Perfection

 

I got to thinking about perfection and perfectionism this morning, after a zen zoom meeting in which it came up. The idea is one with which most people are familiar: the desire or felt need to do things perfectly, or, as perfectly as we can. It is usually accompanied by the feeling that we have fallen short of our ideal. This can happen with our performance in any number of activities, such as playing an instrument, or playing a sport, or doing math, or writing an email or essay or book, or giving a talk, or preparing a meal, or cleaning, or driving a car, or fixing a roof, or any of the activities we engage in, ad infinitum.  We are always aiming, though rarely succeeding, at reaching perfection. 

            The question that comes up is why? Why this mania, this desperation to be perfect? 

            The answers, if there are any, are of course complex. First has to be its source—striving to please or get approval from our parents. Nearly all of us would admit that, deep down, the person(s) we’re always eager to please, regardless of the current form they take (teacher, boss, critic, reviewer, the public, posterity, etc.), is our father and/or mother. And of course this makes sense, for if we do not get the approval of the source of our life and well-being—our parent(s)—our very survival could be at risk; and, not incidentally, our sense of worth. This is clearly why “unconditional love” is now considered so important, why so many parents now say, ad nauseam, “love you.” Even so, the message that most of us get, or hear as the message, is conditional: ‘I’ll love you if you do this, and do it well.’ Which means to most of us: ‘get it right, get it perfect as I see it, or you will not only not be loved, you will be unworthy.’ No parent actually says this. But most of us interpret the message in this way—if only subconsciously. ‘If you will do as I say, if you do it perfectly, only then will you get my approval and love; if you do it wrong, you will lack my approval and be abandoned, worthless.’ No wonder we all want to be perfect. 

            In modern America, there is an added condition or two to this drive toward perfection. We in the land of “equality” bear the added burden of having to prove our value, our place, earn our love and sense of worth, in the marketplace. That is to say, in more traditional cultures, where social positions are more or less fixed, average people do not have to prove their worth by “doing;” they are considered worthy regardless of what they do or don’t do, simply by the fact of being human. The Dalai Lama was said to have commented about this lack of a fundamental sense of worth in Americans. While he knew that Tibetans had this as a kind of birthright, Americans he observed did not; Americans somehow felt that they had to earn a fundamental sense of worth. And it’s true: we Americans feel we have to “make something” of ourselves. Then, with either our earnings or fame or possessions or the celebration of our colleagues as proof, we can feel worthy—worthy of any social position to which we might aspire. The drive to perfection gets exacerbated by this. It also gets exacerbated by the related fact that most of us live in highly urbanized settings totally unlike the village cultures from which many of our forebears came. And in those small village cultures, embedded in societies similar to the Tibet of the Dalai Lama, one’s sense of worth derived, similarly, just from being known, and accepted/respected as a human being. As such, one was worthy without having to prove anything, without having to makesomething of oneself. One was worthy and known and loved from the outset—unlike those of us in America, where worth must be proven by our accomplishments.

            There is an added burden that we moderns share. That is the burden of being, almost always, watchers rather than performers. We have TVs and CDs and DVDs and smart phones that display for us, always, the most perfect performances—in sports, in music, in scholarship, in talking even—known. Where in prior cultures, one had to attend a live musical or sports event where the risk of mistakes was always on display, and everyone knew it, we always watch or hear on our devices perfection—performances where errors or blunders are easily edited out. And those doing the performing are, to begin with, the best the world can offer: be it Valentina Lisitsa playing Beethoven, or Tom Brady throwing perfect passes. The standards we measure ourselves by are, therefore, these super performances, rather  than the communal games or singing fests that more often prevailed in previous times, and which we could all join. 

