The whole 20th century could surely be read as a reach for the stars: reality trying to get a grasp of Utopia; the ambition of perfecting society as the central issue of politics and policies; a society, that citing Robert F. Kennedy doesn't get lost mourning about things as they are, but instead dreams of things as they could be, and asks: "Why not?".
Today we learn in the media as in schools, from historians as from politicians, that the idealism that carried this agenda of self-perfection was wrong, that Gulags and Nazi concentration camps were the ultimate product of this attitude of mind. We learn as self-evident, that ideals do only contribute to conflict between as whitin countries and that true political progress is due to technical, objective, quasi-scientific knowledge and consequent action.
This, we say, is not true.
While teaching such belief today's society conveniently forgets, that this period was the period of mankind's greatest progress. Not only we could argue, that socialism found some political mediation in post-war Europe, leading to the greatest experiment in social active democracies seen until now. Or that even the Soviet Union, especially after the terrors of Stalinsm, knew progress and a new relative prosperity of families still owned by rural Lords less than 100 years before.
Not only could we argue, that this period saw the greatest decline in poverty, even in countries east of Berlin and south of the equator. And that even those remaining poor, got closer year by year to the rich part of the world, surely not making their suffering less terrible, but showing how progress was taking its course.
But we could even argue that the United States of America, always holding high the notion of liberty, and often truly being a "beacon of hope", were it just because of idealism. America was idealistic, as Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal was, or the infamous McCarthism, or even the Great Society of the (not so idealistic) Lyndon B. Johnson.
So it is difficult to deny, that the 50 years, which saw the greatest progress in mankind's history were driven by an idealism, a reach for the stars.
Today this reach for the stars has stopped for too long.
It's time we stop just looking at the world as a place of treachery and hate, but instead start again to glance at the incomplete patterns of progress it contains and again try to complete them.
