Plato’s Honey Head

In Moby Dick, a careless sailor falls into the large cavity of oil that forms the major part of a sperm whale’s head. The account concludes with the following paragraph:

Now, had Tashtego perished in that head, it had been a very precious perishing; smothered in the very whitest and daintiest of fragrant spermaceti; coffined, hearsed, and tombed in the secret inner chamber and sanctum sanctorum of the whale. Only one sweeter end can readily be recalled—the delicious death of an Ohio honey-hunter, who seeking honey in the crotch of a hollow tree, found such exceeding store of it, that leaning too far over, it sucked him in, so that he died embalmed. How many, think ye, have likewise fallen into Plato’s honey head, and sweetly perished there?¹

A more graphic image of the often-fatal attraction idealism has represented for generations of Americans would be hard to find. Granted, a complete philosophy of idealism may never have taken root in American soil. One looks in vain, for example, for a metaphysics, epistemology, logic, and value system that is clearly idealistic and distinctively American. Transcendentalism, which may appear to be a candidate, betrays its ancestry by a heavy German accent, and later manifestations are seldom more than variations upon themes composed elsewhere.

Yet Melville’s instinct is sure. Plato’s name heads the family group sheet of most idealists, and the staying power of his fundamental position is matched only by the honeyed ease with which it seems to encompass and resolve major problems in philosophy. Very early in America, however, philosophical theory was subordinated to practical consequence. Ralph Waldo Emerson may well have had Platonic absolutes in mind when he urged his countrymen “to hitch (their) wagons to a star,”² but he was promptly and widely interpreted to be pleading for high goals and ambitious effort. American idealism kept only a tenuous tie with Platonic and neo-Platonic doctrines. Its real force became evident in the general use of the ideal as ultimate goal.

Successive generations of Americans have been inspired and prodded by the heady assumption that nothing is impossible for free men and women in a choice land. If an occasional thread of personal advantage seems to be woven into some of the banners under which we have marched, substantial strands of compassion, honor, sacrifice, loyalty, and unity in apparent diversity are generally discernible and set the expectations that distinguish American imperatives. As a result, we are never prepared as a people for the Teapot Domes and Watergates because we face with profound reluctance the fact that national symbols may no longer carry the ideal aura we have simply taken for granted as part of them. In the midst of widespread cynicism and personal compromise, we still cling to our collective conviction that—be it physical battle or moral challenge—the last time we looked “our flag was still there.” We underestimate the significance of this shared belief at the risk of missing the essence of this country.

While our collective response to the challenge of the ideal should be rising to a shared hope, as individuals we must recognize idealism as a potentially negative force in our lives. Specifically, when idealism becomes divorced from a strong, stabilizing religious context—as, increasingly, it has been of late—it easily degenerates into a goad that either wounds without apparent purpose or becomes justification for the cause in search of a rationale. Such secular idealism assumes a pious face without difficulty if it seems to need to. For instance, secular idealism would have us think that a perfectionist is on the way to perfection. To suggest otherwise is to appear either perverse or obtuse. How, argues secular idealism, could one fail to see that total commitment in all we do is simply required if we would perfect ourselves? I would respond, gently—for the perfectionist has little disposition to brook criticism—that perfectionists may be working against their own growth by “looking beyond the mark” (Jacob 4:14).

In this context of perfectionism’s hazards, President Harold B. Lee counseled that trying to make the gospel more than it is can be as serious a problem as making it less. Fretful striving after ultimate accomplishment may blur appreciation of modest but effective effort. Students, especially graduate students, who obsessively rework their material are more prone to failure than they probably realize. Needed refinement becomes mere fiddling; pared once too often, one’s prose becomes cryptic. Truly complex ideas can be simplified until they become simpleminded. Most of us know the frustration of “trying too hard” yet feel guilty when we ease off. The ideal (note how that very term coerces us) remains unremitting effort. We have been conditioned by slogans such as “There’s no such word as can’t” or “The impossible just takes a little longer,” or we become enslaved by aphorisms like “Whatever is worth doing is worth doing well.”

