From my latest issue of Res Extensa:

One of the most important things we can teach our children as they’re coming of age is to cultivate a comfort with contradiction. Sometimes good things come at the expense of other good things. You can’t always get your way. There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

As we grow up, we discover the contradictions of everyday life: one benefit requires giving up another.

In fact, we do teach these things as parents trying to raise well-adjusted kids: Share and help others. Tell the truth, even when there’s a benefit to not doing so. Delay gratification. What’s great for you might not be great for the group. These are all ways of preparing a human for participation in a polite, but complicated, society.

Thinking we can avoid grappling with the inevitable contradictions of everyday life lead us to bad places:

Utopian ideas of the future require one to think in radical terms, and to lose hard-won progress. Radicals want to ignore trade-offs, to start over, to rebuild, to avoid the contradiction in the first place rather than grapple with it, ignoring Chesterton’s fences. If anything, school these days fosters more of this kind of radical thinking than its opposite.

The irony is that a discomfort with contradiction doesn’t get rid of it anyway. Just because we shouldn’t have to live with imperfections doesn’t cause a bulldozed, greenfield solution to actually work. We often end up tearing things down and still have the same negative outcome we had before. It’s George Orwell’s “Where’s the omelet?” every time.

I first heard this idea from Jonah Goldberg, and it’s been bubbling around in my head ever since.