The Cult of Originality
So this young turk (as in rambunctious not ethnicity) friend of my grandson says "dignity is so Beethoven". That this numbskull thought that dignity let alone Beethoven was unlikely to survive his abuse is of course another matter, but his point was that these fine things were so the day before yesterday that they were hardly worth his consideration. It seems that what was worth his consideration were a number of things that I did not understand the nature of and probably never will, because they are so cutting edge that they will bleed to death prior to birth, thankfully given the womb of originality's natural tendency to abort most creations. There is nothing unusual about these eventual abortions having a life in the minds of young turks prior to their demise, for that is the nature of what is given the greatest credence by such individuals. What is worth noting is the degree to which such behavior has become all too common throughout our hyperventilating, change obsessed, society.
The answer to the following question is crucial to what I mean: how often do we bother to ask whether something that is clearly original is also clearly good? Put another way, how often do we put down something that is clearly good as being something that is unoriginal? Whether by belief or not, we have come by behavior to trump goodness with originality, whether that original thing is good or not. The end result being that originality replaces goodness as the default outcome.
The great error is in believing that goodness and originality are the same thing. They are not. They are more often than not, not even kissing cousins. Originality merely requires the existence of something that we fail to ascribe to something that is already in existence. More often than not the thing is not nearly as original in nature as it is a case of our failure to know the thing's origins. Because of its nature, we will often ascribe originality to any change regardless of the nature of the change. New England weather is virtually always new as compared with yesterday, but very much the same as the day before that.
How often have you heard of late the expression that I don't agree with what that person is saying, but at least it isn't the same old same old? Our default belief has become any change being better than what we have. This is nonsense, but not without a basis in our experience. Those transformative moments in our lives are transformative precisely because they possess goodness in prescence of the new.
When I was seven years old my father took Maggie and I (a long story better left for another time) to a black and tan in Chicago called the Lincoln Gardens, where I first head the cornet of Louis Armstrong playing in King Oliver's band. I could not have known what transformation even was, but I knew it had happened to me. On this matter history speaks for itself. In musical and cultural terms, goodness and originality were seamless; they were whole cloth. Greatness seems to effortlessly revel in a synergy between goodness and originality. Education collects all these effortless synergies and gives the impression that they are the natural order of things, rather than the great exceptions that they really are. So we find ourselves in the presence of originality and just assume (because of this educationally induced bias) that it is our fault that we do not recognize its goodness, even when every bone in our bodies is repulsed by what we clearly understand is otherwise.
So what brought on this rhetorical seizure of mine? All this claptrap around that Obama fellah saying things that had been uttered by our casino obsessed governor: Deval Patrick, and not giving Mister Originality himself (Deval Patrick again) credit. Did one word of all the verbiage surrounding this non-event ask whether what was actually said was something worth saying? If not, then why not? I am not even sure I like this Obama fellah. The only thing I am comfortable giving his credit for is that he was wise enough to be a Democrat rather than a Republican. But his lack of originality has little to do with my concerns with him. It is more that he is a little too original by half, and it makes me wonder why he feels a need to be that rather than what he actually is. Like originality and goodness, In this case I sense that they are not the same thing.
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