On being stubborn
In the last rambling episode, the one with the Volvo bashing, I made some observations concerning politics, principles and compromises. After that was published, I saw Bertram's post over at The Crooked Timber.
Now, you're probably thinking: “That was over a year ago!” Yes, my browser has a huge backlog of hundreds of open tabs left to read later. Only recently did I came around to reading Bertram's piece. May we get back to the topic?
Anyway, the disposition in that post aligns pretty well with my fleeting comments. Now I would like to play the devil's advocate and argue against myself (as seems to be in vogue nowadays) and Bertram.
First, I don't actually disagree when it comes to those particular immigration policies discussed by Bertram. But there is plenty to be said against the general idea of settling for the second-best or, perhaps just in a more folksy turn of phrase, not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
After all, who is dealing the options? Who says we can't get a better second-best? How do we assess whether we really can't get the actual best? Can we trust such comparative judgements in the first place? Even if we could be sure that there were only two options, the second-best may be quite a long way from our desired outcome.
I guess there is some strategic wisdom in the principle: better to gain something through compromise than to achieve nothing out of sheer stubbornness. I think we humans are naturally averse to being stubborn. People tend to avoid conflict and rightly so.
Consensus is a powerful thing. In its purest form, it may bring about genuine agreement. But it can also hide the frustrated and premature forsaking of worthy goals because of miscalculated positions. It's one of the great misfortunes of life that many of our most consequential actions are plagued by too many unknowns. Perhaps we were not dealt such a bad hand. And our tendency to compromise and be agreeable may obfuscate that.
People wanting to effect change are often perceived as stubborn. To a certain degree, depending on the size of the change, they kind of have to be. When considered stubborn, they are rarely praised for being tenacious but instead disapproved for being unreasonable. And perhaps they are. But I fear certain kinds of objectives can only be achieved unreservedly. There is no incremental route to them. There is no piecemeal overarching series of compromises that would deliver them.
That's not me shouting Vive la révolution by the way. I am as weary of radicals as your average bourgeois. I think it is important to recognize though that to resist making concessions is not always such a blemish as the phrase “making the perfect the enemy of the good” would have us believe. Sometimes making concessions may even be counterproductive to the main cause. Sometimes it's actually more advisable to keep the issue unresolved and potentially uncomfortable for everybody than to give way to an imperfect relief that would nonetheless destroy any momentum towards a full solution.
John Tanner wrote in his Handbook that all progress depends on the unreasonable man. All his failings aside (and don't even get me started on Bernard Shaw), I think there is a truth to that. Sometimes we just have to put our feet down.