            Everything leads us, compels us, therefore, to try for perfection. And what this naturally leads to is discontent—with ourselves for not achieving the perfection we hope is possible, and with others for embodying, at least from the outside, the perfection we wish were ours. Perhaps the most graphic example of this latter is found in the arena of feminine appearance. Women (and, increasingly, men) are constantly regaled with products and processes meant to enhance their looks in the marketplace of attracting a mate. Along with those products come the images, constantly before all of us, of impossibly slim and perfect models whose appeal is hyped in every forum: in parties and bars and marriages and sporting events and automobile outings and business meetings, all of which are made to seem perfect by the presence of beautiful, perfect people. No wonder so many teenagers are depressed, and so many attempt suicide. Who could possibly measure up? 

            With all this, there is, at the same time, an inner dynamic at work, forming resistance to the actual achievement of perfection—even if it were possible. This involves the phenomenon, widely seen in cultures where evil eye is prevalent, of avoiding perfection as a kind of danger. This is especially dramatic in traditional India, where mothers purposely smear the faces of their babies—especially if they are beautiful—to mar or disguise that beauty. Why? Because in evil eye cultures, the attractive child or possession is always at risk—from envious eyes that either lust after that attractive possession, or wish it to be harmed in some way. It is believed that this envious gaze can result in illness or death. The best way to avoid such dire effects (aside from wearing amulets to ward off the eye) is to cover over the obvious beauty or wealth by minimizing it in public. Avoid talking about one’s success or accomplishments. Minimize one’s wealth. Reduce the beauty of a child with dirt or rags. All in the belief that, if envy can be avoided, one will be safe. I myself experienced the latent effects of this as a boy, growing up in a family that definitely believed in evil eye (malocchio in Italian). When I had to perform in piano recitals, for example, and though I never realized it till I was an adult, there was always the inclination to perform well, yes; but dragging in the opposite direction was the impulse to make some mistakes. In short, to avoid looking too good or playing too well, which subconsciously meant attracting the envy of others and the damage of evil eye, I was impelled to fall well short of the perfection I was always striving for. (see my Mal Occhio: The Underside of Vision, [Sanniti: 2008] for more details.)  

            I have the feeling that more people than myself, whether they believe in or even know about evil eye, sabotage what they do in this way. That is, concurrent with our drive for perfection, we have an opposite drive seeking to avoid doing our best. If this seems like a contradiction, it is that confounding contradiction of which human behavior is so often made. 

            Perfection, then. We yearn for it more than anything else. At the same time, we seem to avoid it like the plague. Which brings us to the question: is perfection even possible in this world? And if it were, would we, as mere humans, want it? My guess is that most of us don’t really have to worry about this. Nothing we do, or are, is ever perfect. But what if we could approach it? Would any of us make that storied bargain with the devil, or with science, to achieve perfect health (DNA purged of all genes for disease) or wealth or competence or immortality if it were offered? I think not. Perfection, it seems to me, would take us out of the human realm, where “human” means, if we examine it closely, the arena of mistake, of error. Life itself consists mostly of mistakes. Mistakes, errors, failures are what make us human. Each of us, at some level of our being, knows this. I knew this (albeit not consciously) when performing on the piano. And so, we make mistakes; and so, we constantly fall short of our ideal of perfection; and so, we are at one with the rest of humanity, with the rest of life itself; striving to be perfect, driven to achieve perfection, but always knowing that we cannot get there—not least because perfection would be that ultimate end stop, that isolation that none of us truly wants—if, that is, what we mistaken creatures want matters in the first place. 

 

Lawrence DiStasi

Invasion of the Viruses

People are thronging stores from tiny corner markets to giant Costcos and snapping up everything in sight, especially—and I can’t for the life of me figure this out—toilet paper. Schools are canceling classes, from college to grade school, with expectations that schools nationwide will all be shut down by next week. Airlines have almost come to a halt, and layoffs are mounting everywhere. Virtually every large gathering has been canceled, as has spring training in baseball, the NBA, and college basketball’s March Madness. Broadway shows are suspended and so is nearly everything else where people normally gather. States and the national government have declared national emergencies. What the hell is happening? One would think that an alien invasion is taking place, or is imminent. 

