If Only the SDS had been Idealists!

For Mark Rudd to admit that the SDS really did evil things (Hat Tip: Insty) is not news, except insofar as it shows a glimmer of honesty in a poltical radical. What rather rises above the usual is the way the Chronicle of Higher Education attempts a demarcation between actions and motives:

The confession, a depressing postscript to the 1960s, solves a four-decade-long mystery. It offers a grim testament to just how mean things got at Columbia, and a sobering reminder that not all student radicals were starry-eyed idealists. In more than a couple of cases, they were power-hungry extremists jostling for control of the student-protest movement.

The naivete staggers: as though idealism never caused extremism and power-struggle. One is one to make of someone who believes that passion and a desire to change the world would stand in the way of cutting a few ethical corners for the greater good? Do they really mean to suggest that Mark Rudd was a cynic in 1968?

 

Starry-eyed Idealist. Murderous Bastard. Goatee Afficionado.

I don't know where people get the idea that utopian idealism and brutal calculation are mutually exclusive.  Even the New Testament advises being innocent as lambs and wise as serpents. Pol Pot did not kill millions for the hell of it. Sure, he enjoyed the exercise of power,  but fundamentally he, and Mao, and Lenin, and Stalin, and Napoleon and you-know-who believed in what they were doing. Believed that it would make the world so much better that the present savageries would be forgotten in the future symphonies of happiness and peace. 

If anything, idealism needs leavening with grim experience and that touch of cynicism that comes with the awareness of how truly broken the world is. Otherwise, one comes to believe that anything that will strengthen your power to act for righteousness' sake is a duty to undertake. And like Lady Macbeth, you will glibly pretend that the blood will not mark you.