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.
Even if one is interested only in one's own society, which is one's prerogative, one can understand that society much better by comparing it with others.
My view is that if there is no evidence for it, then forget about it. An agnostic is somebody who doesn’t believe in something until there is evidence for it, so I’m agnostic.
The whole world is a theatre for the display of the divine goodness, wisdom, justice, and power, but the Church is the orchestra, as it were—the most conspicuous part of it; and the nearer the approaches are that God makes to us, the more intimate and condescending the communication of his benefits, the more attentively are we called to consider them.
How full of trifles everything is! It is only one's thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.
Say not, 'I have found the truth,' but rather, 'I have found a truth.'
What I call middle-class society is any society that becomes rigidified in predetermined forms, forbidding all evolution, all gains, all progress, all discovery. I call middle-class a closed society in which life has no taste, in which the air is tainted, in which ideas and men are corrupt. And I think that a man who takes a stand against this death is in a sense a revolutionary.
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