            In a way, it has. But the invasion is not comprised of strange little men with one eye in the middle of their bulbous foreheads. The invasion this time is by these miniscule things called viruses. And so, it probably behooves us to know just what these creatures (if that’s the right word) are. To find out, we have to look to science—something that the current administration has contempt for; which is why their response has been so pathetic and dismissive and infuriating and ultimately catastrophic for us all.  

            Viruses, to begin with, are tiny. As an example, the polio virus, just 30 nanometers across, is approximately 10,000 times smaller than a grain of salt! Even bacteria—which are as small as we can possibly imagine—are large comparatively, the common lab bacteria E. Coli being 40 times larger than the hepatitus virus. But size is only the beginning. Viruses seem to occupy a place somewhere between life and non-life. That is, they seem to exist as life forms, having nucleic acids and DNA or RNA. But they can’t use this genetic information to replicate themselves on their own. As Jacqueline Dudley of the University of Texas at Austin puts it, “A minimal virus is a parasite that requires replication (making copies of itself) in a host cell.” That’s because a virus doesn’t have the machinery to perform this trick of self-generation (i.e., is it possessed of life, or not?), and so therefore, must “hijack” a real cell’s machinery to reproduce itself. That is, the little devil is able to use its host’s equally tiny machinery to make RNA from its DNA, and thereby make the proteins it needs to self-generate. And that’s the central formula we use to define life: DNA to RNA to the proteins that are the building blocks of new little organisms. 

            This, then, is what viruses must do. Their primary role is to deliver their DNA or RNA genome into a host cell so that that viral genome can thereby be expressed (transcribed and translated). It’s really a literary problem for the poor virus. It can’t express itself on its own, it’s a kind of half-live mute, so it must find another cell (usually one in a living plant or animal like us) it can slip into, and get it to afford it expression and, thereby, real life. One almost wants to sympathize with the mute little buggers. One almost wants to open up one’s passages—respiratory passages, or perhaps an open wound—so the hapless little viruses can sneak in and find their voices. Trouble is, as with all hijacking, this is not a nice process. Because once inside the host cell, viruses disrupt the cell’s normal activity, halting the synthesis of any RNA and proteins that the host cell might use for itself, and get it to produce viral proteins, which it can’t use. And, of course, in the process often crippling the larger organism, often mortally so. 

            One of the things that has occurred to me in the last few days is wondering just how and why these nasty little creatures have been allowed to mess up our lives. Where did they come from in the first place, and what has allowed them to thrive? There are, after all, millions of different kinds of viruses (though scientists have been able to describe only about 5,000 of them), and they are not only found everywhere, but they outnumber by far every other biological entity on our planet. Surely, anything that numerous and ubiqitous must have some use or value, as we assess it—that is, evolutionarily. And indeed, viruses are now said to be an important means of horizontal gene transfer—the process whereby bacteria, say, are able to acquire new properties that allow them to resist our antibiotics without having to go through the normal reproductive process. Viruses help them do this. And this, in turn, increases genetic diversity, always supposed to be a good thing, without the usual method of sexual reproduction. The bacteria just get novel properties by sideways insertion. Just by being in the vicinity of that new virus-carried genetic improvement. So viruses are of some value to bacteria, at least in allowing them to resist our attempts to kill them (hence the proliferation of antibiotic-resistant superbugs). 

            But what of the why? Are they at all critical to life itself? Apparently so. Viruses may be the first organisms to have mastered the art of self-assembly (though not self-reproduction). The so-called ‘virus-first hypothesis’ proposes that viruses may be the first proto-life form to have evolved from complex molecules of protein and nucleic acid that initially appeared on this earth. At the very least, viruses are now seen as an ancient form that probably appeared before life split into its three main domains: archaea, bacteria, and eukaryota (micro-organisms with a nucleus, like the cells from which we are made.) So they may well be the ancestors of us all. 

