Can society be perfect?

why anti-perfectionism is conservative; and Dan Williams is anti-perfectionist

Note: Register here for a Zoom discussion Tuesday November 12 at 1 PM New York time with Bart Wilson, Christopher Martin and me on Nichola Raihani’s The Social Instinct. It is on the subject of human cooperation, which is a central topic of my own writing.

For purposes of this essay, you are a perfectionist if you believe that society could be perfect provided that the ideas that are known to be correct are implemented. You are an anti-perfectionist if you believe that attempts to perfect society will backfire because of our inherent human flaws.

An example: schools teaching contemporary ideas on sexuality

What is your position on allowing parents to opt their children out of classroom instruction and materials that those parents might consider inappropriate?

The League of Women Voters of Montgomery County put this question to every candidate for the school board in our local election this year. One candidate answered,

I will respect the inherent right of parents to guide their children’s moral compass and cultural beliefs, including supporting them in shaping curriculum and policy input.

Her opponent said,

MCPS should not allow opt-outs of these materials. …MCPS’s goal with these materials is to provide mirrors (to reflect back on students who see themselves) and windows (for students who do not see themselves to peer into someone else’s experience and learn empathy).

The first candidate is the closest thing that you will find to a conservative in this county. The second candidate represents the establishment here. “Mirrors and Windows” is how school officials describe their policy. That verbiage also appears in other candidates’ responses.

The progressive candidates’ view is that parents should have no right to decide how their children are exposed to ideas about sexuality. Taking it as given that contemporary ideas about LGBTQ are correct and important, tradition-bound parents should be shoved aside in order to allow schools to provide perfect sex education.

For perfectionists, human mistakes can and should be corrected. The alternative point of view is that to err is human. Everyone can be wrong, so that people must be given some leeway to make mistakes and learn for themselves.

Conservatism vs. Perfectionism

The conservative respects tradition on the grounds that it embodies knowledge acquired through experience. The perfectionist view is that tradition can be discarded as soon as we believe that we have discovered something better.

A short way to put it would be this:

The conservative would have us treat no one as infallible. The perfectionist would have us treat its tribe’s beliefs as if they were infallible.

Dan Williams writes,

my main objection to the liberal establishment’s post-2016 panic about misinformation is not that it’s too pessimistic about the health of public discourse but that it’s not pessimistic enough. Specifically, it imagines that society’s epistemological problems involve a simple, discrete pathology (“misinformation”) that is easily identifiable by society’s intellectual elites. I disagree.

Williams implicitly sees everyone as fallible. He sees the liberal establishment as recognizing fallibility only in its adversaries.

if “misinformation” means “misleading information”, there’s an enormous amount of highly misleading communication in progressive and liberal spaces from highly-educated academics, journalists, pundits, and politicians. It’s just that the construction of misleading narratives among this segment of the population rarely takes the form of outright fake news. Moreover, this complication is exacerbated by the fact that it’s this segment of the population typically making decisions about what constitutes “misinformation”. Unless one assumes that this segment of the population is infallible, there will therefore inevitably be many forms of misleading content the misleadingness of which is not detectable by them (i.e., the misleading content they endorse).

I have started to read Luke Conway’s Liberal Bullies, which is yet another attack on progressives’ intolerance toward other viewpoints. Conway’s take is that contemporary progressives have the psychological profile of authoritarians who cannot tolerate ambiguity. Whether this psychological typecasting has value is something I have yet to consider.

Regardless of the psychology, I find the intellectual style of the perfectionist quite alien. It goes against the outlook that I share with my father, especially “Sometimes it’s this way and sometimes it’s that way.”

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Reflections on conversations with Jesse Singal and Fin Moorhouse