This has long been one of my favourite quotations.  Some translations prefer to substitute the word ‘perfect’ for the word ‘best’.  It works well in both versions, so let us use ‘perfect’ for now.

Years ago, I first saw the observation in a paper going round the Foreign & Commonwealth Office.  It used the epigram as a riposte to the British Ambassador to a Gulf state who wanted the very best.  He had claimed that unless his official car was a Rolls-Royce he would get no respect from the locals.  Request denied.  Perfection is not always plain sense.

It gets worse the more you think about it.  As perfection is unattainable, for obvious reasons that we will come back to later, it is not necessarily always benign as a concept or objective.  Denying this plain fact leads to all sorts of trouble.

Standards

I’m not for one moment ignoring the obvious need for high standards and the discipline required to meet them.  This is particularly true of life-or-death arenas:  air traffic control, for example, or paramedics’ response to heart failure or strokes.  High standards have their place and are usually appropriate as well as demanding.  That is because they are built on hard reality and its challenges, notably the health and safety of our fellow human beings.

No, perfectionism is altogether different from high standards.  It is an absolutist creed based on the supposition that the perfect is achievable, let alone desirable.  It’s an attitude which in the normal course of everyday life is irritating and exhausting, but ultimately tolerable.  We find ways to get round it, so let’s leave that individual level of the syndrome aside.  It is the comparatively harmless end of the spectrum.

Be perfect, or else

Perfectionism is at its worst when it affects people badly on a national or international scale.  At this level perfectionism is like some kind of gold standard sought, ultimately in vain, by strong-minded individuals who believe that they can attain it, even if others cannot, and have few qualms about how this could be achieved.

The most obvious examples are all revolutionaries, with a heavy dose of millenarianism, who successfully obtain power.  And what a gallery they make:  Savonarola, Müntzer, Robespierre, Lenin, Pol Pot, to name but a few fanatics.  Louis de Saint-Juste, that other monster of the French Revolution, spoke for all of them when he declared that “in every Revolution a dictator is needed to save the state by force, or censors to save it by virtue.”

For that statement to have any validity at all, it must be right to assume that absolute ‘virtue’ is not debatable, but a given.  You have to go for it.  All that is required to achieve it is the exercise of Will.

Purity and the Will 

Now Will is something which state criminals have in abundance.  They see Will as self-evidently good.  It clarifies: shows what has to be done.  Its first mission, as it were, is to cleanse.   Given the opportunity, these absolutists, implacable and self-righteous, opt for purity.  If that involves emptying a city by force, then so be it.  They see the process as inevitable.  Carried out thoroughly enough, it will succeed and all shall be clean; ready for the perfect.   It is possible; it is desirable; how should it not be achieved?

The human factor    

The only obstacle in the way is imperfection: irrational, obstinate and obstructive, most obviously and detestably displayed by ordinary people.  They do not and cannot exercise this Will.   So it will have to be exercised on their behalf.

It is human failing, therefore, like some kind of Original Sin, which threatens to undermine the realisation of the perfect state or society.  In the mind of the totalitarian, this virus-like infestation mutates quickly and damagingly into disloyalty.  The people are not only afflicted with false consciousness and non-co-operation, but also with disobedience.  This being so, the people must be ‘corrected’.

The problem is, of course, the fact that human beings generally hold on tenaciously to their awkward humanity.  They will not be ‘corrected.’  The point is most clearly made in David Karp’s satirical novel One (1953) which, more thoroughly than George Orwell’s better-known 1984, explores the extent to which the individual as an archetype can withstand a totalitarianism which claims to be benign and for the good of all.

Heresy and salvation

One imagines a present day conformist society, referred to only as the State, which believes itself to be perfect.  Anyone who challenges this doctrine must by definition be a heretic.  The novel charts the way in which the hero, a contrarian professor suspected of individualist thinking amounting to heresy, is subjected to medical and judicial procedures of increasing severity until he is ‘perfected’ as a re-educated – in the sense of redeemed – obedient member of society.  The experiment fails, however, derailed by what the baffled State almost despairingly condemns as “the vanity, the ego, the drive to be and to retain the individual” (p218).

The idea of heresy is apt.  The great religions of the Book mull over this continually: why is humankind and human existence so imperfect? Why does the Deity – that ultimate form of Perfection – have to remind us of this again and again?  What’s the matter with us?  Why are we so prone to be against perfection?

It’s because we have to be.  If perfection is a sign of unreason at best and insanity at worst, then we need to cherish our human failings.  They save us from the madness and death that the very worst perfectionists insist is both essential and feasible in a good cause.

We generally muddle along, in our untidy lives, always hoping that we can get to enjoy the good enough.  We sussed out perfectionism long ago.  We know the best has the capacity to hurt, on many levels of our existence.  Let the best come about if it has to, but save us from it. And let us have the good instead.

