(French) Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien.

(English) The best is the enemy of the good.

While a French idiom warns against striving too hard for perfection, English speakers would more likely identify with, “Shoot for the moon; even if you miss, you will land among the stars.” The French might seem absurd, but if I had to go with somebody, I’d probably go with Voltaire over Brown. I know that pits me against the prevailing mindset of this land of opportunity, but I know there’s a point when striving too hard for perfection gets in the way of, well, life. And a lot of other things. For example, what’s the point of taking 20 units every quarter if you’re completely burnt out when they hand you the degree and unwilling to look at anything remotely related to your undergraduate career again?

What happens in a broader context, though? What about the best-intentioned activists who decide that their life’s work is making the planet into their version of utopia? Sometimes things just don’t work that way. Sometimes, in trying to make the whole world pure, you yourself rot from the inside out.

The problem is, this is exactly what we’re doing, on so many different levels. I’m just one person; if I decide that I want to remake the entire world into my image of utopia before I die, I’m going to be miserable for a decent part of my life. That’s not to say that I should just give up entirely, but realistic goals are important. And the same is true for nations. There’s no point in trying to make the world a spitting image of ourselves, because that’s our idea of utopia, if we turn ourselves into a quagmire of despicability in the process. Because then even if we do pull off creating a world in our image, all we will accomplish is making the whole world into a kind of miserable dystopia.

So, what do we think is a good idea? Turning over our own rights? That’s exactly what we’ve been doing recently. We can now be thrown in jail indefinitely for no given reason; we can have our communications monitored without being notified even if there are no specific charges against us; the government can demand records such as library-book checkouts and have the librarians prosecuted if they notify the people affected.

Sounds like a shining beacon of freedom and democracy to me. But should I really be surprised when people try to tell me that, since things are so much worse over there, these are just little things that I have to endure to make the whole world better and I shouldn’t be such a whiner? Somehow I don’t buy that. I don’t think that having to worry about being investigated for no reason without even being aware of it will help other people around the world become more “free.”

You might say the same thing about women’s rights. A popular “liberals are hypocrites” argument is that we’re pushing for women’s rights here (abortion, better justice for rape victims, etc.) and blatantly ignoring women’s rights overseas. Conservatives are the ones going to the Islamic world, the place that treats its women worst, and doing something to bring greater equality for women by overturning Islamic rule. Oh? Would anyone care to explain to me why the situation for women in Iraq has gotten worse since we set foot there? Although Iraq certainly had a poor government before, at least women had roughly equal status with men and the government was fairly secular — one of the most progressive in the region. So stop playing the “Oh, Islam is the root of all evil!” card to justify going to war there. Now crimes against women have increased dramatically and nothing has been done about it. Additionally, women are being excluded from the new “progressive” government that’s being created, which is less secular than the one that had been in place.

That’s just one example. Many of Bush’s foreign policies — such as refusing aid to countries with AIDS epidemics if contraceptive practices might be encouraged with the funding — are quite harmful to women and women’s reproductive rights. Whether you support abortion or not, women should have at least some control over what happens to their bodies. If you’re going to tell me that Islamic groups are so awful to their women, that U.S. fundamentalists are absolutely nothing like them and liberals are the ones who are actually hurting women by being open-minded and not taking a stand against these devils, then you’d better be able to explain why the United States formed an alliance with Iran, Syria, Libya, Sudan and Iraq at the recent U.N. Special Session on Children in New York. The goal of the alliance was to purge the world of comprehensive sex education, restrict STD-prevention and contraceptive information to married couples (not even contraceptives themselves — information about them) and redefine “reproductive health services” around the world as excluding legal abortion in all cases, no matter how much danger the mother is in.

Yep. Expect utopia to arrive shortly.

Kate is off in her own utopian world, but she might get email there. Try to reach her at kltang@stanford.edu.