Any idea of some worth will be inevitably subjected to criticism. This is especially apparent in today’s increasingly polarizing environment, where people standing on opposite sides of an issue constantly attempt to pulverize the others’ opinions into oblivion. Very often, the criticisms dished out will come from an absolutist or idealized perspective, which I think is something that we should recognize, understand, and be wary of.

There is an old, famous principle called Chesterton’s fence. It states that reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood. The original namesake example describes a seemingly arbitrary and useless fence in the road, and a reformer saying: “I don’t see a use for this fence, let’s remove it.” To which another person, being aware of this principle, replies: “If you don’t see the use of it, then I won’t let you remove it. Only when you can tell me the purpose that this fence serves will I consider its removal.”

This principle serves as a warning for radical criticism of ideas that offer teardown-and-rebuild style reforms as solutions. But many criticisms, while they do not suggest radical reforms as solutions, fall into another trap, one of absolutism. I think that this is a more general class of issues than what Chesterton’s fence can be applied to, and we need to beware of them.

Here, by absolutism, I mean the idealized perspective of looking at things with respect to some hypothetical, perfect world or solution. For example, people critical of some existing policy A will often point out all the problems with A, along with all the merits of their proposed new policy B, with an implicit assumption that there exists some perfect, flawless solution X that B is strictly closer to than A. There is very little talk about the good parts of A (i.e. what Chesterton’s fence reminds us to look for), and the potential bad parts of B.

This is very understandable. After all, you do not want to undermine your own ideas in any way when you are trying to convince others that they are right, especially since your opponents will be attacking them for you anyway. But I think this type of absolutist criticism, one that assumes the existence of a perfect solution X, is often wrong at a fundamental level, because in most cases there are no attainable perfect solutions. Instead, for most problems, we just have multiple “terrible” solutions, each optimizing for its own set of outcomes while making different sets of compromises. Absolutist perspectives discourage conversations about compromises, and blind us to the nature of the choices we make, which almost always improves some things at the cost of others¹.

I think one reason that most discourse shies away from talking about compromises is that it is much harder to do than talking about absolutes. This is in part because things at the extremes of a spectrum are much more obvious to everyone, but the closer we get to the middle of the spectrum, the blurrier the picture becomes. For example, on the spectrum of citizen safety versus freedom, almost everyone can agree that both “a nation-wide surveillance system run by the intelligence agencies” and “the complete disbandment of all intelligence-gathering agencies” are bad. There probably isn’t a perfect solution that can maximize both safety and freedom, so we have to make compromises, which means moving towards the middle of the spectrum. But this is when things become less and less obvious: how much safety and freedom is optimal? This seems like an intractable problem, and so many people avoid talking about compromises altogether, and instead only focus on one side of the extremes, with absolutist opinions like “we need to do everything we can to protect our citizens from harm”.

We need to recognize when we are being deluded by hypothetical unattainable ideals. This doesn’t mean that we should stop aspiring to perfection, as there is definitely utility still in dreaming about the ideal. But I do think that instead of talking with absolutist perspectives, we should try to talk more about compromises, explicitly. Not only will we be more honest with ourselves this way, about what is achievable, I think doing so will also help us resolve (or at least get to the bottom of) disagreements more effectively.

P.S. Looking back, it seems that I’m simply making the case for people to become more moderate, to try to see things from “the other side”. Perhaps that’s exactly what I’m doing, because on a fundamental level that’s how I think.