The perfect has been made the enemy of the good

Regis Martin, at Crisis Magazine writes about the Unattainability of Perfect Justice. Thomas Sowell calls it "cosmic justice." But wheter you call it perfect justice, or cosmic justice, or indeed any other name, the attempt always results in massive and gross injustic. As Martin notes:

Those who ignore this ineluctable fact, who disdain to accept the limits of human justice, who wish to deny what the poet Yeats has called “the perpetual injustice of life,” are dangerously romantic, becoming a danger to themselves and to others. It is to engage in a kind of utopian logic, which is a species of idealism wholly illusory and unreal. To be sure, politicians are especially prone, their decisions drawn to what the philosopher Michael Oakeshott has called “making politics the way the crow flies.”

Here is the sin of rationalism, he said, and it has been tried many times in history, most especially in the last century among despots like Hitler and Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, with results both predictable and catastrophic. “The conjunction of dreaming and ruling,” he wrote, “necessarily generates tyranny.” There is no humane way, in other words, to make an omelet without breaking a great many eggs. Lenin understood the logic, declaring that the hour had come when, “it is no longer possible to listen to music, because music arouses the desire to caress children’s heads, while the moment has come to cut them off.”

Please read the embedded article. It is true that we can not achieve perfect justice, but as a goal we should attempt to provide equal justice for everybody. But the perfect has been made the enemy of the good. We no longer attempt to provide equal justice, because we can not provide perfect justice.