How that last maxim—“Whatever is worth doing is worth doing well”—used to take the joy out of my weedy garden! But no more. Now I browse through seed catalogs on snowy evenings and dream of bounteous harvests, knowing all the while that my gardening time is going to be indeterminate and that I will need to be satisfied if my watermelons do not ripen—again. They did not ripen this year, but those valiant little football-size melons are less reproach than promise. This year I did what I could. Now, if I get them planted a month earlier, next year will be better. I must admit I felt a bit dashed when a young grandson, looking at my garden with me after I had returned from an extended trip, asked, “Grandpa, how did your garden get ruined?” He was a bit young to appreciate the Shakespearean quote that is my answer to those who question my flawed effort: “An ill-favored thing, sir, but mine own.”³ I enjoy having a garden, and I have no desire to calculate every time that I can bring something to fruition before I start. If I have to do such calculation, more often than not I will refuse to begin at all. Perhaps I should also note that a few half-finished items—or as I prefer to describe them, about three days along to creation—reside in my basement workshop. Those projects do not weigh on my conscience, but they do engage my mind from time to time. In fact, I return to projects begun months or even years ago, better prepared now to complete them—and find them good.

Perfectionists, in contrast, can seldom wait. They have such trouble in being tentative. They cannot enjoy the genial trial and error that often leads to imaginative answers. In feverishly reaching for ultimates, they lose the ability to relate their effort to the importance of each task. If everything must be done well, perfectionists also forfeit the power to distinguish between that which must be done with exquisite care and that which requires only a modicum of skill. Function is the key. Under certain circumstance, rough carpentry may suit its function better than a cabinetmaker’s precision. Fastidious effort should be saved for significant tasks, lest we all turn into fussbudgets. If every effort is our best, we can rise to no challenge. We become drained by the trivial and find that the level of excellence we can sustain is disappointing. The result is guilt and frustration.

The distinction between perfection and perfectionism is not a minor, semantic one. As an absolute term in a relative world, the word perfection is difficult to use precisely, but for Mormons, at least, it has connotations that suggest eternal progress. Perfectionism, on the other hand, is less a humble assertion of what one may someday become than a mildly arrogant description of a self-imposed affliction that is as disappointing as it is burdensome. Only perfectionists, for instance, can have their hopes blasted, because only extravagant expectations have that much to lose. If our hopes are reasonable, they have the “substance” promised in the first verse of Hebrews 11. Appropriate but unpretentious hopes enhance the present by providing an immediate enjoyment of the future, for whether one’s dreams are realized in fact, they have been relished in faith, provided that impossible yearning did not corrupt anticipation. The possible and reachable serve immediate needs. They provide directing goals and useful gauges. The ideal has a tendency to float free of the explicit guidance I need at a given moment. Following the ideal is like trying find our way from Provo to Orem by following the North Star. It is there, but it cannot show us the way to the diagonal.⁴

The second challenge of the secular ideal, with clearly negative overtones, is the siren song of romanticism. May I hasten to make the same kind of distinction here between romance and romanticism that I earlier made between perfection and perfectionism? As one who cannot imagine himself more happily a husband, father, and grandfather, I would be ungrateful if I did not give proper recognition to romance—that woefully inadequate term by which to sum up the delights of courtship and the continuing fulfillment of marriage. Romanticism, on the other hand, is long on ego but short on the love that reaches out to others in sensitive concern. We can make no persuasive protestation of sympathy or general concern for a cause if we slight basic human relationships.

Romantics often claim they are transcending the merely personal to align themselves with celestial forces. What they claim to be sublime, however, usually turns out to be merely primitive—an instinctive response that rallies romantics in every age, a symbol of the dark side of the romantic period in literature. Yet even here, romantics do not seek the transcendent; rather, they await it. The discipline, the apprenticeship that earns access to basic truths, requires an ordering of life that romantic yearners consider anathema. Like Alexander of old, they would rather cut knots than untie them. The fact that cutting the knots always ruins the rope, making further use of it impractical, has little appeal to those whose chronology is restricted to now and whose horizons are bounded by here.

