My Vision of a Perfect World

(So our Creative Writing class has morphed into a philosophy symposium.)

My vision of a perfect world:  from whose perspective?

·        A dog’s?  (I wish I could bark any time I wanted, just for fun.)

·        A dinosaur’s?  (Please don’t let that meteor hit earth.)

·        A cow’s?  (I wish these mornings were not so cold that my udder freezes.)

·        Mine?  I’ll have to investigate that.

What does a “perfect world” mean to me?  That is not an easy question to answer.  I am not particularly dissatisfied with the world we have.  Should I start by adjusting our current world?   (Teachers should earn more than football players.  The Navy should have to hold bake sales to buy a new aircraft carrier and PTAs should have funding to start new lunch programs.)  That list could go on forever

Perhaps I should start defining my vision from scratch.  What about the human population?  I certainly would not want a population composed entirely of copies of me.  That would be boring and uninteresting.  Could we add a few different types?  Better, but still boring.  What’s wrong with the current population?  What then about the Adolph Hitlers and Jeffrey Dahmers?  Removing those types from the gene pool would probably have unintended consequences!  The Einsteins, Edisons, and Listers might never have arrived.

The same sort of discussion applies to Nature.  Nature is both beautiful and violent:  the redwood forests, the Grand Canyon, killer whales eating seals,…

If there ever were an Eden, it would never last.  Human beings need stimulation.

Recent studies with babies as young as four months old show that they prefer “nice” to “mean”.  One implication is that while “nice” is inherent, “mean” is learned.

So my vision of a perfect world is pretty much the one we have with perhaps a tweaking of the genes that emphasize “nice”, without unpleasant unintended consequences.

Robert Niel Beatie – November 27, 2012