THE MOST PERFECT IMPERFECTION

When you get far from the political center, to the left or the right, you find perfectionism. What it comes down to is rigid adherence to an unrealistic paradigm.

Leftist perfectionism wants perfect social equality. Rightist perfectionism wants those who are naturally "superior" in some respect to be lords over the rest of us.

There is the true human perfection, by contrast. You see it in sages and saints. They have no illusions about anything that is as merely human and fraught with wishful thinking as ideology is. Their judgments are penetratingly realistic, their decisions altogether pragmatic. They appeal to the best in us, regardless of where we start from, and they work to evolve us.

What should we who are not sages or saints want from our society?

We can and should acknowledge that all of us have the same rights. We should all have the chance to help ourselves economically, both as individuals and collaboratively. We should all have the chance to be heard when we have something to say, both at work and in society. We should all have the chance to participate in civic life, including office-seeking. We should all have community or government help in getting by when we cannot do so on our own. We should have a government that intervenes pragmatically on behalf of our collective well-being when the latter is not supported otherwise. Less or more than the above can be dangerous.

On the left, an attempt to negate the effects of varying degrees of judgment and talent and leadership ability could only straitjacket us. We have not seen true socialism in any mass society; the women who swept the Moscow streets in the old USSR days were in no sense equal to Politburo members or even to factory workers, and nobody admitted that that was a scandal for Communism.

So on the left, insistence on perfection results in either a Procrustean bed or hypocrisy. On the right, it results in self-designated Nietzschean supermen kicking us around for their own aggrandizement or amusement.

Not insisting on perfection but continuing to improve things keeps freedom and democracy going and the fanatics and "zero tolerance" freaks at bay, where their imperfection should keep them lest it succeed in making us still less perfect.