From the mail bag:
Is the way you interpret Voltaire's saying the way it was originally intended? I'm probably wrong here, but I always took the saying to mean this: a willingness to settle for what is "better" makes it likely that one won't acquire what is "good".
Good, better, best. Positive, comparative, superlative. "The best/better is the enemy of the good" means that oftentimes, not always, the pursuit of the best/better will prevent one from attaining the good. The point is that if one is not, oftentimes, willing to settle for what is merely good, one won't get anything of value. So I suggest that my reader has not understood Monsieur Voltaire's aperçu.
Example. It will come down to Romney versus Obama. If libertarians and conservatives fail to vote for Romney, on account of his manifold defects, then they run the risk of four more years of the worthless Obama. Those libertarians and conservatives will have let the better/best become the enemy of the good. They will have shown a failure to understand the human predicament and the politics pertaining to it. He who holds out for perfection in an imperfect world may end up with nothing.
You give the example of a spouse: try to hold out for a perfect wife, and you'll never marry at all. An example that would fit my reading would be, if one settles for a wife who's merely better than most of the available options, then one's apt to settle for a wife who isn't good. Sometimes it's better to refuse all the available options.
I agree that it is sometimes better to refuse all the available options. If the choice is between Hitler and Stalin, then one ought to abstain!
Maybe a better example would be, imagine I need to install plumbing in my house. Crappy plumbing is almost always going to be better than no plumbing. But should I (say, out of laziness) really settle for that, on the grounds that 'well, it's better than the nothing I had'?
Of course not. Voltaire's point is not that one should settle for what is inferior when something better is available. The point is that one should not allow the pursuit of unattainable perfection to prevent the attainment of something good but within reach. Suppose someone were to say: I won't have any faucets or fixtures in my house unless they are all made of solid gold! You will agree that such an attitude would be eminently unreasonable.
The Voltairean principle as I read it is exceedingly important in both personal life and in politics.
Perhaps you know some perfectionists. These types never accomplish anything because they are stymied by the conceit that anything less than perfection is worthless. I knew a guy in graduate school who thought that a dissertation had to be a magnum opus. He never finished and dropped out of sight.
In politics there are 'all or nothing' types who demand the whole enchilada or none. Some years back, when it looked as if it would be Giuliani versus Hillary, some conservative extremists said they would withhold their support from the former on the ground that he is soft on abortion. But that makes no bloody sense given that under Hillary things would have been worse.
The 'all or nothing' mentality is typical of adolescents of all ages. "We want the world and we want it . . NOW!"
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