Those of us with opportunities for better education than many romantics must be particularly sensitive to the educational presumptions that often reveal a romantic stance in the making. Have we learned to carp, but not yet learned to criticize? Do we know enough to spot the ore, yet remain unable to refine the gold? Do we use clever slogans intended to rip through sham and hypocrisy, yet fail to see that superficiality is a widely circulated counterfeit of true simplicity? Children are seldom romantic, but adolescents—those who are in the process of maturing or have never grown up—are often afflicted. At a certain stage in our lives, romanticism is understandable. Who has not needed to triumph over astounding odds, savor the possibility of an unearned breakthrough, or bask in the luxury of easy mastery? Most of us survive such blandishment, little the worse for a mild rattling of the bars that begin to enclose our unbridled fancy. If we bring hearts still disorderly with expectation to college, a year in the dorms helps calm them. The embarrassing few who temporarily succumb to soap-opera maundering usually grow up. In fact, as Thoreau says, “The young man who gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, decides—in middle age—to build a wood shed with them.”⁵ If we feel serious disillusionment in contemplating such a conclusion, we may need to look with unanointed eyes at our youthful ambitions. If they were shored up by emotionalism and buttressed by sentimentality, they lacked a solid foundation on which to build anything. This problem extends even to woodsheds, for a base anchored by romantic notions is subject to all winds and responsive to every pressure.

Ideals that fail to comport with reality in any practical sense are usually more frustrating than motivating. Even the idea of complete personal freedom—so dear to romantic hearts—would, in practice, destroy the very individuality it is supposed to foster. The most cursory examination of human history demonstrates that personal freedom is the first casualty of chaos. When the recognition of authority disappears, nothing save the struggle for power remains. Respect for law is the cornerstone of individual liberty, admitting no substitute short of universal love. Indeed, law must proceed from such love, for any love that does not add respect to affection is little more than infatuation, and infatuation is no base on which to build a free society.

The most disabling characteristic of romantics may not be their lack of realism so much as their penchant for extremes. Most of us have long recognized that extremes vitiate our strength. Romantics, on the other hand, are at least as concerned about the vehemence of their support as the object of their support. When finally tiring of pretending to powers unavailable to them, they weary of trying to establish a linkage between principle and application. For that reason, they often retreat to skepticism—which may be the last refuge, the final illusion, of romantic idealism. In insisting that all things are less than they seem, the romantic can still remain with comfortable ultimates, for skepticism is as absolute as credulity.

The penchant for skepticism, of course, is romanticism’s fatal flaw. Doubt can be creative, the sure path to certainty when it implies a desire to know, as Alma makes clear (Alma 32). Skepticism, however, is essentially thoughtless, an indulgent reflex. For skeptics—by definition—cannot affirm anything, even their own skepticism. Trying to remain mentally coherent while being skeptical of our own skepticism can short-circuit the higher brain centers and leave us in the darkness of cynicism—a condition of intellectual and emotional exhaustion that is not simply a prelude to despair, but the hallmark of despair.

The slide from skepticism into cynicism is all the more inevitable because skepticism is clearly addictive. Scoffing often takes on the appearance of valid criticism; one can enjoy the “high” of being taken seriously with a minimum of mental effort. After all, as Alexander Pope pointed out over two centuries ago, many of us have “an itching to deride, and fain would be on the laughing side.”⁶ If we indulge this temptation to ridicule, we can easily substitute jeering and emotional tirade for thoughtful consideration, until our lip becomes perpetually curled and our mind only operates at a fast idle. Secular idealism, too, eats its children.

I need not continue to identify manifestations of idealism that have proven to be deceptive or negative. We can successfully meet idealism’s challenge—especially if we enjoy the added illumination of the gospel. Those tempted by perfectionism should read King Benjamin’s address and learn that God never asks us to run faster than we have strength (Mosiah 4:27). Budding romanticists may refocus their abstract charity after reflecting upon the intensely practical and personal definition of “pure religion and undefiled” described in James 1:27. Similarly, skeptics may understand their real problem after considering Paul’s assertion that Satan blinds “the minds of them which believe not” (2 Cor. 4:4).

