"The Anatomy of Perfection"
The Anatomy of Perfection
Rev. Robert Doss
November 18, 1962
To link anatomy with perfection is, of course, playing with words for there is no such animal unless one believes in the existence of Plato’s Ideas, an idea like the “perfect anatomy.”
Perhaps the advertising industry would have us believe in such ideas for everyone has heard his share of assurances that if one only bathes with “X” product the perfect body beautiful will result.
If we were absolutists we might think ourselves capable of imagining the best, the most perfect of worlds, the pluperfect ideal.
But I would suppose that most of us look upon the world and human relations and social orders as evolving, hopefully toward something better with our help.
Perfection, however, is unattainable, maybe even unimaginable.
Does anyone know of any perfect ministers or perfect churches or perfect church members?
It is said that a horse trader once told the great preacher, Henry Ward Beecher, that he would like to sell him a certain horse. “He’s a good clean horse,” the trader said. “He works well on either side of the tongue, he has no bad habits, and he is a fine team worker!”
“I can’t buy your horse,” Beecher replied. “But I certainly would like to have him as a member of my church.”
Perhaps that might have been Beecher’s idea of a perfect or, if not perfect, a most desirable church member but Unitarians are likely to have other ideas. Team work we need, but we probably can’t imagine a Unitarian being willing, at someone else’s bidding, to work passively on either side of the tongue.
To say ‘perfection’ is to ask, “Perfection for whom?”
Today I am concerned about two extremes. One is the increasing inability of many people in society to determine what is the better thing to do or even what they want to do in any number of situations. The other is the tendency of many to swallow some prejudice or system or authority as the only, and absolutely the best, way. … That is, perfection itself.
It may be that some writers like Eric Fromm and Rollo May and some poets like W. H. Auden have a point, that ours is an age characterized by great anxiety resulting in inability to act on the one hand or extremist authoritarian action on the other.
Inability to act out of one’s own values and being results in selfless conformity and, as Auden reminds us, “the pressures toward conformity are enormous in a world where commercial and mechanical values have attained the status of ‘godhood.’”
Is there some truth in the society he describes?
“We move on
As the wheel wills; one revolution
Registers all things, the rise and fall
In pay and prices …
… this stupid world where
Gadgets are gods, and we go on talking,
Many about much, but remain alone,
Alive but alone, belonging – where?
Unattached as tumbleweed.”
The case is overstated for emphasis, but there is not much question about too high a regard for commercial and mechanical values leading to conformity. And conformity, too much of it, is an escape from freedom as well as escape from anxiety.
In some things it is fine to conform – non-conformity doesn’t mean anarchy. When we do as others do, it should be because we have thought about it and see it as in the best interest of all. But, to forget what we have to contribute and become members of the lonely crowd is a sad, escapist conformity. And the escape is not satisfactory because with it goes freedom.
Another escape from freedom and anxiety is by way of authoritarianism. One theory has it that German fascism came out of a prevailing indefinite anxiety in that country where economic, political, cultural, and religious security seemed to be lost. There was no foundation under things. A longing for security at any price was growing in people with the resulting belief, “better authority with security than freedom with fear!”
In some ways, according to this theory, communistic totalitarianism fulfills the same function as fascism did. Communism is a product of “the desperate wish to find a purpose in what seems confusion and emptiness.” It provides a faith, a footing, a foundation, something to believe in which provides some relief from anxiety.
People like Toynbee and Rollo May, who agrees with him, feel that our political and social survival may well depend upon our capacity for tolerating the anxiety inherent in a dangerous world situation. If man does not learn to tolerate anxiety, he may irrationally precipitate a war as a way out of such painful uncertainty.
May suggests that we must turn our anxiety to constructive uses.
In this sermon I wish to step back from the anxious world, for the time, to begin with the individual in it. Perhaps there are analogies in the individual to what happens in communities, nations, and around the globe.
And I would like to use one example, that of the perfectionist, who, in the extreme is often the most similar to the authoritarian.
What is a perfectionist? He is not the person who likes to do a good job or who works toward excellence; that is commendable. I’m thinking of a type, which I will attempt to describe, knowing that no one fits into his mold completely. And ,if I seem to make this fictitious person completely one-sided, it is for emphasis.
The perfectionist, then, is a man (or a woman, but I will call him a “he”) with a negative attitude toward life. He does not have what we would call self-esteem, but thinks very highly of the self he thinks he is.
His attitude toward his fellow is usually one of superiority. “I am too good for them.” He may all too often be heard to say, and it may be true sometimes but it is always true to him, “If you want anything done right, you have to do it all yourself.”
This man is unyielding, uncompromising, and over scrupulous idealist who is quite certain he has the truth.
Nothing is good enough for him, of course. Things aren’t right at home; the schools are run “all wrong;” the churches are pockets of hypocrisy; the people he works with just can’t seem to do things correctly.
Everywhere the perfectionist goes he sees something that shocks him. He would like to tell them a thing or two, but unless he has the power to do that he would not sully his pure idealism by contact with real people in real-life situations.
He finds it impossible to put up with or to tolerate any disliked, unfinished or faulty situation.
Obviously our fictional perfectionist is a very unhappy man.
