i started reading c.s. lewis's studies in words (but took a hiatus from it because his purpose, to explore how to read old texts, is so different from mine). but in it, he briefly describes the moralization of words / how they come to inherently contain the designation "good" or "bad" (basically an ultra-linguistic continuation of what nietzsche writes in the genealogy of morals). anyway, i was thinking a lot about the words "idealist" and "realist" and how i believe that they wrongly carry that value judgement.
today, if you say the word romanticism, you garner immediate eye rolls and sarcastic comments. because the word dreamer is associated with naivety, with stupidity, with a disconnect from reality. no, everybody wants to be a realist (forgetting that cynicism is careful and easy) because a realist is grounded and connected to the truth.
but for me (and i don't necessarily want to politicize the terms), a realist is person not unlike a conservative: someone who does not want to change the status quo. because i have seen realists settle far too often at, "but that's the way it is in the real world." that's the way it is. laziness. unwillingness. the desire to take the "smart" route without questioning anything, without looking around to see that their destitute "objective truth" is almost entirely perceived. because switch to a different decade, a different country, a different skin colour, a different gender, a different social class, educational background, childhood, even birthdate ... and your truth will switch accordingly. no, their truth is the perception of truth that has been fed to them - the kind that the media has very easily commodified so that avril lavigne was once real because she scowled, so that the sex pistols were real because of the way they dressed. film for example, has created a codified system which we see as fantasy. it then negates this system to feed us "reality". completely constructed. and not to linger on the media, but to read a newspaper and watch the news is to get a hyper-realized sense of an impending apocalypse so that, the minute you lift your head from behind the paper, the world seems all-too still, all-too serene.
i still struggle to understand why grit is inherently real, when especially here at columbia, we live in green grass. i mean, i understand where this comes from, i understand the upper-middle class guilt which operates to make us believe that our privileged lives are not reality. and the funny thing is, that in ghana, people generally believe that their destitute lives are not reality.
but i am moving further and further from my point. i've mentioned why i think the term realist connotes over-glorified complacency. i also, think that the terms "idealist" & "romanticism" are highly misunderstood. and though i am not necessarily talking about the artistic movement, it hurts me to see poets like keats, coleridge, and shelley thrown aside because people generally misunderstand the term "Romanticism" and don't see it as the continued, relentless questioning of the world's great paradoxes & acknowledgment of its great wonders.
i won't launch into conspiracy theories, but it seems to me that, because idealism and romanticism are always portrayed to us in the "dreamer" archetype of hollywood films, always shown to us as men so disconnected from the physical laws of reality, forever in their own minds, we learn to dislike them, to quickly dissociate ourselves from them. but i have seen idealism and it is what has changed the world. to look at the gritty world and imagine a better one, to know that there is still so much wonder in this world, to want to change anything, to go exploring and questioning this world ... this is inherently romanticism & idealism. to look at the world around you and see the good and the bad, to acknowledge the good and believe in it so much that you want to save it by attacking the bad ... this is idealism, this is romanticism. and they run on the hackneyed concept of hope (now copyrighted by barack obama, oh lol).
you can't say you want to change the world and call yourself a realist. because, realist, how dare you think that your puny insignificant life will be the one to change a system that has been in place for centuries before you were born?
that's the mindframe, no?
also, to be an idealist, you need to focus your attention so much on the good, to constantly remind yourself that it is there. we live in a world that will focus on the bad. i can vaguely see how this all started, but we have forgotten to acknowledge what we are fighting to save. this fight to focus on the good in a world forever throwing bad your way is what has been picked up as a disconnect from reality, i think. but a realist is a person that focuses on the bad in a world constantly throwing good his or her way. it is an equally disconnected world view. the difference being that, as a realist, you have no chance of falling.
on a final note, because i have lost my train of thought & i'm tired, i find it really funny, really hilarious here at columbia when the left-wing student activists pretend to be realists. i love to see them separate themselves from the artists, the theorists, the scholars ... i love to hear them spout words like "fact" & "concrete", and especially, "reality". and i am not trying to separate myself from these people, but i find it very hard to take part in activism at columbia for many reasons, and the complacency that comes with defining yourself as a "realist" is one of them.
i wish we wouldn't let the common perception, the moralized connotation, of these words affect who we are so much. and you may ask what changing the connotation of the word will do (because, despite my philology i am aware that a word is a word and cannot entirely define a person - especially thanks to a process c.s. lewis details in the book)? well, my ideal would be a person willing to dream but also willing to physically fight for their dreamworld. when we call ourselves "realists" based on the common perception, we inherently accept the status quo. a realist should be someone who is willing to realistically reach for a better world. but realists often snowball into cynicism, pessimism, and complacency. no, in the moralizations of the word, i would rather be an idealist, an optimist, a romantic. because i would rather acknowledge the wonders around me. this is what spurs me to want change. and in a world where my feeble attempts are often curbed quickly, it is idealism that keeps me going, keeps me taking the punches.
oh yes, oh definitely, i will be an idealist.
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