On the Beauty and Utility of the Imperfect

There is a crack in everything . . .

Trouble

“The planet Stasis looked so much like Earth.”

In the novel Bewilderment, LINK 13 an astrobiologist describes imaginary but possible planets for his son. The fictional Stasis, so much like Earth, has no intelligent life. Why not?

The planet’s axis had little tilt, which meant one monotone season at every latitude. A dense atmosphere smoothed out fluctuations in temperature. . . . Few meteors ever threaded the gauntlet of massive nearby planets. And so the climate on Stasis had stayed stable through most of its existence. Richard Powers

All life had evolved to survive in one particular, unchanging spot. Unchanging, and therefore unchallenging. So intelligence didn’t evolve. The son thought for a while. “Trouble is what creates intelligence?” The father responds, yes. Crisis and change and upheaval.

Surprise

Even when it doesn’t cause us trouble, the unexpected gets our attention. Often we’ll try to figure out why. Millennia ago, Aristotle argued that humans by nature desire to know. As evidence, he pointed to “the delight we take in our senses.” Scientists today can go further, and tell us that making sense of the world has survival value. Natural selection, therefore, will favor those who take pleasure in learning.

The history of science is filled with surprises and the scientists who paid attention. Alexander Fleming noticed that a mold had killed bacteria on a petri dish. The mold was Penicillium notatum, and the rest is history. Wilhelm Roentgen noticed that a screen had started to glow, a screen 9 feet away and uninvolved in the experiment he was conducting with cathode rays. He called this unknown force X-rays, and again the rest is history.

Beauty

The Japanese term wabi-sabi expresses the beauty of imperfection. Kintsugi -- vases whose cracks have been mended with gold – celebrate the value of finitude. They are reminders that nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect. Their aesthetics of roughness, modesty, and intimacy emphasize the act of making, not just its product.

There is beauty in many lives, in spite of, or because of their flaws. I wrote last time about appreciating Jimmy Carter as a remarkable example. A recent biography of Mohammed makes a similar point. The author (a sympathetic non-Muslim) notes that devout biographers sometimes deny that Muhammad had ever doubted or despaired, despite good evidence that he did. “Perhaps this is why it can be so hard to see who Muhammad really was. The purity of perfection denies the complexity of a lived life.” Lesley Hazleton

The cost of denial

We should value imperfection and complexity. Acknowledging them, though, interferes with simpler, more comforting views of the world. Simple explanations of the way the world works are immensely attractive. When they’re true, they’re works of genius; Isaac Newton’s laws of motion captured in three sentences everything we knew about the subject. Similarly, plainspoken insights can be profound. Consider the three sentences of the Serenity Prayer.

Other brief adages, equally attractive, are false or foolish. “You can be whatever you want to be.” “Every cloud has a silver lining.” “You’re just as old as you feel.” A friend called such sayings seductive half-truths. Better yet, a recent book calls them Lies I’ve Loved. Here I’ll just call them un-truisms.

I suppose few people take these claims literally. They’re meant to comfort and inspire, and must do that, or they wouldn’t be so popular. Nevertheless, they can do harm. If you try and fail, the un-truism suggests you didn’t try hard enough. Again, you may not feel old, but at 70 your body needs you to know the truth.

When denials amount to cover-ups, they’re pernicious. During Covid our public health establishment made mistakes, many inevitable, given how little we knew. Other mistakes, however, were avoidable. That masks are helpful was known from the beginning – but at first we were told otherwise. Later, nursing homes were kept in lockdown even after vaccines were available. Missteps like these encouraged distrust and resistance, one reason our deathrate was five times that of Japan and the Philippines, per capita.

Public health professionals have begun analyzing and criticizing what went wrong. That’s always what’s called for: Don’t paper over the cracks. Instead, use them to understand and make changes.

Laugh and learn

To end on a lighter note: I enjoy Jon Stewart’s jibes at politicians and the media, especially when he targets Fox News and Trump. I am just as pleased, though, when Stewart mocks his own side (my side) as well.

Take, for instance, his comments on our reactions to Trump’s bellicose first week:

The first law of Trumpodynamics: Every action is met with a very-not-equal overreaction, thus throwing off our ability to know when shit is actually getting real.

Stewart’s comments on reactions to Trump pardoning the violent perpetrators of January 6, 2021:

Trump had the constitutional right to do what he did. The constitution gave him a kingly power and he’s using it. Don’t hate him, hate the founding fathers.

I don’t always agree with Stewart. I don’t always find him funny. But I almost always find him bracing.

Let’s face our own imperfections. Learn from them and try to correct them. And, sometimes, find a way to laugh about them.

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