House of Eratosthenes

Blogger friend Virgil sends along his thoughts about Bill Maher’s asinine monologue — the one that ridicules, among other things, Baby Trig and his big sister Bristol.

Virgil writes:

Basically for many many years, we have [always] hired PERFECT people who have no baggage, defects, etc..

Problem is, as I get older and wiser, I now realize that they are perfect because they have NEVER done anything outside their comfort zone.

Hopefully I will get the names right here, but give me people like Lincoln who failed 6 or seven times.
With those failures, comes wisdom which you can’t get from a book or a college.

Give me people like grant who drank way too much, but when people approached lincoln about him he said “Find out what he drinks and send a case to all of my officers”

you ask for perfect, you get nada…

You know what? I’m going to put aside what, exactly, offends me about Maher’s comments…although those items of offense are significant and numerous.

What Virgil is addressing when he says “ask for perfect, you get nada” — is — bathosploration.

Opposite of Exploration. A progressive movement over time which endeavors toward an ideal, rather than toward a frontier. This makes fulfillment of the Exponential Growth Instinct absolutely impossible over the long term.

Which is important, because the Exponential Growth Instinct is…

The desire endemic to the human condition, to achieve something on par with what’s been achieved before, but on a more massive scale. This compulsion has a symbiotic relationship with the health and vitality of the human spirit; neither one can truly thrive without the other.

To bottom-line it — we are programmed by a deity…or, if you prefer, we are molded and shaped by hundreds of thousands of years of evolution…to try to do tomorrow what we did yesterday, plus a whole lot more. If we can’t do this, we end up unhappy.

And any time you hear someone using the word “perfect” you have to watch out for comes next. You have to be wary even if you detect a sense of that objective, even if no one actually uses the P-word; and I certainly catch more than a whiff of that when people complain about Alaska’s “mooseburger” governor. They want perfection.

The trouble with perfection, is not that it will everlastingly elude you. You might actually catch up to it — and that is where the trouble starts. Perfection is antithetical to exploration. It is bathosploration; a ludicrous descent into a downward spiral of nit-picking away at ultimately meaningless flaws that aren’t even flaws.

Whether we’re talking about selecting candidates for high office, or cleaning up a house, the predicament in which we ensconce ourselves is the exercise in Trudging Toward Zero:

That part of Bathosploration that endeavors toward an ideal rather than toward a frontier. It is a sanitizing process, that starts from some measured level of contamination and endeavors toward eradicating as much contaminant as possible. Activities of this type can be gratifying to some personality types, because they are definite in scope, and achievement against pre-established goals is always measurable. If there are hazards to be involved then they are absolutely predictable in magnitude. However, trudging toward zero can be boring for other personality types, and regardless of who is involved it is ultimately susceptible to the Bathosplorific Crash

Read over that first sentence again. It endeavors toward an ideal rather than toward a frontier. There is, therefore, some “ground zero” of what the thing is supposed to be. And once reality aligns with that, the dog has caught the car. We end up frustrated because our exponential growth instinct can no longer be fulfilled. All we can do is detect more and more minute bits of residue in the reality-to-ideal delta, and eradicate them on a more and more surgically-precise scale.

Which leads, inexorably, to the bathosplorific crash.

The depressing and frustrating sensation people experience when they have been engaged in Bathosploration and realize they cannot fulfill the Exponential Growth Instinct without re-defining their goals.

And THERE is the treachery of perfection! It is not an infinity. It is a zero. You do not acquire it by accumulating things; you acquire it by getting rid of things. It lies at the end of a sanitizing process, and therefore, has very little to do with existence itself. It has little or nothing to do with life. It is a low nadir. It is cleanliness. It is stillness. It is death.

What does this have to do with Gov. Palin? Is this yet another plea that we should lower our sites, and excuse her little imperfections? Kinda. Sorta yes, sorta no. The case against Gov. Palin has not yet been made. Look at Maher’s clip minute by minute, second by second, frame by frame. What’s his argument? He calls her a redneck, makes fun of her youngest child with the birth defect, announces that he doesn’t quite yet know how to pronounce her name (?!?). Calls her “mooseburger.”

The theory of the Bathosplorific Crash says if you indulge in the labors toward an ideal rather than indulging in the labors toward a frontier, you will indulge in a patently absurd exercise of sanding off burrs that stick out from the pattern of a stencil — and, ultimately, achieve nothing of note, because you will have succeeded in systematically expunging anything remarkable or extraordinary in the raw material you were given. You will ultimately succeed at nothing, save for reproducing a pattern that was defined elsewhere. And throughout this, you will nurture and incubate within you the instincts of an explorer — which will come into conflict with your actual achievement after you’ve completed the work of a walking, talking, breathing copy machine.

And then you have your bathosplorific crash. That moment when you realize the goals toward which you have been working, frustrate the passions within you.

I think we’re at that point. We’re actually several years past it. Barack Obama represents the zero. As it comes within our power to be able to elect him President, it comes within our power to be the dog whose teeth graze up against the bumper. He puts on a good show of resembling a “Perfect Being” — although for a modern Messiah, he is quite dirty in many places. But he talks his talk. He enunciates. He articulates. He wears a suit well.

And he’s inexperienced. Inexperienced in a way that really matters. He is as clean as he is…which isn’t very clean at all…because he hasn’t really held a lot of jobs in which there is a real potential to measurably fail at something.

He says he is the change we have been waiting for. He’s absolutely right; that is exactly the problem. He is not, contrary to the rhetoric of his followers, a remarkable person. He is wholly unremarkable. He’s a soft-spoken, articulate, presentable, outgoing average-man who is not spectacular, and that’s his appeal.

Bill Maher has found some comedy sound-bites he can throw out that make it sound like it’s a good idea to trash Sarah Palin, and support Barack Obama. These sound bites are valuable and precious to him, and to his audience. I find that telling. Things become valuable and precious when they are rare. If these people were backing a decent candidate, the sound bites that make that evident, wouldn’t be so valuable and precious because they wouldn’t be rare. But for that to come about, that candidate has to stand for something…be something…offer himself or herself to us, after trudging toward a frontier rather than toward an ideal. Into infinity rather than toward zero. Which means, as an interesting person with some stories to tell. Like Sarah Palin.

Not like Barack Obama.

He doesn’t offer the cleanliness that is the least we should have in hand after a bathosplorific pursuit. But he offers the zero in abundance. He matches the cookie cutter. He is unscrupulous and stands for nothing. Palin, although a neophyte to politics, is a neophyte in ways that are good. And we know what she’s all about, because she’s done stuff. We can debate it, but at least we have something to debate — because she has had jobs in which it is possible to fail.

Glad I got that off my chest. Next, sometime soon, I’ll go through what was in Maher’s monologue that crinkled my eyebrows up together and made my teeth grind. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

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On PerfectionWednesday, September 10th, 2008

On Perfection
Wednesday, September 10th, 2008