On The Practical and the Ideal
We all too often lower our ideals to match the practical, when we could lift the practical up towards our ideals.
I would like to discuss the tension between practicality and idealism. We are often used to this dialog in the context of politics and, in the American context, the demands of practicality always out-weigh those of idealism. It is hard to imagine we could find ourselves in our current societal predicaments if we were led by our ideals, rather than our notions of practicality.
The ideal is a representation of a certain form of perfection. Ideals can be related to our internal life, our spiritual life, our civic life, our political life, our interpersonal life. Ideals shape our highest vision for who we can be as people.
The practical is a representation of things as they are. Often, the practical is defined by a certain kind of inertia that exists that prevents us from living up to our ideals. Perhaps your ideal is to vote for a political candidate you like, but discover this is rather impractical given societal inertia (i.e., stopping the rolling of our political machine would be like stopping a freight train with our hands).
The ideal and practical live in tension with one another, tension because the ideal and the practical are never in perfect harmony with one another. We have our ideals and we consistently see that the practical does not match with them.
This is okay of course - growing up, I used to get told I needed to “be more practical”, that it wasn’t reasonable to be so idealistic about things. I think it is important to discuss the relationship between the practical and the ideal and how they each relate to us.
The practical and the ideal are like two teams playing tug-of-war and we are the rope. Our ideals pull us in one direction and the practical pulls us in another. This is why I say the two live in tension. The question becomes, which side do we allow to have influence over us - i.e., which team wins the game of tug-of-war?
Let us take a simple example. Perhaps my ideal is that I ought to not let my anger control me. Yet, one day, my dog pees in the house and I get so angry that I kick him. There will come a moment, once the anger has calmed down, where the practical and the ideal must meet in confrontation, for I have fallen short of my own ideal of myself.
In this example, the practical wins when we make excuses and get defensive. We say, “But, he deserved it - he misbehaved and so my anger and actions were justified.” By doing so, we lower our ideals down to the practical.
In this example, the ideal wins when we recognize that we have fallen short and when recommit ourselves to living up to our ideal in a sincere manner.1 We say, “I fell short of the person I aim to be - I will work diligently to live up to my ideal self.” By doing so, we raise the practical to our ideal.
And this is the important role that ideals play in our lives. We, as individuals, will always fall short of our ideals in some way or another. We will get angry, we will be unkind, we will make mistakes, we will lose our way - yet, it is our ideals that guide us forward, even when we fall short of them.
A limiting belief is an idea we hold that prevents us from feeling strong enough to live up to our own ideals. We live in a time of great limiting beliefs, at the personal and societal levels. At the personal level, we know we shouldn’t get angry but we say, “I just can’t control my anger”. At the societal level, we know we should be able to help people but we say, “It just isn’t practical to do so.”
We put up limiting beliefs when it is too uncomfortable to bear the tension between the ideal and the practical. See, the ideal will always be in tension with the practical, but if we release our ideals, then we can bask in the comfort of the practical. Then, when we get angry, instead of needing to navigate the dissonance between our ideal and our reality, we can construct an idea in our minds that our anger was, in fact, ideal.
We debase ourselves when we make the practical our ideal. Maybe this is what Nietzsche meant when he said that “God is dead”. Instead of holding an ideal in our minds with which we can judge what is “good”, we instead shift to simply viewing the practical as “good” and any challenge to it as “bad”.
Perhaps we think that forcing people to work (i.e., slavery) is a bad thing, but we enjoy the practical nature of stores full of cheap clothing made in sweatshops in other countries. The comfort of the practical outweighs the ideal - we find a limiting belief to justify it, “what could I possibly do to make a difference?”, and then we fill our closets with such clothing.
We even bring the very idea of idealism into the practical with our limiting beliefs. We say, “I wish I could be idealistic, but it isn’t practical”. Yet, to live without ideals is like exploring unknown terrain without a compass or a map - how will we know which way to go?