A plum: the great French playwright Molière gets an unexpected and extraordinary benefit from someone else’s misjudgement: an anecdote from Madame Campan‘s memoirs of the French court:

Louis XIV and Moliere, via Wikipedia

When a just man dies,
Lamentation and praise,
Sorrow and joy, are one.

It’s hypocrisy.  Being, in the memorable words of an American interviewee many years  ago, “one of those vicious liberals”, I confess I have rather enjoyed condescending to people who don’t see things as I do; specifically in terms of their access to the Truth – or rather seeming lack of it – through knowledge and education.  Over the years, all sorts of people have incurred my silent scorn on this point.

To Labour canvassers, for example, I have wanted to shake my copy of the Guardian in their faces and shriek: don’t you realise what you’re doing to our civil rights?  To Conservative councillors in golf clubs: have you no idea about how your party really is, red in tooth and claw?  Underlings (when I had any): do you really not know about main verbs in sentences?  Fox News: you cannot be serious in supposing that… Opponents of women priests:  you’re misreading the gospels!  Fundamentalists: you’re misreading the Bible!  Historians on TV: you obviously don’t know a vital factor affecting what you’re talking about. Women: don’t you realise where I’m coming from? My mother: you can’t think that, surely…  And so on ad nauseam.  I know things.  I think I know better.

But now I have met my match, and I have to grovel.

I also have sinned

To be fair to myself, there are areas of human knowledge and expertise that I know very little about.  Natural history, for example; country life; good clothes; Lady Gaga; answering the phone properly; motor mechanics; cricket; money.  I can bluff my way past these, and get away.  But I can’t escape IT.  I need it.  But it doesn’t need me.

My daughter, whom I once witnessed in front of our computer texting friends, typing an assignment paper, talking on the phone, all with the speakers full on and all at the same time, put it succinctly.  When I mentioned a few years ago that I was briefing colleagues at work about gaps in our online presence, she ignited. “Papa,” she exclaimed, “you know [expletive deleted] all about IT! What do you think you’re doing?”  Shamed, I desisted, but I couldn’t stay away. I had to live a lie, and inevitably I was found out. About CSS, RSS, system configuration, syncing and inserting lines in html, I knew nothing and learned less.

Now what?

Fast forward to the present, for instance, and I find I have just been refunded my money by a software firm (good), all because I couldn’t understand their careful instructions on how to download and install their program (very bad). On this, I have form. Every little glitch in front of the screen gives me hours of anxiety, leafing through manuals and forum postings, getting more and more frustrated at my own ignorance and lack of comprehension, and angry, – blind, confused – until at last I arrive at the eye of the storm: in a brief moment of exhausted calm I realise that, yes, I cannot understand information technology and I never will.

In this, I am unempowered, as unempowered as those unfortunates who don’t seem to know the difference between consubstantiation (good) and transubstantiation (bad). I am condemned to soldier on, not knowing how to resize in Photoshop or refresh my gravatar. I who knew it all, am as ignorant as I supposed that they were.

Having confessed to all this, I am relieved but I realise that I have put myself in jeopardy. IT-savvy people and comment spammers alike have me down to be cut from the herd. True, I have been well treated recently by big beasts in the IT forest, but their protection and sympathy cannot last for ever. I have to go out now and face my IT demons alone. I promise to do all I can to learn how to fix broken links, use hashtags wisely and convert MP3 scraps into ringtones. Above all, I will learn eventually to repair my own websites’ FTP breakages and cultivate their pingbacks.  So please bear with me. Forgive me, for I too have sinned. I will get there eventually.

David Cameron has just taken the decision to frag all his European counterparts, and damage our relations with our neighbours for a generation, simply to appease his right wing and protect his so-called friends in the City.  So once again, the bankers win, the rest of us lose, and the Cro-Magnon arm of the Conservative Party rejoice.

Now what?

It is yet another illustration of that wonderful 18th century epigram about going to war: Now they are ringing the bells, soon they will be wringing their hands.

Tories understand the bit about post-modern states all right, but persist in seeing it as a problem, or a threat.  In years to come, our fixation with nation states will seem as quaint as all those little duchies and principalities that existed in Germany before the Napoleonic era seem now to us.  When the boat people arrive in ever greater numbers from the starving south and pitch up in climate-ravaged Murcia or Sicily, it will soon become clear that it will be our problem too.  We will have to acknowledge that FDR was right when he said that you don’t allow your neighbour’s house to burn down just because he doesn’t have a hose and you do.

It’s my hose

European problems need European solutions and we have just demonstrated, seemingly, that we think that Europe can do what it wants; we will have no part in it.  The prime minister poses as an ordinary plumber helping to clear the drains, but his admixture has burned a hole in the pipe that connects us with our neighbours, and they will fix it without reference to us.

