The Philosophical Sieve:
Looking For Perfection in People and Societies

When we draw values from an ancient society (as we do with the Pawnee under "Things We’d Like to Share With You"), we’re sometimes asked, "Aren’t you idealizing this culture?" Or if it’s a person we quote from, "Aren’t you idealizing this person?" Since we try to pick what’s exemplary in a person or culture, we usually find this reaction to be odd. If a person does something exemplary, should we ignore the exemplary something if we find that the person has also done something less than exemplary? If we discovered, for instance, that Gandhi had some trait we didn’t like, would that be grounds for dismissing whatever good he achieved?

Whatever people intend when they ask us these questions, we usually reply that human and social behavior runs along a spectrum—and the spectrum of behavior is an important philosophical tool.

Specifically, we humans and our societies exhibit traits that range from (1) those we need to restrain to (2) those we need to question constantly to (3) those we encourage to (4) those that seem so flawless in their creativity that we merely let them happen. We and our cultures tend to run the gamut from destructive to downright saintly behavior.

Our evolutionary tendencies at their best move further and further away from the (1) traits listed above and more and more toward the (3) and (4) traits. Each of us does things that we know we need to restrain, but we also grow toward those behaviors that are more creative. We catch ourselves doing things we regret, and we catch ourselves being creative, even saintly at times.

But we always find traits all along the spectrum, so we know that no individual or society is going to come off as perfect. Each person and each culture will simply locate its spectrum differently—some more destructive, some more creative. Some will be moving in one direction, some the other direction.

Over time, however, we’ve realized that there’s another issue involved when we’re asked about idealizing someone or some culture—and this issue is also a philosophical one. What we considered an odd reaction turns out to be the person not grasping what philosophy does—which is easy for people not to grasp these days, since philosophy has all but disappeared from ordinary discourse and everyday living. But as philosophers, we think it’s important that people do grasp what philosophy can do in their lives, especially in this critical time of massive cultural change.

What good transformational philosophy recommends when dealing with change is to try to find the highest vision and values available. Philosophy puts individuals and societies in a conceptual sieve and shakes it, hoping that the best and most useful ideas and values will fall out. Then, each of us can use these ideas and values to help shape the new culture that’s emerging with the new millennium.

Granted, there are some persons and societies who don't, as the colloquial phrase goes, walk their talk. They’re not consistent in their behavior. But we can learn even from that inconsistency. Why don’t they walk their talk? What does this tell us about their talk—their ideals and how they carry them out? Would we, for instance, trust Stalin’s ideals of social change, even if they sounded good? If those ideals did appeal to us, we’d want to know what methods Stalin intended to use to put the ideals into effect. Were the methods consistent with the ideals? And so on.

In fact, for many years we worked with and for an alternative religious group with impressive ideals, sophisticated methods of analysis, high intellectual potential, and some of the nuttiest people we’ve ever met. The inconsistency between the potential and the behavior taught us a great deal about how human wounding can override even the highest religious ideals and end up turning the religion into a dogma that ranges from confused to dangerous.

Since this has happened with religious, political, economic, and scientific institutions down through history, it’s important to see why it happens—and our experience with this group informed our own healing work. What we learned about the warping of individuals and institutions became a major part of our second book, The Paradigm Conspiracy and still informs articles on this website ("We Are Not Our Traumas" and "Impossible Choices," for instance).

So the philosophical sieve that we recommend not only looks for the highest values, but it can also learn from how those values are implemented. When we’re looking for ideals to inform the big changes that are going on right now, we’re looking for the best we can get from any source. But we also look for how those ideals play out in a life or a culture, so that we can learn from that history and not repeat its mistakes.

This is what good transformational philosophy is supposed to do—offer us a sieve to shake out what we can use, especially since we live at one of history’s turning points. And this is what we as philosophers have in mind when we turn with approval to the ideas or values of some person or culture. We don’t intend to parade that person or culture before our readers as perfect. Instead, we hope to offer ideas that may help all of us to push this culture in a more positive direction along the spectrum of behavior, to move all of us toward greater creativity and perhaps even a bit of saintliness.