Scientizers Strike Again

I did a frightening thing today. In my employee lunchroom sits a television, and for the last five minutes or so of my lunch break, I broke my usual pattern of facing away from it and reading, and reluctantly gazed into the idiot box. The program, it turns out, was a sort of investigative report on dating and romance services of every sort.

Now, I find such things rather disturbing in the first place. I'm sure that many people have come to find a lasting relationship through some sort of dating service, but all in all I think it reflects a sort of existential wandering in the kingdom of Eros that leads more to one-night-stands and superficial infatuation than to lasting commitment based upon inner, rather than outer, qualities. In any case, however, it wasn't so much watching aging boomers trying to "revive that spark of youth" that disturbed me, but rather a new program being instituted by Match.com.

This program was enthusiastically described as a sort of "wave of the future" and a "science of love" by one of Match.com's executives. In essence, it is a computer program that generates comparative images and descriptions, asking the participant to choose between the two (something like a test for eyeglasses: which is clearer; one ... or two?). When you're all finished choosing hair colour, waist dimensions, etc., the computer will generate for you your "ideal man/woman." Next, the dating service looks for individuals whose images most closely match your personal "ideal," and directs your attention toward them.

Stephen Jay Gould warned us about this sort of thing; Neil Postman interacted with it directly. Both men are dead now, but they still warn from the grave. Surely it is not difficult for a reasonably intelligent person to tell the immediate problems with this program. It places physical beauty at the top of the list of criteria for a successful "relationship." It discriminates against those people who have been blessed with glorious souls yet are stuck with very imperfect bodies. It presumes that humans can appreciate only one kind of external beauty. It exercises an incredible, odious reductionism in believing that love partakes not of soul, not of magic, but of sheer evolutionary statistics. It contravenes nearly every important sentiment about love held by every artist, every philosopher, even the mindless hack poetasters who work for Hallmark.

Worse than all this, though, it lays bare a vein in our society that has done its very best job at destroying any frame of reference left over from the days of faith: the idea that anything which is proclaimed "scientific" by any clean-shaven personage in a white coat and thick glasses can be taken as gospel. It doesn't matter if the "science" consists merely of opinion or aesthetics; it is taken as fact, not possibility or, God forbid, myth. I know little about women or love, but I do know that if anything impresses me, it is the sheer diversity of beauty that exists in the human race. How two women can be nearly opposites of one another, and still equally lovely. Yet tell the public that its "ideal partner" can be scientifically determined on a computer (which cannot lie or err), and it will believe it, and subsequently select the closest earthly approximation of this nonpareil off the pages of Match dot com. No matter this ideal pair will be divorced in five years; one can then repeat the process (in a variety of blind-date bars and other such foofaraw) until growing so old that, not caring anymore, Joe Citizen buys himself a motorhome and roams the country with wife number n, getting ready to die.

Surely, my friends, life can be lived in a way superior to this Social Darwinist, technocratic nightmare? I think so.