In contrast to secular idealism, gospel-centered idealism has a unique spectrum and congruity. Only LDS doctrine unites the pre-mortal, mortal, and post-mortal worlds in an infinite, eternal realm where every righteous goal can be achieved and every worthy hope realized. Lacking such an encompassing orientation, secular idealism tends to lack coherence. Specifically, the disjunction between the actual and the ideal leaves those two concepts adrift: the actual loses any extended meaning, while the ideal becomes an impossible dream. Consequently, secular idealism cannot effect the reconciliation that is the measure of fundamental truth.

The gospel admits no such limitation. It acknowledges no impossible dreams, although it recognizes order even in eternal growth. Perfectionists must learn the principle of progress incorporated in “line upon line, precept upon precept” (D&C 98:12); furthermore, they must understand that appropriately using their talent and energy is part of their stewardship accountability. Romanticists, on the other hand, must come to appreciate that salvation requires individual effort, that the discipline of this world is a necessary preparation for the next. And skeptics, finally, must eventually see that “all things are possible to him that believeth” (Mark 9:23).

The reconciliation that gospel idealism makes possible—the blending of spirit and matter, sacred and secular, eternal and transient, general and specific, positive and negative, trial and reward—is all about us and continually reaffirms that all truth is a “compound in one” (2 Ne. 2:11). But all of us must come to appreciate the totality of our own experience, to understand that adversity is a gift no less than talent and that failure helps to define success. Perhaps attaining this understanding is the greatest challenge the ideal—which for Latter-day Saints is celestial exaltation—puts before us.

Can we reconcile opposites without serving two masters? Consider a few of the mundane and apparently negative gifts that are a necessary part of the whole. First, a kind word for shame. Jeremiah kept faith with backsliding Judah through excruciating days but finally despaired when his friends lost their capacity to be ashamed. What an unflagging prompter shame is! How grateful we should be that that adrenalin of shame can still summon our better selves when we are sorely tempted.

Next, at least a thankful nod to poverty—that gray companion of all my student days. If necessity is the mother of invention, poverty is the father of perspective. When circumstance limits frivolous choice, even the dullard becomes discriminating. One seldom forgets the underscored lessons of deprivation. How sobering—and how maturing—to be free from the cheat of indulgence. The recurring thrill of enough to eat is never lost on one who has been hungry without recourse. But surely the perspective of poverty is not limited to physical well-being. A shabby series of C grades is the perfect setting for a glorious A, especially when one has learned—and earned—the difference.

Finally, grateful acknowledgment of the uncertainty that plagues our expectations and compromises our cleverest plans. In the flourish of youth, I prized the decisive gesture, the unqualified stance. Later, mildly disheveled by having been decisively wrong a few times, I was willing to admit that an unqualified stance is just a pose that takes itself too seriously. An honest assessment of what we have really been able to forecast in our own life should keep the most compulsive planner modest. Deaths of those dear to me have underlined again and again the tenuous grasp we each have on life. After the unexpected jostles with the unbelievable on the front page of every newspaper, we nervously assert that the only certainty is uncertainty.

What makes shame, poverty, and uncertainty objects of true thanksgiving? The gospel provides a context for each, and each provides a defining counter that sharpens a basic truth. Shame, when completed by repentance, results in progress. Poverty prepares the obedient to fully appreciate the abundance that is their inevitable reward. And earthly uncertainties are merely the obverse of the unchanging verities that give exaltation its meaning.

If we can keep our eye single in the midst of multiple distraction, if all our choices have the authority of personal righteousness, if we still feel the pull of stars when we must walk through mire, we will be ready to say with Habakkuk of old: “Although the fig tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines; the labour of the olive shall fail, and the fields shall yield no meat; the flocks shall be cut off from the fold, and there shall be no herd in the stalls: Yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will joy in the God of my salvation” (Hab. 3:17–18). If we can share such a feeling of reconciliation, we will have met the challenge of the ideal, now and throughout eternity.