“Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien,” counselled Voltaire two centuries ago. “The best is the enemy of the good.”
If Voltaire were with us today, would he chuckle at the difficulty I have understanding his maxim, or would he reassure me that I am not altogether a lost cause for noticing its paradoxical nature?
Is ‘best’ superior to ‘good,’ or is ‘good’ superior to ‘best’? It seems most students and faculty today would agree with the former. Two years ago, the incoming president of the University of Maryland echoed Voltaire's very words in his own assertion of which is superior:
Faculty makes the absolutely critical distinction between ‘what is good’ and ‘what is best.’ As Voltaire said ‘The best is the enemy of the good.’ Good is easy. It's polite. It's friendly. It's insidious. . .To become a great research university, the faculty must never be satisfied with the good, and their quest for the best must be an unrelenting pursuit. By making constant demands on themselves and on us, they will lift the university to greatness.
In modern terms, ‘the best’ is generally considered the highest quality of all that is good. And our quest for ‘bestness’ is indeed an admirable one. In the most general sense, it is what makes us distinctly human. When we no longer push ourselves to ever greater heights, we no longer evolve; we no longer advance that which is distinctly human nature.
But what happens when the actual quest for best overshadows doing and creating what is good—when best becomes inferior to good? Can such a thing really occur?
Nearly 200 years after Voltaire, Einstein wrote, “Perfection of means and confusion of goals seem—in my opinion—to characterize our age.”
I find that today our desire for being the best—that insidious form of perfectionism—has inadvertently mutated into an intellectual constipation. I am reminded constantly of the young student at the prestigious university who is so driven to be the best amongst his classmates that he is unable to concentrate on his work. I am reminded of the highly capable student who focusses so intently on the grade she receives on a term paper that she is unable to heed constructive criticism and reap the rewards of a better paper. I am reminded of the highly intelligent student who excels in his studies, only later to graduate with honours and feel no pride for having actually learnt something. I am reminded of the same student who has not learnt the inherent value of learning.
What of the great work we dismiss when it does not meet the dubious criteria of ‘bestness’? I shudder to imagine a world where only the best literature, the best art, or the best discoveries were considered worthy of any positive attention. In that world, Shakespeare may very well have been branded a minor playwright; Voltaire himself a mere ‘theorist’.
If the world's great thinkers were relegated to producing only ‘hits’, we would be left with an intellectual tradition that basically cannot transcend time—that becomes empty to future generations who find the value today in what yesterday was ignorantly considered merely ‘good’.
Our quest for ‘bestness’ is most insidious in our contemporary pedagogical methods. Every school prides itself on offering its students the best education. Part of what makes each school's education the best is its belief that its methods are those proven best through research. But as the famous artificial intelligence pioneer and education critic, Seymour Papert, asked, why does the ‘Rigourous Researcher’ think there is a best method? Or perhaps there are actually several ‘best methods’—each the highest quality of ‘good methods’ for every type of student.
What happens to some of our most intelligent students when what is best for the masses, is simply not best for them? What happens when their own good ways of learning are ignorantly interpreted as deviant?
In a country that supposedly prides itself on exploration and discovery, we basically talk into our hands when it comes to our students. As Papert writes in his book The Children's Machine, part of what today we consider the best educational methods actively mask the ignorance and confusion that makes us distinctly human.
Our current formula for education, particularly in the academy, involves reinforcing the illusion that the process of education is a clear, well-defined formula that will achieve clear, well-defined, well-measurable results. Unfortunately, we humans do not operate that way. Some of our greatest insights and discoveries—the best, if you must—have in fact resulted from the acceptance and subsequent exploration of our ignorance and confusion—and that process is often anything but clear, well-defined, or scientifically measurable.
But I find something more disturbing in modern education's quest for best. I was struck by David Brooks's recent article in Atlantic Monthly, “The Organization Kid”. In it, Brooks compares what he calls today's elite, meritocratic college students to their pre-war Edwardian counterparts, who appeared to be much less concerned with superior academic achievement than with the shaping of superior character and considering what it means to live a virtuous life.
I find it troubling that in our earnest efforts to be the best student; to score the best LSAT and ACT scores; and to subsequently pile onto our CV's as many degrees as it takes to put others to shame; we appear relatively unconcerned about less instrumental goals of justice, welfare, and morality. We seem to be producing ambitious, highly-motivated, hard-working super-achievers—who not uncommonly leave the university having never really bothered considering the graver issues of courage or character. They have, essentially, sacrificed being the best that they can be, for the best that they can do.
I recognise, of course, that I am fully embarrassing myself in the forum of the modern university by daring to question the relentless pursuit of ‘bestness’, as the president of the University of Maryland defines it. But if I must embarrass myself in public to learn something I consider inherently good, then so be it. To my mind, best is a natural, incidental bi-product of being focussed on one's competency; doing what one genuinely believes in and wants to do; and then putting forward all one's energies to learn, to explore, to discover, to challenge, and to know.
The person who must constantly remind him or herself of the need to be best at such tasks, is the person who can never really be best. Being best is neither a means nor a goal. It is a reward for pursuing and creating the good. And it happens precisely when you least expect it—and often when you least care for it. Yes, “le mieux est l'ennemi du bien.” But I think it goes both ways. And I surmise if Voltaire saw us today, he would agree.
Eddy Elmer is a student at Simon Fraser University and can be reached at eddy@eddyelmer.com.
Copyright © 2001, by Eddy M. Elmer
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