Idealism, alas, does not protect one from ignorance, dogmatism, and foolishness.
Interpretation
Idealism does not shield individuals from being uninformed or stubbornly holding onto misguided beliefs.
In this quote, Sidney Hook emphasizes that merely holding lofty ideals or ambitions does not grant immunity against ignorance or irrationality. It serves as a reminder that one must actively seek knowledge and remain open to questioning their beliefs to avoid falling into the traps of dogmatism and foolishness.
In practice
During a discussion about the importance of critical thinking in education.
A liberal education will impart an awareness of the amazing and precious complexity of human relationships. Since those relationships are violated more often out of insensitiveness than out of deliberate intent, whatever increases sensitiveness of perception and understanding humanizes life.
Everyone recognizes a distinction between knowledge and wisdom. . . Wisdom is a kind of knowledge. It is knowledge of the nature, career, and consequences of human values. Since these cannot be separated from the human organism and the social scene, the moral ways of man cannot be understood without knowledge of the ways of things and institutions.
In contrast to totalitarianism, democracy can face and live with the truth about itself.
Tolerance always has limits - it cannot tolerate what is itself actively intolerant.
The easiest rationalization for the refusal to seek the truth is the denial that truth exists.
The mob that hails the man on horseback, the Caesars and conquering heroes, does not retain its freedoms for long.
There's a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will.
They [intellectuals] coined most of the slogans that guided the butcheries of Bolshevism, Fascism, and Nazism. Intellectuals extolling the delights of murder, writers advocating censorship, philosophers judging the merits of thinkers and authors, not according to the value of their contributions but according to their achievements on battlefields, are the spiritual leaders of our age of perpetual strife.
I would not question the sincerity of vegetarians who take little interest in Animal Liberation because they give priority to other causes; but when nonvegetarians say that "human problems come first" I cannot help wondering what exactly it is that they are doing for human beings that compels them to continue to support the wasteful, ruthless exploitation of farm animals.
Such is of the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere.
The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.
Life has to be given a meaning because of the obvious fact that it has no meaning.
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