The Perfectability of Man

A lot of conservative babble about Wall-E has crossed my desk in the last few days. Conservatives don't like the environmental message. They don't like being told that Americans are becoming couch potatoes. That environmental issues are actually real and American obesity is a problem do not impress them. They are pursuing a higher cause and refuse to let fact impede them.

But one statement got my attention from Kyle Smith. He pointed out that Wall-E was being presented to a bunch of people eating popcorn sitting down in a darkened theater-- in short, the very couch potatoes Wall-E was criticizing. He went further to point out that the merchandising of Wall-E would produce the vast amounts of disposable kitsch the file decried. Hypocrisy, indeed.

The sort of rhetoric where you demean the credentials of the presenter in order to discredit the message is an old flaw. It denies the imperfection of the presentation. After all, if you want to get an environmental and public health message to kids, where better to put it?

Then, I realized there's an underlying myth being exercised here. The myth of the perfect world.

The myth goes something like this, using Wall-E as an example. In a perfect world, we would not be couch potatoes. We are couch potatoes. In a perfect world, the mechanism by which we would be informed we shouldn't be couch potatoes would not involve the very mechanism we use to be couch potatoes. But the world isn't perfect. The couch potatoes pay attention to the couch potato mechanism. We must use the couch potato mechanism to communicate to the couch potato and then are criticized for using the mechanism that created the couch potato in the first place.

Thus, instead of the perfect world being a goal to which we aspire it actually becomes something we have to compete with. The circular reasoning above is a good example. Using the couch potato mechanism (a movie) to attempt to get the couch potato off the couch should be, I submit, a good thing. Yet, because it does not act as if it is in a perfect world, it must compete with the perfect. The world is imperfect and therefore it fails.

We see it a lot in politics. We're seeing it right now.

It's true Obama talked about the war in Iraq sort of like this:

We need to get out of Iraq immediately! And we should do it responsibly.

And it's also true the way he speaks now is:

We need to get out of Iraq immediately. And we should do it responsibly.


If you didn't hear both sentences you weren't really listening to what he was saying. You were hearing what you wanted to hear.

Yet, Obama is getting criticized for flip flopping. He didn't. If you go back to what he said you'll hear the right thing.

In a perfect world, he would have stated both messages equally and we would have judged both messages equally. However, he's not perfect. The world's not perfect. He's compromised the tone of his rhetoric to get elected without being dishonest. In a perfect world we would say that it is a good thing he's trying to get elected by being honest. Yet, because he's competing with a non-existent Perfect Obama, he is criticized.

You see this in religion as well.

One of the interesting things that happens in some religious conversations is whether or not it's okay to compare yourself to Jesus. People do it and get criticized for it. See here and here. Being an atheist this doesn't have a big impact on me but it curious to observe.

Now you can make the argument that comparing yourself to someone remarkable, be they Jesus, Einstein, Bhudda or what, should not be used to glorify yourself or trivialize the great. That could be a legitimate problem. However, the fact of comparison itself is often the criticism. Why should that be?

Jesus (to use one of the above) represents the perfect human being. How could he not be since he's the Son of God. Consequently, his perfection is unattainable to the rest of us. But it seems to me that his very perfection and divinity should be something Christians should strive for. Pursuit of an unattainable ideal is a noble endeavor.

That is, in a perfect world.

In this, the imperfect world, we don't want to be reminded of that which makes us uncomfortable. We protect ourselves from self-examination of this sort by elevating Jesus to a very high place-- too high for the likes of us to even attempt comparison. We can't get there so we shouldn't try; the great has become the enemy of the good. The religion, the mechanism that is intended to propagate the message of Jesus in fact propagates the person of Jesus so that his message can be safely ignored.

Perfect.
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Links of Interest
Evolution in Action: Malaria gene increases HIV risk
Fantastic Contraption Exhibit
Fly By Night
The Bees vs. The Crows. A midnight grudge match
Skyscraper Farming: And it took them how long to figure this out?
P. Z. Myers shoots foot. Hits head.
7 Children who changed the world.
Greena: Warrior Princess
Solar Power
Alternative Moon Rocket and here.
Cheap water
The magnetic fields of galaxies
Wet Mars
Pittsburgh Droids