The revenge of the good fairy - Reality Club lecture on human fallibility and technology

Whole Earth Review, Summer, 1987 by Mary Catherine Bateson

In this context it is worth noticing that not only dohuman beings play out their ambivalence in relation to their most cherished dreams, the nightmares of warning that they hold up also tend to come about. Both Armageddon and Heaven on Earth are likely to turn out to be nightmares. It might be argued that the twentieth century is the century in which God turned literal-minded, displaying a fundamentalism more pernicious than the human variety, and gave mankind, in concrete and factual form, one after another of the dreams gestated through the centuries. But of course it is the human species that has been diligently implementing fantasies that should never have been taken literally. Nuclear weapons are one kind of dream come true, concretized poetry. They represent not only the wish fulfillment of a super weapon, but also a dream of human unity. The planet is now, more truly and completely than ever before, one, united by risk (and by pollution and by communication). The holocaust was another kind of dream or nightmare come true.

In order to live with necessary ambivalence, weneed to reassert the value of fallibility, to deny the infantile wish for omnipotence that is contained in every technology that must not fail, lest its failure resemble the revenge of the Good Fairy. If we could assert the value of fallibility, we might learn never to build a dam or a reactor or a defense system unless its ultimate failure was an acceptable risk. The tragic loss of a ship and crew, like the space shuttle, is different from the risk of accidental war, and should probably be regarded as an acceptable risk--one to be limited more effectively than it was, but always there. Simultaneously, we need to accept the presence of error in all human enterprises, instead of imputing, as our lawsuits increasingly do, an expectation of infallibility to all-too-human doctors and engineers. This does not mean endorsing carelessness or criminal negligence, but it does mean that we should be grateful that neither Mephistopheles nor the Good Fairy has granted infallibility.

We will not stop dreaming and wishing, nor will welose the notion of perfection, but we need to find ways of remembering that any dream, taken literally, is likely to be destructive. There is a tradition among Middle Eastern rug weavers, for instance, that every rug, no matter how fine and opulent (and every rug is metaphorically a garden and an analog of paradise), should contain a deliberate error, for perfection belongs only to Allah.