THE ACADEMY OF PHILOSOPHY & LETTERS

2024 Annual Conference

Return to the Real: Hope and Moral Restoration in Work, Play, and Politics

View the official conference schedule here.

View a list of featured speaker bios here.

Our world is rife with idealism—and that’s a bad thing.

Consider our social policy where we dream of a world of perfect equality, rejecting obvious differences of sex, talent, and culture. The result is suppression of free speech (no room for a loyal opposition), mutilated children (a small price to pay for egalitarian paradise), and institutions increasingly under the grip of an idyllic ideology (wokeness is a common contemporary form).

Consider our foreign policy where we dream of liberative action predicated not on sinister conniving to dominate, but on an idyllic dream of a world without evil. When that world proves impossible to bring about, the dream collapses into pessimism, only to be renewed again in a different theater with a different evil—but the same disastrous result.

Consider our constitutional order, where we abrogate clear constitutional structures under visions of idyllic goods. The decline in local authority results not in liberty, but the relentless centralization of power.

Consider our culture where art and architecture do not help us live better in the real world, but alienate us from it. Some art—like some thought—does not reveal reality, but obscures it.

The constant barrage of negative media and pessimism about the direction of the world is not the reverse of idealism, but the direct result of judging it according to romantic standards and expectations. Idealism and pessimism are not opposites, but corollaries.

The idyllic orientation guiding our elite’s policy meets the real in a sentiment best expressed by Robespierre, “To make an omelet, you must break a few eggs”—and break eggs they have. The path from dream to reality is strewn with the bodies of dead citizens and soldiers abroad and disfigured cities and children at home. Down every vista we see nothing but desolation. Efforts at urban renewal have resulted in urban deterioration, educational reform in educational decline, and social transformation in social degeneration. Like Icarus, our elite do not accept the limitations of the real and believe it a virtue to fly us toward the sun. In their minds, the resulting conflagration is testament not to the failure of their moral vision, but the exaltedness of their virtue.

So the idyllic dream makes true moral reform impossible. How can the particular, the concrete, the incremental be moral in the face of outrageous oppression on the one hand and dreams of Arcadia on the other?

What does it mean to the Return to the Real? This is not a call for pessimism, but a call for a return to a moral imagination, one not given to idyllic dreaming, but vibrant engagement with real places, real people, and ideas of the real.

Hope, not idyllic dreaming, is the virtue that should animate our participants’ papers.