Short, to the point, and written in a very accessible style,
The Case Against Perfection raises interesting questions about the pursuit of
human perfection. Sandel makes his arguments extremely well by suggesting them,
identifying possible oppositional arguments and then countering those
oppositional arguments in a precise and comprehensive manner. I feel like I can
learn from his writing style and adopt this style of argument in my own
academic writing. His ability to make a very complex issue accessible is
amazing.
While reading this book, I found myself asking friends
random questions like, “If you were pregnant and found out your baby was going
to have down syndrome, what would you do?” I find this question and others like
this raised by Sandel extremely interesting. Sandel argues that if we go down
the road of eliminating apparently ‘imperfect’ people, like those with downs (a
path we are well on the way to) we may end up producing a society that is
competitive and less forgiving. If we are compelled to ‘get rid’ of
imperfections in babies before they are born then people will be judged for not being perfect. Parents will also
(and already are) be judged for failing to eliminate the imperfection in their
child. Adults who fail to do anything to get braces on their teeth because they
don’t really mind having crooked teeth will be regarded as freaks, athletes who
reject performance enhancers will be dropped from the team (apparently this
already happens in America), deaf parents who choose to have deaf babies will
be criticised for not allowing their children a greater chance in life. These
are just some examples.
I came away from this book pretty much agreeing with its
fundamental argument. There is something very unsettling about human beings’
pursuit of perfection. It’s hard to articulate logically what that is, but
Sandel does it well. Perhaps we like to believe that it is human nature to want
to master something (actually I think that’s more like imperialism than human
nature…did the Indigenous Australians try to ‘master’ the land?), but something
very valuable will be lost if we continue to ‘master’ biology and genetics.
That something is human beings’ capacity to understand and appreciate that we
are NOT in control of everything and there are bigger things out there at work.
This is not necessarily ‘God’. Acknowledging that we cannot necessarily be in
control of everything engenders a humility which is good for society. It fosters
social solidarity to improve political and social structures. Rather than ‘fixing’
the individual to fit into a flawed society, working together to address social
problems should be the priority. While adjusting nature to fit into the social
world we have created may seem empowering, in fact,
'Changing our nature to fit
the world, rather than the other way around, is actually the deepest form of
disempowerment. It distracts us from reflecting critically on the world, and
deadens the impulse to social and political improvement. Rather than employ our
genetic powers to straighten 'the crooked timber of humanity', we should do what
we can to create social and political arrangements more hospitable to the gifts
and limitations of imperfect human beings' (p.97).
