Quandary after quandary

In the course of my life, I’ve encountered a number of supposedly helpful aphorisms or lyrics or parts of poems that leave me questioning their applicability to today’s world and the issues we face. Here’s a few examples:

• Perfect is the enemy of good


• ... faced with selecting from two immoral options, the least immoral one should be chosen


• Ring the bells that still can ring
  Forget your perfect offering
  There is a crack, a crack in everything
  That’s how the light gets in.

I’m not disagreeing with the intent of any of the preceding or similar elements of guidance, but the recovering planner in me asks if we “settle for” these approaches, how do we make progress? Is choosing the lesser of two evils the same kind of progress as selecting the better of two goods, or is it simply a holding action until a better choice is available, and how do we get to that better choice?

Is May the “best”month? (serviceberry?) bushes blooming in May.

Photo by J. Harrington

The wonderful Buckminster Fuller captured much of my dilemma in this quotation:

“I am enthusiastic over humanity’s extraordinary and sometimes very timely ingenuity. If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top buoyant enough to keep you afloat that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver. But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday’s fortuitous contrivings as constituting the only means for solving a given problem.”

Of course, he also noted that: “Humans beings always do the most intelligent thing…after they’ve tried every stupid alternative and none of them have worked” 

As I look toward next November, it’s clear to me that we have a choice, not between the lesser of two evils, but between a lesser good and a greater evil. Perhaps, in this universe, thats the best we can hope for. Maybe progress is an emergent property of the systems we’ve inherited. Perhaps we need to learn to be happy that we have choices while we work to create a new, different, and better system. Would ranked choice voting or a parliamentary system work better? How would we know?

Perfect

By Kenn Nesbitt

Today I managed something

that I’ve never done before.

I turned in this week’s spelling quiz

and got a perfect score.

Although my score was perfect,

it appears I’m not too bright.

I got a perfect zero—

not a single answer right.

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