Orthodoxy

In attempting to find the middle road between the optimist and the pessimist, what can get lost is the more pressing matter of what either of the two are looking for or working toward. No matter how positive one might judge current conditions, there is always the drive to make things continually better. The question, of course, is what better actually means. Many attempts have been made to discover what ideals should be sought after. For instance, though many things can be drawn from nature, nature itself doesn’t explicitly demand an ideal: “There is no principle in nature” (153). Values are not derived directly from nature; rather, human ideals are imposed onto nature and demand human rationality to discern.

Another error in this regard is to view mere progress through time as actual and desirable progress, socially speaking. Further, there is an ideal that is set up that is never really concretely settled: Everything is spoken of in images and metaphors, and no tangible definitions are ever offered. People work toward an idealized future that has no basis in reality. Finally, there is the error that progress is simply whatever the one with the power to bring about change wants. This final category gets closest to the truth since an ideal requires a person (or group of people) to have a genuine sense of what they want and a plan to put it into action.