Let's not fall for the Nirvana Fallacy

In my logic book I classify it as “Unobtainable Perfection,” but it’s often nicknamed the “Nirvana” or the “Utopia” fallacy. It’s when you criticize something because it’s not perfect, like criticizing the present because it doesn’t reach the perfection of some imagined future world.

People on the Left often compare the present world with a hypothetical future one.  “ Wouldn’t it be nice if all our wants were satisfied, and people behaved better towards each other.” Yes, it might indeed be nice, but it’s not what’s on offer. What’s on offer is this world that might be made better. Not perfect, but certainly better.

People on the centre right usually compare the present, not with the future, but with the past. They don’t ask “Could it be perfect,” they ask “Is it better than it was.” They usually say that it is. It’s better than billions fewer die of starvation and disease, that a tiny fraction of mothers now die in childbirth, or children in infancy. And they tend to favour doing more of what we know works in practice, rather than putting all our eggs in a restructured basket that probably won’t work. 

They try to improve the human condition, but cautiously, and alert for unintended consequences. Popper called this process “piecemeal social engineering,” and compared it favourably with utopian grand designs that have never worked in practice. 

A popular saying is that “The perfect is the enemy of the good,” meaning that if we reject initiatives that might improve things because they fall short of perfect, we risk not making any improvements at all. We do what we can with the limited knowledge we have, and we see if it works in practice. If it does, we do more of it. This real-world approach has achieved more for humanity than any of the grand conceptions of a perfect world, and certainly better than any of the catastrophic failures that resulted when people have attempted to bring one about. 

Most of us have encountered people who want to compare what capitalism, with all its flaws, has achieved in practice, with what some idealized concept of what a perfect socialist society might be like. No. We compare practice with practice or theory with theory. We don’t compare the apples of the real world with the pears of some fanciful world of the imagination.

Perfection might be for the next world, but for this one the target should be improvement.