Idealism

Human ideals are known, even by those persons and societies not holding to a systematic value system.  Without a value system and significant support of it, neither the individual nor the society will be satisfied with outcomes.  The individual may find a holistic life in a conflicted and contradictory world, as a society may find an order pointing toward ideals, while individuals in that society are losing out.  The great illustration of this is biblical Israel.  Under Moses and escaping Egypt there was a solidarity that held through thick and thin.  After winning the point, and with a system in place, they felt free to shift back and forth in responses, both gaining and losing their way, in and out, up and down, blessing and tragedy.  It is the story of nations.  Historians expect to find in every era the birth, rise, performance, decay and death of nations.  Birth begins in some idealism, grows during the development period, sustains for a longer or shorter period of performance during which the seeds are sown for decay, division, and growth of negatives (evils) that ultimately infect the nation to reductive excess and loss of vision – and that to ending (death).

One of my research projects in college was to analyze the American response to The League of Nations, and present my case in a term paper.  I went into the project with one pattern of belief about the League, and came out with another.  What changed me was not in the ideals of President Woodrow Wilson, the chief author of the League, but the follies of the leaders, including Wilson.  It ultimately became a paper tiger League, incapable of preventing World War II, begun twenty years after World War I ended.  Retaliation to the defeat, the costly reparations, and marginalizing in the world gave rise to a spirit of revenge that was forming as early as 1923, the year of my birth, with an offended artist who took the name of Adolf Hitler and began his program to take the reign of Germany.  I remember well, even though I was only ten years of age, when Hitler was able to shoulder Von Hindenburgh out of authority and take over.  When the war was over in 1945, the world’s leaders had two monstrous wars to taunt and teach them.  Churchill’s warning after the war gave us the Iron Curtain negative that pertains to this day with some slippage, like a faulty garage door going part way up, then down, then up, then down and the world is held in suspense.  The current organization for peace and solutions, now in New York, is so fraught with differences and modest leadership that its contributions are largely related to charity, perhaps with some fraud on the side.

Wilson’s efforts were certainly taken from Christian idealism.  It may have been so strong that he did not detect how to break the human tendency to selfish and angry interests.  In the book entitled simply Wilson, by A. Scott Berg, in a lengthy review by Margaret MacMillan entitled Wilson at His Worst and Best we have statements like the following sample: Berg . . . starts each chapter with a verse from . . . the King James Bible . . . . Does he intend to show Wilson as a figure from another time or perhaps, since many of the passages deal with the life of Christ, as yet another holy martyr?  Berg supports the belief that Wilson was intellectual, well educated, holding high ideals from the manse of his minister father, was deeply committed to family – and so the development of a man of high ideals including: Peace in our time. There was another side, noted in the review: [Wilson] was quick to see slights and was vindictive to those who crossed him – they were morally wrong.  At the same time he advanced segregation, bullied small countries, and was at his worst when he avoided persons like Henry Cabot Lodge in forming the peace delegation to Europe so lost support for his goals relating to lasting peace.  In his life closure, Wilson died, a broken man, in 1924. 

How then do we gain some of the ideals of heaven, which God would share with the world if we sought his gifts?  It would take prayer by those who know prayer; persuasion for the right as God gives us to see the right, humility that offers the graces of a free society without self-interest except for peace, and hopefully freedom in respect for others; persuasion that nothing, not even an acre of space other than our present borders is desired; and, programming to advance the ideals of peoples.  To win in a conglomeration of troubled nations, leadership must find maturity, service, wisdom, humility and righteousness (right).