“Realism” is one of those intractably ideological words that have a tendency to speak the speaker rather than being spoken by him or her. People have a tendency to use this word with a lot of swagger, little realizing they are sitting on the ventriloquist’s knees, speaking his words, without even knowing he exists. This has happened so often that the swagger is actually built in now. You cannot say “be realistic” without swaggering any more than you can say “fuck off” politely.
In short, “realistic” and “realism” are ideological words.
One usually says, “be realistic” to people whose perceptions of a situation are seen as too optimistic. Very seldom is exaggerated pessimism told to “be realistic.” Why is this? Isn’t exaggerated fearfulness as far from reality as exaggerated hope? Somehow the word “realism” has become loaded with pessimism, with a belief that what is most real is somehow necessarily not how we would like it to be. In other words, the good can never be as “real” as the bad. A bad situation is very real, but a good one is somehow imaginary, ephemeral, wishful thinking. We are going beyond the statement that there is more bad than good in life, and towards a view that says the good can only ever be, in some vague sense, ghostly—unreal. Something like an inverted Platonism has crept into our language and thought.
Strictly speaking, “real” simply means that which is–good, bad, or indifferent. So linking this neutral word with connotations of a darker, more pessimistic (even cynical) sort implies a darker and cynical approach to the world generally: an approach that says that which is not the way we want it to be is somehow more “real” than things we like or love. All that is good or deeply desirable is looked upon in a patronizing manner. To be “realistic,” therefor, is to pretend to be neutral while promoting a very non-neutral view about the nature of reality.
From a Christian perspective (but not only from that perspective) “realism” is not pessimism, but defeatism, even collaboration with the darker angels of the world. (Simple pessimism is more honest, and even justifiable at times. It does not amount to a sneaky, cosmological/ideological move like “realism” does.) The news, after all, is good, according to the gospels. If there is anything that is less than real, it is evil, not good, despite the power and pervasiveness of the former. In The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis, hardly a man to underestimate the power and extent of evil, likens heaven to a kind of hyper-reality where waterfalls are too loud for ordinary human ears, and the grass is too hard to walk on comfortably until one gets used to it. Those in hell (or maybe it was purgatory? I do not remember) when given a holiday in heaven, find the light hurts their eyes and themselves to be barely visible, like shadows or heat waves on the horizon.
Pilate was a “realist” when he murdered Jesus. “What is truth?” he asks. This might seem like a fine and thoughtful philosophical question, one which comes to mind only for sensitive and thoughtful souls, or tragic figures trying to understand their fate: the faithful servants of emperors “only trying to do their job” and trapped in unpalatable situations that “unrealistic” people do not understand. Some commentators have seen the Bible’s portrayal of Pilate here as antisemitic in its attempt to show Pilate in as positive a light as possible, thereby blaming the death of Christ as much as possible on the Jews. I do not know if this criticism of the Bible is true or not, but I do remember years ago seeing Pilate in this same light: that is, as a man trying to do the right thing, but somehow “tragically flawed”: less a sinner than his reputation paints him.
But now I see him, in his question about truth, as performing a standard politician’s gambit: when you are about to do a rotten and clearly unjustifiable thing, a thing you haven’t been forced to do either, play the role of the figure so exalted and wise that he sees reasons for his misdeeds that are beyond the comprehension of the vulgar and judgemental masses. “What is truth?” asks Pilate, as if he has an excuse for crucifying the truth because of his rectitude in admitting he is too scrupulous to pretend he knows it. The irony of Pilate’s “what is truth” is not that a sensitive and thoughtful man will now do a bad thing quite contrary to his noble intentions, but that the truth he is asking for is standing before him, about to be crucified by him, and he cannot or will not see him.
Maybe Pilate was putting truth on hold because he was a man of “reality.” There is a profound difference in having “reality” as the master referent, as opposed to “truth.” For reality is simply about what IS. Truth includes that, but is also about what OUGHT to be. In that sense, reality is only a subset of truth. Those who swagger and tell us to “get back to reality” are really trying to blind us to truth.
Perhaps the difference between a religious and a secular view is this: in the former, what OUGHT to be is as much a reality as what IS, however much painfully unmanifested in the realm of IS. For secularity, there is only what is.