Subjectivity

Will any private training enable the young man to stand firm against the overwhelming flood of popular opinion? or will he be carried away by the stream? Will he not have the notions of good and evil which the public in general have? No, indeed, even to make the attempt is a great piece of folly; such is inevitably the character of one who has had no other training in virtue other than that which is supplied by public opinion. (I speak of human virtue only; what is more than human is not included: for I would not have you ignorant that, in the present evil state of governments, whatever is saved and comes to good is saved by the power of God.)

I might compare him to a man who should study the tempers and desires of a mighty strong beast who is fed by him – he would learn how to approach and handle it, also at what times and from what causes it is dangerous or the reverse, and what is the meaning of its different cries, and by what sounds, when another utters them, it is soothed or infuriated; and you may suppose further, that when, by continually attending upon it, he has become perfect in all this, he calls his knowledge wisdom, and makes of it a system or art, which he proceeds to teach, although he has no real notion of what he means, but calls this honorable and that dishonorable, or good or evil, or just or unjust, all in accordance with the tastes and tempers of the great brute. Good he pronounces to be that in which the beast delights, and evil to be that which it dislikes; and he can give no other account of them except that the just and noble are the necessary.

Consider further: will the world ever be induced to believe in the existence of absolute beauty rather than of the many beautiful, or of the absolute in each kind rather than of the many in each kind? Then the world cannot possibly be a philosopher. And therefore philosophers must inevitably fall under the censure of the world.

—Plato, Republic, Book 5.

Coddled

"The youth is an intellectual merely, a believer in ideas, who thinks that ideas can overcome the world. The mature man passes beyond intellectuality to wisdom; he believes in ideas, too, but life has taught him to be content to see them embodied, which is to see them under a sort of limitation. It has been mentioned that the spoiled-child psychology is encountered almost solely in those people who have abandoned nature and who have signalized this abandonment by taking flight from country to city. Turn where we will, we find that the countryman has a superior philosophic resignation to the order of things. He is less agitated by the cycle of birth and death; he frets less; he is more stable in time of crisis."

—Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences chapter 9.

Basically, experience should teach idealists to respect the constraints imposed by limited resources and human nature. The people who believe they can and should be insulated (by government) from everything-they-don't-like tend to live in cities, because in cities they are insulated to some extent. The problem comes when they try to impose their ideals on the real world, or when the real world invades their city.

“Serious” novels

Novels and poems and plays of the late century smelled of the faculty lounge. “Serious” novels were still read by people who thought themselves better educated than their fellows. Meanwhile, almost all of what [most] people did read was unrelievedly banal: romance novels put out by formula, suspense novels with clipped or infantile sentences, and weird fantasy novels trying desperately to echo J. R. R. Tolkien.

—Anthony Esolen