SusanG responds to this quote by Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehti­nen of Flori­da (speak­ing about Iraq):

“Fail­ure is not a part of the Amer­i­can nature nor of our moral fiber. It is cer­tain­ly not a con­cept that is accept­able to our men and women in the armed forces.”

What? Amer­i­cans are a new breed of super-human demi-god? We don’t ever, ever fail at any­thing? We have over­come the lim­i­ta­tions of flawed human nature? We have attained the per­fect­ed nature of the Almighty?

This is tru­ly weird stuff, think­ing that try­ing some­thing and not suc­ceed­ing speaks to our lack of “moral fiber” (what­ev­er that is). The time-hon­ored process of tri­al and error is sim­ply unac­cept­able to some Amer­i­cans, a stain upon our col­lec­tive nation­al soul, it seems. How odd. How dis­tant from every­day real­i­ty. How … near­ly insane this belief appears to me to be.

I think it’s clear that SusanG is read­ing a bit much into that sen­tence, and it’s pos­si­ble to parse Rep. Ros-Lehti­nen’s words more gen­er­ous­ly. For instance, that accept­ing fail­ure is not what Amer­i­cans do, or plan­ning for fail­ure, or some­thing like that. Even though it’s absurd when tak­en to its lit­er­al extreme, there’s some­thing coher­ent about it. And that sort of coher­ence in spite of the plain text is a hall­mark of a “frame.” Think about “pro-life” sup­port­ers of the death penal­ty. ‘Nuff said.

But that sec­ond para­graph got me think­ing about cre­ation­ists. They love to com­plain about the moral con­se­quences of evo­lu­tion. Pre­cise­ly what those moral con­se­quences are eludes me, but I think SusanG got a piece of it. 

Evo­lu­tion involves a whole lot of fail­ure. There are these ran­dom muta­tions. Some make life bet­ter, most make it worse, or at least no bet­ter. Some indi­vid­u­als sur­vive, oth­ers don’t. Some fail, oth­ers suc­ceed. And if fail­ure did­n’t hap­pen, the whole kit-n-kaboo­dle would collapse.

Evo­lu­tion is a process of tri­al and error, and I think that some peo­ple do find some­thing about that process unac­cept­able on a moral level. 

“Try­ing Your Luck” by The Strokes from the album Is This It (2001, 3:29).