Cameron’s decision is more than a catastrophe for the UK, it is an error.  It could have been handled differently, by compromise, but our very own Tea Party, heated up by the Daily Mail and the Daily Express, has once again damaged our national interests through ignorance and malignancy.

Mr Clegg, leave the coalition now and tell Europe we are still with them.  That’s the least you can do.

Cover via Amazon

To understand the current economic crisis (pundits in the British media call it a developing catastrophe) I’m reading a book about the previous one: William D Cohan’s House of cards: how Wall Street’s gamblers broke capitalism (Allen Lane, 2009; UK edition title).  The first hundred pages or so describe the Bear Stearns meltdown which precipitated the banking and credit crisis throughout the world.

And that’s the point: they show that in all the anguished discussions, pleas and threats in March 2008, none of the players, except perhaps the Fed, seem to have paused to think about what consequences to their actions there might be worldwide.  It’s sobering to be reminded that all our credit problems in UK from that time onwards, including the threat of money running out, were triggered by comparatively minor events and statements inside a failing US institution.

No-one amongst these so-called Masters of the Universe cared about the rest of us, is the message; worse, no-one seems to realise how much, internationally, is riding on comparatively routine decisions made day by day in Wall Street.  So we have to ask: the next stone waiting to precipitate an avalanche – where is it right now and what is it doing?

Medieval battle

History is strewn with examples: the bitter lesson that armoured cavalry can be destroyed by local townee militias (Courtrai, 1302) or by bowmen plagued by dysentery (Agincourt, 1415); or that the enemy you face is a new type or model of army with new levels of discipline (Naseby, 1645); or that the enemy who slaughters you consists of ‘natives’ whom you have underestimated and despised (Isandlwana, 1879 or Adowa, 1896 or Dien Bien Phu, 1954); or that your opponent has just invented the cannon (Niebla, 1262) or the tank (Western Front, 1917). You are surprised when the enemy by-passes your elaborate defences (Maginot Line, 1940) or by-passes your detection systems and destroys some of your capital ships (Pearl Harbor, 1941).  Most of all you are shocked into submission when your enemy destroys two of your cities, each with a single bomb (Hiroshima, Nagasaki, 1945).

We shouldn’t be complacent and reassure ourselves that it couldn’t happen now.  It is happening.  Whilst the defence establishment clings to its new aircraft carriers and the Conservative-led government refuses to give up Trident, our new enemies turn out to be young men constructing bombs in a council flat down the street or teenage hackers with the capacity to bring down power systems.  In fact, cyberwarfare is already upon us, but what can the Coldstream Guards (say) do about that?

True, the most recent UK strategic security review (October 2010) lifts the issue to a higher level of priority: “[we shall] develop a transformative programme for cyber security, which addresses threats from states, criminals and terrorists, and seizes the opportunities which cyber space provides for our future prosperity and for advancing our security interests”, but where is the political rhetoric and publicity about this?  Where is the national colloquy about all this?  What should we be doing?  The future pattern of warfare is already amongst us.  We must not be surprised again.

Image via Wikipedia

Another goody plucked at random from the estimable Project Gutenberg, this snapshot of Abraham Lincoln a decade before his presidency reminds me of other great men who were notorious for ‘being elsewhere’ at dinner:  Thomas Acquinas, Archbishop Ramsey and Field Marshall Wavell.

“The habit of mental absorption, or ‘absent-mindedness’ as it is called, was common with him always, but particularly during the formative periods of his life. The New Salem people, it will be remembered, thought him crazy because he passed his best friends in the street without seeing them. At the table, in his own family, he often sat down without knowing or realizing where he was, and ate his food mechanically. When he ‘came to himself’ it was a trick with him to break the silence by the quotation of some verse of poetry from a favorite author. It relieved the awkwardness of the situation, served as a ‘blind’ to the thoughts which had possessed him, and started conversation in a channel that led as far as possible from the subject that he had set aside.”

Francis Fisher Browne  The every-day life of Abraham Lincoln  Chicago, 1913  p112

It does not appear to cross the conservative mind that many of the cuts in public services we are now enduring have consequences.  Already those parts of middle England who routinely criticise their local councils are shocked when those same councils propose, illegally, to close local libraries.  They wanted the railways nationalised and, lo, it was done.  How are they feeling about that now, as fares go up 8%?  Conservatives are routinely anti-planners but after half a lifetime outside UK I have had ample opportunity to see what happens when town and country planning is not allowed to intervene.  Look no further than the urban blight disfiguring the Veneto.

It makes you wonder how much the average patriotic conservative knows about their own country: “What do they know of England, who only England know?”  Conservatives so often appear oblivious to what the consequences might be. If they are possible, they will happen.

It makes me fear for my country.  Conservative surprise is a burden on us all, and needs to be reduced.  Urgently. Nick Clegg, are you hearing this?