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Why are ideals important to humankind?
To appreciate this question, we must first recognize where we are.
Humankind has, over the past few centuries, worked on two interrelated strands – ideas, and scientific truth-seeking
- Ideas refer to concepts and visions about society, organizations, human action, and the larger fate of mankind.
- Truth-seeking refers to the ‘scientific method’ which has been the dominant form of testing and evaluation of our understanding of nature in recent centuries.
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As can be seen above, both ideas and scientific truth-seeking offer potential ways forward and methods of understanding about the world we live in. The fruits of these efforts being embodied in technologies and social architectures that mankind has used as a framework for life.
Both these strands have interacted fruitfully and have helped mankind create the modern world as we know it. However, there has remained a gap.
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Neither of these strands have provided an “architecture of choice” – a framework that guides human engagement both at the level of inter-human engagement and engagement of human beings with themselves.
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Ideas offer options and new alternatives. Science and the pursuit of truth offer certainties. But neither provide a navigation system with which human beings can live happy, fulfilled, and ultimately meaningful lives.
This gap has reflected in the state of mankind around us – massive powerful institutions; radical new technologies; increasing comfort and superior delivery systems for the delivery of goods and services to human beings across the globe. But where is the happiness? Where is the peace? Where is the fulfillment? Where is the harmony that should govern our lives?
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It is here that ideals become valuable.
Ideals provide us with roadmaps for growth and choice-making that allow us to perceive and grasp the world around us – in terms that we can grasp and understand – in short, cognitive maps of reality.
Ideals provide us with identities and proposed modes of response to the challenges we face, and give us, if I may say, the “psychological or cognitive infrastructure” we need to live or lives better.
Ideals provide us with models of thinking that provide – not answers or even criteria – but with the appropriate “cognitive capability set” to deal with the world around.
Ideals propose to us new personal destinies – new visions of self that give us a lighthouse to navigate the ships of our own evolution – they give us, as the sun gives plants, a direction to grow in. Thus ideals also provide us with an evolutionary vision that helps us grow proactively and consciously, and become whoever we seek to be, starting from wherever we are.
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Thus ideals play a critical role for human beings during times of change. They provide –
- Roadmaps for growth and choice-making,
- Identities and proposed models of response,
- Enabling models of thinking,
- An evolutionary vision of ourselves
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Put simply, ideals provide humankind with the missing link between its “inner” realities and the world it lives in.
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Originally written in February 2016