by Rosemary Redfern

Created on: May 31, 2009

There are two issues in the title. What is meant by world and what is meant by perfect. The globe is a large planet moving round in space. It was formed in a natural way, presumably according to the laws of physics. In that sense it must be perfect.

The world can also mean the terrain of the earth's surface. In this, habitats have evolved to exploit a particular region and the plants and animals live in a state of balance, without outside interference. Predators control the numbers of their prey, saprophytes clean up the decaying debris, plants continually rejuvenate burnt out areas. While the prey might not consider it a perfect situation, the balance is elegant in a scientific sense. The natural world has developed some spectacularly beautiful scenery, the sort which makes the heart soar and poetic. Perhaps this is perfection.

Another interpretation of world is the human one. Man kind is a very successful species. We have developed spoken language, the capacity for making war, creating art both decorative and useful, investigated the amazing natural world through science, managed to travel through space to discover more and gone in the reverse direction to find elements and sub atomic particles.

Yet at the same time humans have been totally unable to control human misery and in fact have inflicted it on our own species. How perfect is a species whose greed creates wars to satisfy the need for acquisition or impose religious practices on another group. This suggests that while we have a staggering capacity to investigate, learn, develop theories and generally amass information because we are an essentially curious species, we have not developed sufficiently to have mercy, tolerance or plain kindness. There are individuals, always, who demonstrate these characteristic but so often they are decried as being a soft touch or easy on wrong doers.

The human capacity for order which allows us to make sense of where we live is useful as long as it does not become so rigid that anything outside those rules is considered aberrant. One of the riches of humanity is the variety. To be able to recognize that someone being different is sometimes a natural phenomenon works when it is a great musician or painter but in other fields it tends to be shied away from just because it's different. Being different can scare some people.

Perfection is a dangerous dream. To chase it can create angst and misery because it's a bit like chasing infinity. Working to do the best we can and what is achievable is probably as close to perfection as we shall ever get.

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