            Still, in the current state of things, they’re mainly nasty little buggers that bring us ills like cancer and polio and now Covid-19, which is driving our human world nuts. And of course what makes this threat so panic-inducing is that we can’t see something that’s 10,000 times smaller than a grain of salt, and can’t even be called fully alive. Indeed, we can hardly imagine how such a tiny entity could even exist, much less threaten us. But science, through the magic of electron microscopes, tells us that that’s precisely the case. They tell us that these miniscule things, sprayed out into the air by the thousands when someone sneezes, and thence into our own nostrils and via them into our very cells, can then multiply exponentially, and compromise our cells, our lungs, and our very lives. And though most of us feel completely safe within our normal day-to-day lives, and tend to want to scoff at the supposed dangers, also and equally we sense some unseen cloud of terror lurking just beyond our ken, waiting to envelope us like a nasty dark cloud of miasma, or maybe invisible radiation. And the worst part is that most of us will never see it coming. It’s too small. Too well disguised. Too well integrated into what looks normal and harmless.

            And that, of course, is the genius of viruses, and in the larger sense, of life. Life is composed of the very tiny that assembles and assembles and grows and grows some more into things that are finally visible and self-organizing enough to keep going on their own. And eventually taking over the earth. Such as humans. Assemblages of the very tiny we are, of bacteria and cells and organs and selves that come to see everything solely from our own point of view, so that anything that interrupts our race to the top of every chain so that we can rule supreme over all the flora and fauna of the planet is a mortal threat. And cause for widespread panic. Threatening our lives, our toilet paper, our vacations and our stock market. 

            And perhaps, just perhaps, that’s what viruses are for (we won’t ever know for sure, of course, what the virus actually means, or even what we mean in the end). To bring us a tiny inkling of the balance that is at play here, the calling in of the accounts that must eventually invade our fond dreams of domination. And tell us, in no uncertain terms, that we are not really the monarchs of all we survey. That, in fact, we are just one end of a chain that stretches back eons to before self-reproduction to mere self-assembly and perhaps before that too, and that our supposed reign here is very much temporary and conditional and dependent on so many things we can’t see or even imagine that our hubris in this regard is laughable when it isn’t dangerous. For there is some evidence and speculation recently that most of the pandemics that seem to be threatening us in our time are the result of our reckless disregard for balance in our tearing apart of the very ecosystems (to build our roads and farms and dams) that have kept such pandemics in some check for thousands of years. That, in short, we are bringing on these threats to all humanity ourselves, by running roughshod and unthinkingly over all else. 

            So even though, in the short run, I personally want to stomp out the little buggers that make up the Covid-19 threat, (if only they were big enough to stomp on) and hope desperately for a vaccine that will prevent them from entering my cells, and a medication that will kill them by the zillions, in the longer run I can see that even they, these half-alive miniscule organisms, have their critical role to play in the drama of which I am a part. And, horror of horrors, may be in the end more crucial to that story than I am. I devoutly hope that is not the case. But just the fact that they’re so small and seemingly insignificant seems not to matter anymore. So who really knows? 

Lawrence DiStasi 

The Central Park Five

A few nights ago, I watched the recent two-hour documentary attributed to Ken Burns (it was actually mainly the work of his daughter Sarah and her husband David McMahon), The Central Park Five. The story will be familiar to many: in April 1989, New York City was aflame with outrage over the spate of what newspapers called “wilding” on the part of alleged Black thugs from the Harlem ghetto, who were said to have run amok in Central Park’s northern area, attacking white joggers and others without provocation. A woman jogger named Trisha Meili was not only attacked but brutally raped and left almost dead. New York officials like then-Mayor Ed Koch issued inflammatory statements about a city “out of control” with lawlessness, with tabloid newspapers like the Daily News and the New York Post blaring huge headlines and outraged columns about the “beasts” and “animals” responsible. Very quickly, police apprehended five teenagers and charged them with the crime of rape, and perhaps murder if Trisha Meili died from her wounds.

