The fire with which we must play

I am beginning to get serious about engaging with Allan Bloom's classic, The Closing of the American Mind, still in print and topical this quarter of a century later. I have long postponed reading the book through simple prejudice. Laments about the shortcomings of the new generation have been with us since stylus was put to clay. However, I have, like some sort of literary dog sniffing about, been sampling some passages and on the basis of the erudition in plain sight, have started reading it.

This passage in particular caught my attention.

Utopianism is, as Plato taught us at the outset, the fire with which we must play because it is the only way we can find out what we are. We need to criticize false understandings of Utopia, but the easy way out provided by realism is deadly. As it now stands, students have powerful images of what a perfect body is and pursue it incessantly. But deprived of literary guidance, they no longer have any image of a perfect soul, and hence do not long to have one. They do not even imagine that there is such a thing.

Behind every utopia there is a spirit of totalitarianism at work. "Man is perfectible and I will do it come hell or high water" seems to be the essence. Utopian visions are anathema to freedom and always end tragically.

But Bloom is right on two counts. Utopianism is dangerous but inspirational and a simple throwing up of the hands and a muttered "That's life" is equally unproductive.

Back to the old golden mean then - you are treading a thin line between the motivation and inspiration that comes from a vision of what the world could be (a vision of the City on the Hill) and at the same time, in the same breath, working with the constraints, trade-offs and sacrifices that come with realism. The delicate teetering and tottering down that fine balance is what we call the good life.