We live in an ever-more secular time. Religion has long been responsible for setting the ideals for what it means to be a “good person”. The Ten Commandments, the Teachings of Christ, the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism, the Teachings of Krishna to Arjuna - within these religious systems, we have incredibly high ideals of what it means to be a person.
In The Fiddler on the Roof, the Jewish father Tevye is constantly being challenged by his children. They are not being practical in his mind and every time they frustrate him, he steps aside to speak with God and, after contemplating his ideals, he becomes compassionate and listens to his children. He does not lower his ideals to the practical - he elevates the practical to his ideals.
And this is not some setup to suggest people need to be religious, for religious movements have been just as complicit in the lowering of our ideals. Swami Vivekananda said that, “The worst lie you can ever tell yourself is that you were born a sinner or a wicked man. He alone is a sinner who sees a sinner in another man.” Original sin (the idea that humans are inherently sinful), of course, being a foundational aspect of many modern Christian institutions that permeates all of American culture. The belief that human beings are inherently sinful is a limiting belief that rends us from the realm of ideals.
No - it is just to reflect that we have lowered our ideals down to the practical and that the only thing preventing us from living up to higher ideals is the limiting beliefs that we enforce upon ourselves. The great spiritual traditions of the world have developed beautiful legacies by which we can elevate the practical towards the ideal in our own lives. There are other places to look, but this is what the spiritual traditions are explicitly about.
The great spiritual traditions set “big” ideals, ideals about the very meaning of life. It can feel difficult to engage with these “big” ideals,2 yet, when we set “small” ideals, the practical generally wins in the end. When we set a “small” ideal (such as, “eating better”), we are only able to maintain it until the inertia of practicality becomes too much to bear. A “small” ideal is like choosing kindergartners for the tug-of-war team, a “big” ideal is like choosing the football team.
The most central ideal in nearly all religious traditions is the Oneness of everything and that we each are inherently divine. In a previous post, I discussed how the Shema, the most important Hebrew prayer, is a declaration that God is all that which is (Yahweh/YHWH) and that Yahweh is One.
In the Book of Mark, Jesus is asked, “What is the most important commandment of all”, to which Jesus replied, ““The most important is, ‘Hear, O Israel: YHWH is God, YHWH is One. And you shall love YHWH your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” Oneness is the highest ideal in Judaic and Christian text.
What does it mean for Oneness to be an ideal? Well, it tells us that things which lead to unity are “good” and that lead to division are “bad”. It is why Jesus added The Golden Rule as being just as important as the Shema - because to treat others as you would treat yourself is to bring yourself closer to unity with them. Jesus was very good at making mystical ideals like Oneness feel very practical, which is one reason his teachings are so popular.
So, I will begin to bring this to a conclusion. Ideals are guiding principles. We will not always be able to perfectly embody our ideals, but that does not mean we must discard them. Say I want to travel North and so I drive North but I arrive at a crossroad where I must either turn East or West or return South - just because practicality requires we sometimes have to step off the path of our ideals does not mean we stop walking that path, sometimes we must walk East or West to find the way North.
We reduce our ideals down to the practical through our limiting beliefs. When presented with an ideal, a limiting belief says “that is impossible - I am not able to live up to that ideal.” Our limiting beliefs function by telling ourselves we are lacking, that we are not strong enough to live up to our ideals.
The truth is, we are all strong enough to live up to our ideals. It is only an idea we hold in our minds that we are not. Overcoming such ideas is no trivial matter, of course, it takes a great deal of work to step into realizing this - all of the great spiritual traditions of the world emphasize the importance of “doing the work”. Bringing the ideal down to the practical is easy, lifting the practical up to the ideal is hard - this is the nature of gravity.
And, perhaps the greatest challenge, is that we must become comfortable with the tension that will always exist between the practical and the ideal. Our limiting beliefs protect us from this tension, but it is this very tension that invites us to grow towards our own ideals and invites us towards our shared Oneness and inherently divine nature.
Here, when I say “sincere”, I am meaning that one makes a commitment to their own self that is honest and truthful.
A common limiting belief, one I had to struggle with.