I think @Tom_Storm’s definitional objection is correct. I think you are saying that an extreme opinion is an opinion which is far outside the Overton window, or that an extreme opinion is one which very few people hold. Then you claim that such extreme opinions will never produce optimal outcomes. I don’t see why. Lots of opinions that are now uncontroversial began as controversial opinions, such as the notion that the Earth orbits around the Sun. This phenomenon where the controversial routinely becomes uncontroversial would seem to defeat your thesis. Basically every time we learn something on a societal level as opposed to merely on an individual level, the controversial has again become uncontroversial.
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On your birthday, your friends present you a birthday cake with 21 candles, but when blowing them out, you blow out only 20 of 21. You then commit suicide in front of everyone, because you didn’t blow them all out.
That would be an inherently extreme reaction, regardless of perspective, or popular opinion, because of it’s senselessness. Logic matters!
Well you see here I provided definition of sorts while yours defined extreme as extreme.
But it seems you are still not clear about “what counts as extreme in what context” because definitions are not much use in your argument.
Which is clearly untrue. I have witnessed multiple physical conflicts where in those who go in hard and immediately (an extreme response, you might say) get to walk away unhurt.
Democracy began as an extreme view, gay rights began as an extreme view, female suffrage began as an extreme view and advocates did all kinds of “extreme” things to advance the cause.
We come back to the point that one person’s extremist is another’s moderate.
If you were to modify your view to say one needs to take care when holding an extreme position, taking extreme actions might result in unintended negative consequences, I’d agree. But we’d still need to agree on what counts as extreme.
I’m not sure what your point is here. If you are saying that some extreme views of their time, like female suffrage are not extreme because they are correct you are confusing things. Most extreme positions seem appropriate to those who hold them. We come back to the definitional question: extreme to who?
I would assume that Antinatalism, in action, such as by passing widespread, universal sterilization laws across the board, would be considered “extreme” to even those with positive views on it.
So your position is that neither side’s view or decision is extreme. I have to ask: is anything extreme? If so, what?
Whatever it is, it would then seem to have nothing to do with what is correct.
In which case, “the correct choice is never extreme” doesn’t tell us much about correct choices.
Yes, I like Eagleton a lot; I always enjoy reading his books. That one is an entertaining book, as I recall—light but substantial. Some find him smug, annoying, and intellectually dishonest.
He was important to me 35 years ago for explaining the varieties of literary theory. I always liked him for that book. Before the internet, all we really had were primers. He can be a bit supercilious and biased, but so can I.
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But that’s a bit boring. An interesting angle is that in a world like ours, that tends to flatten and trivialize, a certain outrageousness of views and expression might sometimes be in order. Adorno was fond of saying things like “only exaggeration is true”. I don’t know if I’ll develop this thought but I can’t resist dropping some quotations from Negative Dialectics (in awkwardly literal translation):
Only those thoughts which go to extremes can face up to the all-powerful powerlessness of certain agreement; only mental acrobatics relate to the thing …
No unreflective banality can, as the imprint of the false life, still be true.
What once wished to overtake dogma and tutelage through self-certainty became the social insurance policy of a cognition which does not allow anything to happen. Nothing in fact happens to anything which is completely unobjectionable.
Incidentally, just at the level of style, this attitude is one possible response to the effect that LLMs are having on prose.
If you are, for example, ahead of your time, your position on something may seem extreme in the then current culture or perhaps is extreme in the then current culture. But I really can’t see how thinking extreme thoughts - women should have the vote, slavery should end (in 1810 in the US)leads to bad results. Would it be wrong to voice these thoughts? I can’t see why. I mean it will most likely cause you problems, but putting the seeds out there of something extreme or that seems extreme doesn’t seem to me necessarily problematic.
Later you mentioned extreme acts. We’d need a definition, but one thing I want to point out is that norms can be extreme. WW1 may have seemed normal to most people. Participation, by the US, may have seemed normal. But it was an extreme position, and that’s without deciding it was wrong or right. Opposition might take extreme measures. I don’t think I can rule this out categorically. And given that the norm was extreme, the rule is already broken.