self-righteous college students and kindergarten teachers breaking windows and terrorizing people.