Introduction to a Series: Pitfalls of Philosophical Idealism

One of my favorite young political commentators, Sabrina Salvati, frequently says to her audience, “Make it make sense!” This series is intended to help accomplish that, by contrasting two profoundly different ways of understanding the universe, and illustrating the pitfalls of the one and the advantages of the other.

There’s an ongoing struggle between philosophical idealism, which teaches that ideas, human or otherwise, cause and/or alter reality, and philosophical materialism, which teaches that there is an objective reality that does not give one damn about whether human beings believe in it or not.

Materialist philosophy was summed up nicely by the great Philip K. Dick, who said:

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

There have been plenty of ideas that seemed to describe reality quite nicely for ages that, gradually or suddenly, lost credibility, believers, and existence. I’ll use one of my family stories, passed down through several generations, as one example.

I had a great-grandfather named William, who grew up in North Carolina before the Civil War. He could read and write, so chances are that he had some schooling, and if so was certainly taught the idea of white supremacy, that whites were superior to blacks, a naturally servile race who could never fight back in any kind of organized fashion. No doubt he just believed that was the way it was.

Census records show his family owned no slaves, so it is very likely he was drafted into the Confederate Army. He served in armies commanded by Bragg, Hood, and Johnston. He fought against armies commanded by the likes of Grant and Sherman, and somehow lived through the war without a scratch, as some did.

Towards the end of the war, in 1865 somewhere in North Carolina, his unit faced black soldiers in battle. Years later, his description of those troops made quite the impact on family lore:

They were the best soldiers I ever seen.

My great grandpa William stopped believing in white supremacy on that day. For him, it did go away, and he never let anyone forget it. You see, after the war, he lost his farm to Northern bankers referred to as carpetbaggers, and moved to the Texas Panhandle to carve out a new life for himself and his family there, where all they had to worry about were Comanche.

The Civil War had failed to take William or his brother away from their clan, but the Comanche succeeded. They captured his brother and tortured him to death in a vivid and memorable manner, which also made it into the family lore. As you might imagine, stories of what happened under Comanche Moons were great stuff for a little boy interested in history.

Not long after this happened, a new US Cavalry regiment arrived. The family and the other settlers stared in a mixture of wonder and doubt, but grandpa William exulted when he saw the Buffalo Soldiers. He knew that the days of Comanche raids were numbered, and that the Comanche Moon would become just a memory.

He didn’t see inferior people on those cavalry mounts. He saw the material reality of some of the best soldiers the United States has ever produced.

His descendants farmed the land for two more generations, and they were taught that all men were created equal, that the Civil War was a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight, and that white supremacy didn’t really exist; it was just a bunch of lies spread by the powerful to divide and, most importantly, to rule.

Idealism suckers people into believing things are just not so, and when they act on those beliefs when the reality that once gave them credibility is no more, tragedy and destruction are common results.

In the coming days and weeks, I am going to write a series of stories about when this has happened in history, but I will start with something that is threatening our existence as a species right now—the Idea of American Exceptionalism.

I hope you join me. Thanks for reading, good night, and good luck.