Aporia

In a chapter on political systems in his remarkable book The Beginning of Infinity, David Deutsch notes that

…compromises -amalgams of the policies of the contributors- have an undeservedly high reputation. Though they are certainly better than immediate violence, they are generally, as I have explained, bad policies. If a policy is no one’s idea of what will work, then why should it work? But that is not the worst of it. The key defect of compromise policies is that when one of them is implemented and fails, no one learns anything because no one ever agreed with it.

Recognize at once one of the magical qualities of the American political system! Despite the fact that we live in the laboratory of the real -we can present the universe with any meaningful, properly-phrased question and reliably receive an indisputable answer- neither party ever believes that its policies have been falsified. 

Often, this is because our democracy -such as it is- requires compromise. In ten years, when America’s health care system is still a hideous, tragic mess, Republicans will believe that this is due to the faulty premises of Democratic legislation, while Democrats will believe that the legislation was fatally weakened by obstinate Republicans. While we can of course reason our way to our own hypotheses, we will lack a truly irrefutable conclusion, the sort we now have about, say, whether the sun revolves around the earth.

Thus: a real effect of compromise is that it prevents intact ideas from being tested and falsified. Instead, ideas are blended with their antitheses into policies that are “no one’s idea of what will work,” allowing the perpetual political regurgitation, reinterpretation, and relational stasis that defines the governance of the United States. 

The Autocratic Artist

There has been recent occasion to recall an odd organizational fact: the putative democratic spirit notwithstanding, it is nearly always the case that real artists are autocrats. Collaborative creativity isn’t an exception to this rule; typically, in bands for example, each collaborating artist is dictatorial within his domain, and whatever the extent of his partnership with his peers, there is rarely compromise.

This is not to say there is no persuasion. But persuasion is a radically different epistemological process:

• to compromise is to treat competing ideas as mathematical sums whose average might be equal to (or, more preposterously, greater than) the individual ideas themselves; while
• to persuade is merely to convince others of the soundness of an idea, often without the cost of instantiating any of the competing ideas.

Pondering the inexplicable, even disheartening superiority of the auteur over the democratic committee -considering one’s favorite tyrannical director, or weighing Google’s chances against Apple- one wonders: why do compromises not embody an aggregate of the intelligence of constituent ideas (or policies)? Why do compromises typically produce wholes pitifully less than the sum of their parts?

Deutsch’s book suggests that the real surprise is that anyone should imagine they would do otherwise. As a simple matter of epistemology, there is no reason why the blending of competing ideas would produce a better idea. Imagine if someone had proposed to Galileo and the Catholic Church that they compromise and agree that neither the sun nor the earth revolve, or that they somehow revolve around each other!

This seems obvious enough in science and other fields whose ideas we regard as being predictive, or isomorphic to physical reality in some quantifiable way. But it is no less the case in artistic and creative endeavors.

This is because creative ideas are types of explanations, and every explanation involves whole constellations of interdependent notions, speculations, assertions; a well-developed creative idea -a design, a song, a poem- is not an assembly of fungible units. It is a complete hypothesis unto itself about what will work for a given human purpose.

So while it seems perfectly natural, even morally preferable, to involve many voices and subject creative ideas to the scrutiny of committees, the result tends to be disastrous: the writer knows that his diction depends in part for its effect on his syntax, his punctuation on the typography in which it is rendered; the photographer knows that the same scene shot in a more commercially-appealing way is no longer beautiful but is now banal; the designer knows that the entire premise of his layout is undone by the substitution of a compromised header; etcetera.

That is: creative ideas embody whole explanatory and speculative matrices, even in their minor details. Compromises dilute the implicit, interdependent elements which account for the form and content of creative ideas, introducing new elements (from others, from committees) which derive from wholly different notions about the problems being solved, the relations between the elements involved, the speculations which are justified by experience and evidence, and so on.

Worse: compromise makes it impossible to sort out precisely which elements, or which implicit premises, were responsible for the success or failure of any given creative idea.

The Fault

When people discuss why small companies are more innovative than large companies, or why dictatorial creative thinkers -who are often terribly unpleasant people- produce better work than assemblies of talent, they often talk about speed, about “nimbleness,” and about bureaucracy.

But the essential problem is philosophical: creative ideas must be understood as hypotheses about certain sorts of problems. For the writer, the painter, the designer are all trying to solve a specific problem, and their hypotheses cannot be averaged anymore than Galileo’s could. While persuasion and collaboration are perfectly sensible, the real advantage the best innovators and creators have is that they understand that compromise is epistemologically invalid and procedurally fatal.

So why does compromise have its “undeservedly high reputation”? I believe it is because we are discomfited by the philosophical implications of the fact that some ideas are objectively better. We exempt science from our contemporary anxieties because its benefits are too explicit to deny, but in most creative fields we are no longer capable of accepting the superiority of some solutions to others; unable to sustain confidence in the soundness of the artistic problem-solving process, we will not provoke interpersonal or organizational conflict for the sake of mere ideas.

This sad, mistaken epistemological cowardice turns competing hypotheses into groundless, subjective opinions, and the reasonable course of action when managing conflicting, groundless opinions (about, say, what to order at a restaurant) is to compromise, because there is no better answer.

But the creative arts are not so subjective as we tend to think, which is why a talented, dictatorial auteur will produce better work than polls, focus groups, or hundreds of compromising committees.