The Perils of Perfection - NYTimes.com
▻http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/opinion/sunday/the-perils-of-perfection.html?ref=global-home
For Mr. Bell, these always-on recording devices can make us aware of our own faults, of our inconsistencies, of the many lies we tell ourselves and others. “Successful people don’t shy away from the honest record,” he wrote. “Imagine being confronted with the actual amount of time you spend with your daughter rather than your rosy accounting of it. Or having your eyes opened to how truly abrasive you were in a conversation.” Doctor Freud, meet the iFreud!
This sounds nice in theory, but in the world that we actually inhabit, Mr. Bell’s quest for consistency borders on the tyrannical. In his brilliant essay “In Praise of Inconsistency,” published in Dissent in 1964, the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski argued that, given that we are regularly confronted with equally valid choices where painful ethical reflection is in order, being inconsistent is the only way to avoid becoming a doctrinaire ideologue who sticks to an algorithm. For Kolakowski, absolute consistency is identical to fanaticism.
“The breed of the hesitant and the weak ...of those ...who believe in telling the truth but rather than tell a distinguished painter that his paintings are daubs will praise him politely,” he wrote, “this breed of the inconsistent is still one of the main hopes for the continued survival of the human race.” If the goal of being confronted with one’s own inconsistency is to make us more consistent, then there is little to celebrate here.