He cannot bear to see any possibilities in the human situations, which confront him. He experiences little that is worthwhile. He would either be a dictator or leave humanity alone altogether not realizing what a vacuous condition of “aloneness” he is creating for himself.
Instead of working for the good in himself and in the fallible human conditions which surround him like a sensible man would he spends his time griping or thinking his gripes while staring into the space of a distorted perfection.
Perhaps it would help the perfectionist to realize, as Goethe observed, “It is our errors that make us loveable,” not all of them and not to all people, but some of them to some people, and that’s comfort enough.
I have talked about the perfectionist attitude only as one tendency to be found more or less in some people, a tendency which leaves the person alone and insecure but there are other traits that do the same thing.
Besides the perfectionist who never gets anything right because right as he tries to see it always runs away ahead of him. There are other kinds of people. There is the rationalizer who never does anything wrong.
Then there are those who always blame themselves and those who always accuse somebody else. There are those who are extremely active and those who are extremely passive; the painfully shy and the insecurely extroverted.
So everyone has his temperament and his problems. I picked the perfectionist as an example of one extreme is order to make the suggestion that any extreme needs careful evaluation.
For the individual – all of us as individuals – I’m wondering if it would be useful to raise questions about or examine suggestions as they relate to three ways of approaching one’s “self:”
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Self-examination.
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Self-acceptance.
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Self-competition.
This is not to present a system but to think out loud about these three approaches.
First of all, thinking of self-examination in these days, I think of psychotherapy where, with help, one tries to examine himself carefully, seeking insight into why he is or does what he is and does.
Let me say that I have a very high regard for competent therapy and for psychiatry. But we should not claim for them more than they claim for themselves.
And it strikes me as not completely wise the way many people go around trying to analyze each other, throwing the jargon around (unable to see the forest for the trees), failing to see human beings in front of them because all they think they can see are complexes.
Self-examination is valuable and good psychotherapy is valuable but it is not the purpose of either to put another artificial barrier between people, the barrier, for example, of a theory even what seems to be a perfect theory. There is no perfection in psychiatry.
Perhaps the perfectionist who never succeeds because perfection is impossible and the person who always blames himself could both benefit from therapy but let that be a genuine and serious effort.
Meanwhile it is worthwhile, I think, to avoid conforming to a culture, which would, in a shallow way “psychologize” us all.
It is this kind of psychologizing which the record album “Songs of Couch and Consultation” pokes fun at.
Some of you have heard the song:
“I’ve got the will to fail – the will to fail,
I have talents that I never use
I try to win but I love to lose. …
It’s such a thrill to fail.
I’ve a backward kind of basic need
To get any kicks when I don’t succeed
Because I’ve got the will to fail. …”
Well, one might call that kind of self-examination, even a jolly sort of self-acceptance, but it is hardly a serious effort at either, nor is it meant to be.
First, get honest with oneself.
More than by trying to psychologize away all of our shortcomings, we might be helped by simply and with common sense looking at ourselves for what we are. We can begin to approach the self in the second way suggested by honest self-acceptance.
John Quincy Adams attempted this. In his diary, he said, “I am a man of reserved, cold, austere, and forbidding manners: my political adversaries say, a gloomy misanthropist, and my personal enemies, an unsocial savage. With a knowledge of the actual defect in my character, I have not the pliability to reform it.”
Adams wrote that in a low mood, but one thing he did, he started by examining and accepting the self he actually had and then went on with his life.
What we find, when we look into ourselves, may not please us as much as we wish something else we find may please us more than we guess, in any case, it is difficult to know what we have to work with if we don’t look.
Too look into oneself, see what is there, accept the self, its limitations and shortcomings as well as its strengths and talents and go on with life is one way of overcoming our defects of character instead of refusing to see them. If we don’t look at them they grow until they overcome us.
Then, assuming we can, in a measure, examine ourselves and accept ourselves we are ready to compete with ourselves.
If we do not wish to be crippled by an impossible perfectionism, neither do we want to be satisfied forever with our own average.
It isn’t necessary to worry ourselves over much about competing with other people. There is competition enough to go around if one will only compete with himself.
Envy of someone else’s talents or accomplishments never made anyone feel better about himself. To try to be and do what someone else is and does may be valid up to a point. Most of us appreciate worthy examples. But more imitation is another escape, a loss of self, another kind of perfectionism always lying beyond reach.
If we try to surpass someone else merely for the sake of surpassing him what do we have of ourselves in that?
Isn’t it nearer reality and self-respect for one to take himself for better or worse, work the sail of your own soul, dig there for insights even though the insights produce more questions, and bring forth such fruit as will grow from one’s own ground of living?
The individual who seeks self-knowledge and moves toward a self-acceptance from which to proceed further is his own best competition.
None will ever reach perfection but that is not necessary. Perfection isn’t life nor is it what life is for.
As Buber suggested in the reading this morning, “In order to arrive somewhere it is not enough to go towards something, one must also proceed from something.”
I think it is a possible for individuals to get intimation of what that something from which they proceed is without naming it perfection or God or merely self.
I think it is possible to sense this “nameless” from which one proceeds, this “nameless” something in the self and between selves.
