The Best is Not Enough
When we chase after greatness, who and what are we leaving by the wayside?
Review by Heidi Klumpe
The Good-Enough Life by Avram Alpert was both what I expected and not. I expected this book to talk me out of my desire to be great, but I did not expect it to do so with a trek across ethics, history, economics, and science. I expected “good-enough” would mean a life that is small and sufficient, but not that Alpert would extend this to a world with enough good (i.e., food, housing, purpose, and justice) for everyone.
Alpert’s vision for improving society is vast and, at times, vague and utopian, but what he opposes is more clear: “A unifying theme cuts across much that troubles us in life. We can call this unifying theme greatness.” To be clear, he is not denying that some individuals have intrinsic greatness or outlier abilities. Instead, he is concerned with how greatness is confused with poor correlates (e.g., money, fame, power), how becoming great seems like the best thing to do with our lives, and the belief that optimization produces the best outcomes. The book maps the “poisonous” effects of such thinking “for ourselves, our relationships, our societies, and our planet.” Alpert identifies four aspects of this thinking.
First, “greatness” is often a fiction. Society can confer greatness on the unqualified and overlook people of high value. Our desire for greatness can be at odds with our limitations and weaknesses. We often hope brilliance or wealth can fix our problems, but they do not. This is true in our personal lives, as well as in public policy. Alpert points out that waiting for a “great” technical breakthrough to address climate change can overlook non-technical stumbling blocks in politics; hoping that more “optimal” use of resources will sustain us overlooks the human tendency to increase consumption apace.
The second problem is inequality. A key point in the book is that greatness justifies social stratification. Adam Smith, when describing the “invisible hand” of a free market, predicted financial inequality would exist because successful individuals will selectively enrich themselves or because useful technology is held by a privileged few. This is acceptable to Smith because the greatness of a few will uplift society as a whole, but Alpert thinks such inequality can have dangerous consequences, as “[e]conomic plutocracy inevitably subverts political democracy.”
A third problem of greatness is that it requires some competition to determine who is great, and “winner-take-all” competitions are wasteful. A large collective effort benefits only a single winner, and the “losers,” no less great, are left with nothing. While reading, I thought of the Tour de France, where everyone cycles impressively fast for hours but mere seconds define the difference between a stage win and obscurity. Similar phenomena can keep less well-known scientists from funding their research (the “Matthew effect”) or bankrupt small businesses (brick-and-mortar bookstores in the age of Amazon). Alpert is also leery of what anointing “winners” enriches in society, such as aggression or superficial motivations.
Seeking greatness turns our focus inward, and we lose sight of who our efforts are meant to benefit.
Fourth, and to me the most compelling, is that greatness is often the wrong thing to prioritize. “Optimization” is a ruinous approach to a marriage or parenting. Building a movement around a single charismatic (“great”) leader can limit an organization’s longevity or effectiveness. Seeking greatness turns our focus inward, and we lose sight of who our efforts are meant to benefit. Perhaps most worrisome is that calling something the “best” is not the same as it being “good,” in the sense of being moral, healthy, or uplifting. If greatness is about the size of a person’s influence, goodness concerns the nature of that influence. Alpert shows how greatness can be a misleading stand-in for goodness. For example, it is easier to maximize wealth in the name of altruism than to find the best projects to fund. It is easier to make an algorithm faster than to guarantee the quality of its outcome. This feels like an old idea, that optimization requires metrics that inevitably oversimplify phenomena and produce warped outcomes, but what felt new and impossible to evict from my mind was that trying to be the best is a way to avoid saying what you would actually like to do.
While these problems are clear, the solutions are less so. Making all good things equally available to all people has indissoluble practical challenges. Alpert mostly advocates for more regulated markets, smaller and therefore more widely distributed rewards, or even lotteries that randomly select winners.
Nonetheless, Alpert also argues, convincingly I find, that we cannot proceed practically until we have covered some ground philosophically. First, we need a shared vision of how much people can change. Alpert takes a lot of comfort in humanity’s fundamental plasticity that makes us “unconstrained” by our current flaws, but acknowledges this view can be naïve. He quotes David Brooks: “In the unconstrained vision, you ask: What’s the solution? In a constrained vision you ask: What’s the best set of trade-offs and reforms we can actually achieve? The constrained vision is wiser.” Second, we need a new set of moral values. If optimization and greatness-seeking are what remain when we attempt to strip out bias and specificity, the resulting failures suggest that we need to put something back, something that can orient us toward goodness and away from profits.
For Alpert, equality and the non-economic aspects of human flourishing are essential values for the future. What he advocates for—caring for the least of these, accepting our human limits, seeking meaning over an empty greatness—will not sound unfamiliar to Christians. In the Bible, we read that only God is great, and we are repeatedly commanded to care for widows and orphans. In the Old Testament, Israel’s desire for a great leader, a king, brought about all kinds of suffering in the nation. Inspired by Christ, who gave up the greatness of divinity, we are supposed to “[d]o nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility, consider others better than [ourselves]” (Phil 2:3-4). Even more shocking, Jesus says directly, “[W]hoever wants to become great among you must be your servant” (Matt 20:26).
I’m grateful for how this book made me more sensitive to and critical of “greatness” thinking in my own life. When I become concerned with how much I am winning (Will my boss like my presentation the best? Am I in the fastest checkout line?), I find myself asking whether it is good for there to be losers. I often assess new projects by considering how they will make my career great, but I now wonder if the outcomes will be good, and who they will be good for. I want to identify where optimization is supplanting other important undertakings, such as enjoyment for its own sake or inefficient but ethical projects. Lastly, if I see inequality, what’s justifying it? If the answer is that everyone else will eventually benefit, does reality bear that out? Perhaps these kinds of questions can lead us to the practical solutions that we are still missing.
Heidi Klumpe is a postdoc in biomedical engineering working at Boston University.
The Good-Enough Life was published by Princeton University Press on April 19, 2022. You can purchase a copy from the publisher here.
