"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
One of the most important things we can teach our children as they're coming of age is to cultivate a comfort with contradiction. Sometimes good things come at the expense of other good things. You can’t always get your way. There’s no such thing as a free lunch.
As we grow up, we discover the contradictions of everyday life: one benefit requires giving up another.
In fact, we do teach these things as parents trying to raise well-adjusted kids: Share and help others. Tell the truth, even when there’s a benefit to not doing so. Delay gratification. What’s great for you might not be great for the group. These are all ways of preparing a human for participation in a polite, but complicated, society.
But as kids start learning about things at a higher, “societal” scale versus the interpersonal, I notice a lack of respect for this sort of complexity. Teaching history relies on monocausal, oversimplified explanations of cause and effect. “So-and-so did A because B, and that’s bad.” “X shouldn’t have to come at the expense of Y.”
Some of the simplification is certainly due to limited classroom time and attention to dive into complicated issues. But it does children a disservice when we don’t allow them the space to grapple with multifaceted issues — to find for themselves the competing motivations and see the world in its (more accurate) grays, rather than clearly-painted binaries. We skip to conclusions for them. We tell them what to think, not how to think.
We instill positives like helping the poor, saving the environment, fairness in all things without reinforcing that these noble, worthy pursuits require sacrifices elsewhere. Pursuing any ideal forces us to compromise on others. Comfort with contradiction demands Sowell’s constrained vision — there are no ideal / perfect / free solutions.
Writer Jonah Goldberg has a regular riff he does on this subject in the context of defining what it means to be conservative. Not in its modern, uppercase, Republican party incarnation, but in the "classical liberal" sense of David Hume, Edmund Burke, or the American founders. He makes the point that "conservative" is by-definition relative to the environment. What is "being conserved"? In England, a conservative wanted to preserve the monarchy. In Iran, the Ayatollah’s theocracy. In China, the CCP's authoritarian, panoptic control.
But America’s conservatism (originally) meant preserving the principles of the founding. Constitutionalism. Free minds, free markets. Subsidiarity — legislation by town first, then state, then nation. Fundamental fallibilism. Constraints on branches of government. Constraints on power accruing to factions. Here’s Jonah:
Conservatives champion the idea enshrined in our founding document that we have an individual right to pursue happiness. This isn’t mere rhetoric. The pursuit of happiness isn’t possible collectively, because one man’s joy will always be another man’s misery. Similarly, one community’s definition of the good life will necessarily be another’s definition of tyranny. Conservatism — or at least my brand of it — is not only comfortable with this kind of contradiction, it celebrates it.
In making this distinction, he reinforces the idea that not all good things go together. One of the principal problems with politics is an inability to respect the natural complexity of the world around us. To seek binary solutions to problems as if we can concoct totalizing answers that resolve issues once-and-for-all and put them behind us.
One of the defining factors of the classical liberal, libertarian(ish) worldview is to accept imperfection, and a complicated, contradictory universe:
Humanity is flawed, a crooked timber
Government is not all good, not all bad; is good at some things, bad at others
Total security comes at the expense of total freedom — there's an inverse relationship
If you want an Amazing Big Government program, it costs money — money that could go to another Amazing Big Government program
What we're really talking about here are trade-offs. All adults recognize at normal human-scale the reality of trade-offs. When I have a $20 bill in my pocket but I want $40 worth of groceries, I'm gonna have to put some things back. If I move into a house with a small backyard, I probably can't get my daughter a pet horse. If I love skiing but also saltwater flat fishing, I probably won't find a place to live that satisfies both hobbies. At this sort of individual scale (for the most part), we get this idea. Life is full of trade-offs. We make selections to optimize one path instead of another.
For some reason, though, once outside the personal domain, it's like our respect for trade-offs begins to fade. We suddenly think we can defy laws of physics and have two (or many more!) great things at once. We invent excuses to allow us to have our cake and eat it, too. Raise taxes with no negative consequences. Spend and spend until our problems are solved. This isn't an argument for never raising taxes or solving any particular problem — simply that all trade-offs have consequences! And often ones you can’t predict until the damage is done.
Utopian ideas of the future require one to think in radical terms, and to lose hard-won progress. Radicals want to ignore trade-offs, to start over, to rebuild, to avoid the contradiction in the first place rather than grapple with it, ignoring Chesterton’s fences. If anything, school these days fosters more of this kind of radical thinking than its opposite.
The irony is that a discomfort with contradiction doesn’t get rid of it anyway. Just because we shouldn’t have to live with imperfections doesn't cause a bulldozed, greenfield solution to actually work. We often end up tearing things down and still have the same negative outcome we had before. It's George Orwell's "Where's the omelet?" every time.
When I say that we should foster comfort with contradiction in children, it suggests a challenging path. When you think about the practicality of teaching “it’s complicated” in the classroom, it’s understandable why we avoid it, or don’t do a great job with it. As kids learn to navigate the world, they're seeking out where the lines are, looking for boundaries, edges. Probing at their environment to find hard truths, dependable facts, and good explanations that are hard to vary. They're taking in a melange of gray around them and trying to resolve it to a distinct color, wherever they can.
We in fact do have a domain we teach that deals in contradiction. It’s called economics. But we superficially teach economics as a financial discipline, though it shouldn’t be. Look at how even economists themselves define the term:
Economics is the study of scarce resources that have alternative uses. —Tom Sowell
Economics is the science of competing preferences. —Steven Landsburg
We need a study of life economics. I suppose I'm making a case for teaching complexity science. But I like Goldberg’s framing of it as a "comfort" with contradiction rather than a hard science — a sense of calming down when we have conflicting goals. That it's possible to accept that the world is a complex place, without also giving up on improving it.
We’ve accomplished all our major civilizational achievements incrementally, through deliberate experiment and iteration. Every attempt to “start clean” has failed. Once you accept fallibilism, it becomes easier to pursue a path of continuous improvement. In alignment with the British enlightenment, an error-correcting, trial-and-error path is the way to keep getting better.
As a topic of study, comfort with contradiction meshes well with incrementalism. It would be a nice complement to Jason Fried's idea of teaching iteration:
So here’s my one small idea: I’d begin to teach iteration. Iteration as a subject, equivalent to math, science, history, language, art, music, etc. How do you make something better over time? How do you return to something that you’ve done and see it with fresh eyes? How do you apply a new perspective to an old problem? Where do you find that new perspective? What trails do you follow and which do you ignore? How do you smash the familiar and reassemble something new from the same pieces?
I think children are capable of handling much more ambiguity than we give them credit for. We don't give them enough opportunity to explore the world for themselves and develop their own understanding of life's complexities. There's a world where we can give them the clear moral foundations on the facts we have determined to a high degree of confidence. In a way, just like we do when we’re building something new, we should give them hard edges to stay within, but a soft middle to navigate for themselves.
Thank you for reading. If you found this useful or interesting, please forward on to your friends and colleagues. Any thoughts on balancing trade-offs? How can we pursue greatness and maintain resilient, lasting progress? Leave me a comment below — would love to hear feedback.