I’m left with the following, which you may or may not find helpful if you continue to write about this. (Maybe you feel it’s been covered already in those 200 years worth of political philosophy you mention.) In order not to sound like smug bourgeois complacency, it’s probably important that a program based on “satisficing” have some means of identifying those cases where urgency or maximilism actually is warranted and responding accordingly. For instance, in 1963 you had M.L. King and others demanding that federal power finally be used to smash the Jim Crow system for good. King’s rhetoric was all about how this was long overdue, “Why We Can’t Wait,” etc., and he was up against critics who in some cases granted his substantive arguments but in various ways asked him to “chill” about it (more or less the position of the group he was replying to in his “Letter from the Birmingham Jail”). So, “chill” and “good enough” were distinct political positions in those cases, and most people today would agree that they were wrong and King was right. Even Rand Paul kind of had to concede this last year, or least stop arguing the contrary.

Fast-forwarding 50 years, how do we today decide which demands for urgent attention to something are truly urgent, and which we can chill about? Can we chill about global warming, for instance? About the conditions underlying the famines in East Africa? Etc. etc. What’s the principle for deciding this? You urge being “more general” about drawing the line between cases, but you seem to agree there’s a line to be drawn, i.e. that there are still some outcomes that are basically not acceptable, albeit fewer than the activists on all sides claim. How do we know which are which?

It seems that there’s no way around, finally, getting into the weeds and evaluating particular issues, then engaging the activists’ claims on their own terms — trying to convince fellow citizens that “good enough” solutions are available or have been found for Issue X, despite the shrill demands from some quarters that Issue X be immediately addressed in such-and-such a specific way. The problem is, that’s still making political arguments, and therefore not really “opting out.” Or you can not bother to make the arguments, but then you’re still implying them by your (in)action while ALSO ceding the public square to the maximalists — which it seems is exactly what you’re saying you don’t want to do.

The politics of “good enough” is in my mind very much not opting out in the sense of being apolitical or non-political. Schwartz and others have a more formal word for the concept, “satisficing”, which I really hate the sound of. At the simplest level, Schwartz argues that satisficing is a decision rule about everyday choices which tends to produce much more satisfaction and peace-of-mind for people who employ it. If, for example, you don’t care that much about whether this detergent or that detergent is the best, and just figure that anything that’s not to expensive and works well enough, then you just grab something and pay it no more mind. If you want to always get the very best detergent at the very best price point, you’re a “maximizer”, in Schwartz’ view, and much more unhappy or unsettled as a result. Every choice or decision is perpetually accompanied by regret, as well as a tremendous amount of mental labor.

Ok. So I think this is completely on-target, though I’ve never agreed fully with a corollary argument that Schwartz makes, which is the best way to compel more people to satisfice is to reduce the total amount of choices in a given system. The important thing here is that satisficing can be a much more comprehensive praxis in politics and life, not just about choosing which brand of baked beans to buy. And as such, it’s:

1) an extremely active ethos, not a passive one, because it comprehensively disagrees with extremely powerful and prevalent frameworks present in consumer capitalism, social hierarchy, and the American political system. If you insist that you don’t need to be top dog, that having a basic level of comfort is sufficient, that a vision of social relations that is exclusively built around competition is unnecessary, and so on, you’re very much dissenting from dominant ideology.

and

2) I think this is not just a kind of bourgeois “I got mine, fuck the workers”: I think satisficing is a concept that can be a powerful way to think about self and community all the way up and down the social hierarchy, and create social connections across class and hierarchical boundaries.

Where I see this as an opt-out is at two points: first, in terms of a kind of sociocultural libertarianism (something that Russell knows is a pretty consistent vision of mine) in which I’d suggest that satisficing requires a much broader range of accepting divergent individual, familial and community preferences in cultural and social practice than many on the left seem prepared to accept and second, that many of the long-standing details and particulars that fuel left-liberal conflicts are themselves fueled by maximizing, that various political fractions don’t set goals like, “less discrimination” or “more income equality” but instead have extremely specific political objectives that become fetishistic over time and make everything less or different seem horribly insufficient. This is just an extension of seeing satisficing as an active political project: applying it TO politics means that you’ve got to learn to embrace a much broader range of outcomes as basically ok, and be much more general about drawing the line between basically ok and basically not at all acceptable.

So, the “good enough” posture amounts to saying: I see no reason to be politically active in opposition to the current state of affairs. That’s an assertion that aren’t any big injustices, or assaults on the poor and defenseless, or attempts to undermine the greatness of America, or [insert your possible social evil here] currently urgent enough to call for such opposition. Again, this is an analysis like any other, and when proffered to others it’s a political argument like any other. So it can’t also be an argument for not making political arguments, or even for less impassioned political arguments: Even a call for less passion implies a view of how good/bad things currently are relative to what they could be).

Since we’re talking at this “meta” level, I won’t get into the question of whether things are currently good enough in America to warrant the position proffered here. I’m sure they’re pretty good for some people. But here’s another thing: Even the activists who most passionately argue for X or Y or Z in the public square are also, in nearly every case, taking some version of the “good enough” position themselves, since almost none of them join revolutionary organizations aimed at the forcible overthrow of the current system. They make their arguments, they go to their rallies, they publish their blog posts, they write to their congresspeople or whatever, and then they DO chill the fuck out, i.e. they go about the normal daily business of doing jobs and raising families and watching TV and so on. If their public arguments sound “totalizing,” that’s not necessarily because they’re any more ideological than someone who openly says that things are currently good enough; it’s because a certain kind of totalization is implicit in most arguments — i.e., the fact of arguing a point, any point, involves highlighting what you see as true and why, and downplaying or attempting to refute alternative views. To the extent that we’ve reached a point that lots of people feel they can opt out of this, can look around and say, chill out, life is good enough without engaging in a lot of explicit political arguments, that itself is a testament to the success of those who made explicit political arguments in the past when they needed to be made to correct the features of society that previously were NOT good enough.

But (and of course you saw this “but” coming a mile away…), I have to go back to a point that we’ve argued about for years: are you really comfortable believing that “good enough”, that the “medium chill”, that the “opt-out button”, isn’t itself a rather complicated endeavor, requiring–if not on a personal level, than at least on the political one–a rather comprehensive project? Your plea for a decent majority that will “chill the fuck out” seems to quietly hope that the aggressive meritocrats, the Constitution-worshiping Tea Partiers, the Intelligent Designers, the Grover Norquist disciples, the neocons, the globalizing Friedmanites, etc., etc., aren’t actually what you observed at the beginning of your rant: groups which embody “significant political faction[s] with real social foundations”. If that’s what they are, why should they chill the fuck out? They’ve got their base, their fired up, and they’re winning! (Which you seem to acknowledge in suggesting that you almost hope that some of them get their way and crash the whole global financial system.)

This is why I guess I can’t help but find myself more on Farrell’s side than on Yglesias’s. Yes, you’re correct that a desire to engage on behalf of simplicity and “good enough”–assuming that I’m right and that opting out alone won’t do it–will result in “lot[s] of extremely rivalrous visions of praxis, with varying degrees of improbability and/or undesirability” contesting each other. That’s exhausting, and creates its own problems, and isn’t any fun. But given the fact that, in my view at least, living a medium chill life depends upon, for example, as Roberts put it, providing “safe, accessible, pleasant public spaces and resources”, then I’m going to continue to believe that “fiddling around with deferred tax credits for LEED-certified merino-sheep shearing in designated small-agribusiness zones”, at least at the present moment, ain’t going to do the trick.