Living With Trauma 5

There are few things that stick in my craw like the idea of human perfectibility. I really don't know where we got that kind of nonsense but this has caused our species more problems than I could itemize in one little blogpost. I just gleaned this little definition from dictionary.com: "The doctrine, advanced by Rousseau and others, that people are capable of achieving perfection on earth through natural means, without the grace of God." Here's another bit of codswallop from nineteenth century Unitarian minister James Walker (American, natch!): "There is nothing to hinder us from maintaining, as the Scriptures seem to do, the doctrine of human perfectibility. Perfectibility, as here used, differs from perfection in this – that a man may be pronounced perfectible though he never attains to perfection in fact, provided only that there is nothing in his nature itself to exclude the possibility of his perfection, and nothing in his circumstances to exclude the possibility of his continually going on towards perfection…" As a species we humans are fundamentally and essentially flawed and there seems no end to our hubris. Here's a little gem from my novel, the Thirteen Crucifixions, published serially on these pages from June 2014 through much of 2015, should you care to take the effort of trying to find it, Gentle Reader. This is part of a dialogue between Sheila, a café owner in her sixties, and Melissa, a young punk girl in her early twenties who is having a rest in the staff room since her boyfriend has just walked out on her: "There are no perfect solutions.  To anything.  There’s always going to be consequences.  There will always be compromises to be made, there will always be a mess to clean up.  No matter how hard we try to avoid making one.”             “Do you really believe that?”             “I KNOW it.”             “And it always has to be like that.”             “I don’t know if it has to.  But that’s the way it is.”             “But you say it doesn’t have to.”             “All right—say it doesn’t.”             “Then what do we do?”             “I don’t know.  Keep trying I suppose.”             “But what if we keep messing up?”             “But isn’t that how we learn?  Through our mistakes?  By messing up?”             “So what you’re saying then is we’re really here to learn. That it doesn’t matter if we fuck-up or not—excuse my language please.”             “I wouldn’t say it doesn’t matter.  Of course it matters.  That’s why we have to try not to.”             “But why does it matter?”             “I suppose it comes back to being responsible.  To accepting responsibility.”             “But why bother if we’re going to keep messing up anyway?”             “Because this way we can say that at least we tried?”             “I dunno—that sounds pretty lame, if you ask me.”             “But does it?”  Sheila said.  “Because this way, by trying, by saying that we tried, it sets a whole different process in motion.”             “What do you mean?”             “I mean, okay, we try to do good.  But we mess up for having tried.  At least we’re more likely to see where we’ve messed up, and try to do something to rectify it, whereas, if we just don’t care anyway, we’re not going to recognize much of anything, and things will just keep getting worse before we all drown in the end results of our irresponsible behaviour.”             “But even if we try to make our mistakes better, aren’t we still going to screw up some more?”             “We likely will.  I mean, look at Germany after the war.  They were a nation destroyed by their own evil.  So along came the Americans, the well-intentioned conquerors with their Marshall Plan.  So they rebuilt Germany economically, politically.  But they were never able to conquer Nazism, which especially since reunification has become an increasing menace.  Things are still less than perfect, but what they have now is much better than nothing.”             “So there will never be such a thing as a solution?”             “There will never be such a thing as a perfect solution.”             “So we’re cursed with being imperfect.”             “No.  Not cursed. Blessed.”             “Which makes imperfection our perfection.”             “I’ve never thought of it that way”, Sheila said.  “You are a very wise young woman.”             “I’d say the same about you.”             “Well, I’d hardly call myself young.  As for being wise—”             “Learning being wise?”             “Well, I suppose we’re all getting wisdom.  Or we have that opportunity, that choice we can make.”             “So it’s all about the getting of wisdom, this mess-making and bad choices”, Melissa said.             “I suppose it is”, Sheila said, “I suppose that it is.” By the way, Gentle Reader, please pardon the whole formatting mess on this blog lately. Something happened that screwed up the process and I have no idea how to fix it. Patience, please. We can never hope for perfection. Improvement, yes. But because we are so hobbled by our broken and wounded humanity, our progress is always going to be very slow, very uneven...imperfect. Even to get to where we are now, where the majority of the world's nations have abolished capital punishment, and human rights are almost universally accepted, if very unevenly applied, we have had to come a long way from thousands of years of tyrannical kings, rulers and despots, and the constant bloodletting that is called the history of the world. We have come a long way since slavery, human sacrifice, witch and heretic burnings and torture chambers. And we still have a long way to go. And our progress is going to be ever so slow and ever so imperfect. But what option do we have if we don't want to destroy ourselves and take a good chunk of the earth's biosphere with us? We are all born into trauma. It is not just something that happens to soldiers on the battlefield, nor to the innocent victims of war. This is our lot in life. Trauma is our collective inheritance as a human species. We are born into it. And in trauma we die. We will never be perfect, nowhere near that lofty goal and we just have too many horrifying historical antecedents of what can happen when mad scientists are allowed to take the helm. Eugenics, anyone? Master Race? Six million dead Jews later....