As it turned out, Meili did not die from her wounds, but it didn’t matter. Five teenagers—Antron McCray, Yusuf Salaam, Raymond Santana, Korey Wise, and Kevin Richardson—were said to have confessed to the crime after interrogation, were charged, and released pending trial. Those confessions, videotaped by one of the prosecutors, Elizabeth Lederer, played a key part, indeed, the only part, in the evidence at the trial. Though they did not match each other (each defendant gave a different version of events, basically accusing the others of the rape but not himself), and though each defendant, when he learned he was being charged with the crime, withdrew his confession, the confessions were nevertheless played at the trial and persuaded the jury to convict all five defendants. The jurors convicted the teens despite the lack of any other evidence, physical or otherwise, and despite the fact that the DNA evidence found at the scene did not match any of the defendants. The confessions, with each defendant supplying details of the crime (again, the details did not match each other), overrode all other evidence or lack of it. One juror, recounting how he held out for hours because of the contradictions in the evidence, emphasized repeatedly how fully persuasive the confessions were to most jurors. The idea was, ‘Why would someone confess and supply small details of the crime, if he was innocent?’

This becomes the key question in the documentary. For it turns out that someone else, not the five teenagers who spent five to ten years in prison for it, actually committed the crime on April 19, 1989 in Central Park. Matias Reyes, who had raped several other women, was in prison when he met one of the defendants, Raymond Santana, years later. Struck by uncharacteristic remorse that someone else was paying for his crime, Reyes confessed that he was actually the Central Park rapist, and supplied conclusive details of the rape that no one else had. His DNA was found to be a match to evidence at the scene. New York County District Attorney Robert Morgenthau convened a review panel, and on the basis of their examination of the case, four of the Central Park Five were exonerated and released. The fifth, Raymond Santana, had been convicted of a drug charge and was only released somewhat later.

The point, though, remained: five teenagers had confessed to a crime they did not commit, and served years in prison because of those confessions. How could this happen?

I wrote about a similar trial-by-confession in a blog titled “And Justice for All” on July 13, 2011. This one involved the “Norfolk 4”, a group of US sailors convicted of the rape and murder of Michelle Bosko in 1997. One sailor, Danial Williams, “confessed” to the crime after a grueling interrogation, but since his DNA didn’t match the semen taken from the crime scene, he was induced to implicate his roommate, Joe Dick—whose semen also didn’t match, and who then implicated several others (seven men were eventually implicated in turn). Four were eventually convicted of the crime, along with Omar Ballard, whose DNA did match, and who had actually committed the rape and murder.

And why were the other four convicted? Again, because of those persistent confessions.

It turns out that this business of false confessions is not all that unusual in our justice system. Especially since the Innocence Project began its investigations a few years ago, literally hundreds of wrongful convictions have been attributed to the nefarious effects of false confessions (now considered one of the leading causes of error in the U.S. justice system). Among the researchers who have written about this, Richard Leo and Saul Kassin (interviewed in the Central Park Five documentary) are most prominent. And what they have found is that, contrary to most people’s convictions about this (Why would anyone confess if he/she is innocent? On TV, only the guilty confess, and we’re always relieved when they do.), it’s rather easy for police to get confessions out of certain types of people—especially adolescents like the Central Park Five—and they do it routinely. First, they isolate the suspect, sometimes keeping him awake for long hours. Second, they emphasize how powerless he is in custody, and how convincing is the evidence they have (police routinely lie, even on TV, about the alleged evidence). Kassin, Leo et. al. note a case from Florida in this same year of 1989, State v. Cayward, where “the defendant’s confession was suppressed because police had typed up a phony crime laboratory report that placed Cayward’s DNA on the victim.” One would think such lying would be illegal, but the court vacated the confession not because the lie had led to a false confession, but because “it might find its way into court as evidence.” In fact, it is actually legal for U.S. police to lie in interrogations (though Britain has laws prohibiting this). The same is true of the leniency implication that the police routinely convey to suspects. Though police can’t overtly promise leniency in exchange for a confession, they can and do imply that a confession will favorably affect the case, allow the suspect to end the interrogation, and minimize whatever punishment might eventuate. This was apparently a major factor for the Central Park Five. Alternately threatening and befriending the young men, police convinced them that the only way they could get out of the unbearable stress they were under was to confess. Exhausted and scared, the teens, like most of their peers, were particularly susceptible to this kind of pressure. They fit the profile of those most likely to succumb to police pressure: highly suggestible, tending to have poor memories (the police often supply them with the information that shows up in confessions), highly anxious, and possessed of low self-esteem.

But what about Miranda rights, you may ask? Weren’t these kids read their rights? Why did they talk at all; why not ask for a lawyer? The stats are amazing: according to Richard Leo, “fully four out of five suspects waive their rights under Miranda.” Especially teenagers seem to have difficulty even understanding what Miranda means: one group that was tested, though they seem to have understood the words, had no idea of the implications of Miranda, with one interpreting Miranda as follows: “That means I can’t talk until they tell me to.”  In the Central Park Five case, all five suspects submitted to questioning without ever asking for a lawyer, though one or two had parents present—who seemed not to know about their rights either, or, more likely, figured that it would cost more than they could afford to hire a lawyer. None seemed to understand that the law requires that a lawyer, a public defender, be supplied.

One other major factor operated in the Central Park Five case, and in many others. Innocence. While most of us would consider being innocent a major plus in our favor, in many cases, Kassin notes, innocence may actually put people at risk. This is because people tend to believe that “truth and justice will prevail and that their innocence will become transparent to investigators, juries, and others,” and so they fully cooperate and waive their rights. In one famous case, 18-year-old Peter Reilly falsely confessed to murdering his mother, later saying:

 ‘‘My state of mind was that I hadn’t done anything wrong and I felt that only a criminal really needed an attorney, and this was all going to come out in the wash’’ (Connery, 1996, p. 93).

Something like this seems to have operated in the case of the Central Park Five. All seem to have thought that they were witnesses rather than suspects, and that their confessions blaming others but not themselves for the actual rape would show how innocent they were, and eventually absolve them. They did not. Instead, their confessions persuaded the jury that they were guilty, even absent any other corroborating evidence, even in the face of conflicting evidence. The confessions persuaded the judge and the prosecutors, too, who have been found to be particularly aggressive and punitive when a confession is involved. As to the police, Kassin points out several studies showing that the interrogation procedure itself, contrary to what we might like to think, is deeply compromised by a prior belief in guilt:

The purpose of interrogation is therefore not to discern the truth, determine if the suspect committed the crime, or evaluate his or her denials. Rather, police are trained to interrogate only those suspects whose culpability they ‘‘establish’’ on the basis of their initial investigation (Gordon & Fleisher, 2006; Inbau, Reid, Buckley, & Jayne, 2001).

What is astonishing in the Central Park case is that even after Matias Reyes confessed, and even after the DNA evidence confirmed that he was indeed the perpetrator of the rape, and even after the convictions of the five were vacated, neither the police nor the Chief Prosecutor would admit to having made a mistake. Chief Prosecutor Linda Fairstein, in fact, who made her reputation on the fame of her convictions of the Central Park Five, maintained even afterwards that all five of the teenagers had been part of the rape and Matias had only “completed the assault.” The police who had elicited the false confessions slammed District Attorney Robert Morgenthau and his review panel for allegedly defaming police who had “done nothing wrong.” As to the press, they minimized the coverage of the miscarriage of justice they’d once cheered for so mightily, indicating once again their concern to sensationalize what sells rather than testify to the bland reality of truth.  

I would strongly recommend the PBS video to anyone interested in how the Justice System in these United States of America really works. You can easily watch it online at http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/centralparkfive/. I would also recommend the website www.falseconfessions.org. There you can find statistics on false confessions and copies of the essay from which I have quoted liberally by Kassin, Leo et. al. You’ll be sobered and perhaps shocked to fully realize that the linchpin of what passes for conclusive proof in our legal system is really fraught with pitfalls for defendants, especially the young, vulnerable people of color who are so often targeted by our allegedly impartial system of justice. 

Lawrence DiStasi