Another Thought on Hype

I recently asked the question "is hype good?". I meant "hype" in the most fundamental sense. Not just commercial publicity, but every effort to excite anybody about anything.

This has been on my mind a lot recently, especially regarding one memory in particular.

My birthday is in October. (In four days, actually.) One year, when I was perhaps eleven or twelve, my father gave me a birthday present of A Christmas Carol on audiotape. Books on tape were quite a big thing back then and I was keen on them.

I can remember him saying as he gave it to me: "This recording has been done by some of the best actors in the business". Or something like that.

The fact that my father had gushed over the actors gave the recording a sort of glamour in my mind. It made it seem like a big deal to me. And I wasn't all that naive. I fully understood that my father was just trying to excite me about the gift. But the fact that he cared enough to try to excite me mattered.

The really interesting thing about enthusiasm (to me) is that there's no fixed quantity. It's not like everybody has, say, ten thousand units of enthusiasm (perhaps a unit could be called a "gush") and everybody assigns these units however they see fit: this much to sport, this much to work, this much to family, etc. etc.

Each person's measure of enthusiasm clearly differs. Some people are full of it and some people (or so it has always seemed to me) have very little of it. People with negligible enthusiasm used to greatly unsettle me in my childhood and teens. I called them "death worshippers" because I really believed they were indifferent as to whether they were alive or dead, or perhaps they even preferred the latter state.

Before I was a teenager myself, I really believed all teenagers were death worshippers, from the stories I heard from those who had gone before me. One teenager told me that all his schoolmates threw their weight against the side of the schoolbus when it passed the river, in order to push it in. Rubbish, no doubt, but I believed it. Teenage nihilism seemed to me the epitome of death worship. Mersault in Camus's The Outsider isn't a teenager, but I thought every teenager was like Mersault.

Of course, you can't judge somebody's enthusiasm from outside, and I was just as judgmental back then as I am now. Still, I don't think I was always completely wrong.

The other interesting thing about enthusiasm is that there's no upper limit. Beyond a certain threshold, we start using words like "wonder", "awe", "the numinous", "transcendence", "the sacred", "rapture", etc.

I think one of the purposes of poetry is to raise the roof (literally) of this capacity. I think there is, sadly, a great insight in this stanza from Coventry Patmore:

An idle poet, here and there,
Looks round him; but, for all the rest,
The world, unfathomably fair,
Is duller than a witling’s jest.
Love wakes men, once a lifetime each;
They lift their heavy lids, and look;
And, lo, what one sweet page can teach,
They read with joy, then shut the book.
And some give thanks, and some blaspheme
And most forget; but, either way,
That and the Child’s unheeded dream
Is all the light of all their day.

Personally, I always want to be on the side of the hypers, of the people pushing hype. There is of course hype for bad things. It's right to be cynical about the bad hype. But to be cynical about all hype--- all romance, all idealism, all poetry, all glamour-- is about the worst thing I imagine.

Everything That is Not Anti-Woke is Woke

I'm not declaring this as a principle, I'm making it as an observation. And it makes me very sad.

With very few exceptions-- mostly those cultural spaces that trade in nostalgia-- it seems that the only entertainment, commentary, comedy etc. that doesn't reflect woke assumptions about the world are those that set out to be explicitly anti-woke or at least non-woke.

The contrast is huge. It's like passing from a coloured world to a black-and-white one. I'm not even using those terms evaluatively. Make the anti-woke subculture coloured or black-and-white as you please. The point is that it's a completely different experience, one way or the other, to the mainstream.

The difference is so huge, in fact, that I've noticed that public figures who turn against woke on one topic (usually people who have been the victim of a witch-hunt for wrong-think) nearly always pass over fully into the anti-woke camp, or at least a good deal of the way. The cynical view of this is that they're "grifters" who've lost one audience and know which side of their bread is buttered.

My less cynical view is that, once the spell is broken, it's broken. Consensus seems less trustworthy; "expert opinion" seems less objective; words like "outdated", "backward", "reactionary", or "problematic" suddenly seem like words, vapour.

That's the bright side. The less bright side is that woke is still the air we breathe, even if it has had to retreat from some of its more ambitious forays. (Excuse the mixed metaphor.)

Two Phrases I Can't Stand

"Doing nothing is not an option."

"If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem."

It seems to me that progressives have one imperative: change. Change for its own sake. The ideas that continuity and tradition are good in themselves seem alien to them.

And they never seem to entertain the idea that some "problems" might really be just permanent features of human nature and by-products of freedom.

What I really dislike about those two phrases is the air of finality with which they are pronounced. Yes, doing nothing is always an option, and sometimes it's the best option. And no, not being a part of the supposed solution (and how do you know it's the solution?) doesn't necessarily make you part of a problem. I would say it doesn't make you a part of the problem in most cases.

And also, you can turn the clock back.

Joyful, Sorrowful, Glorious, Luminous...Hopeful?

For centuries, we had the standard fifteen Mysteries of the Rosary: Joyful, Sorrowful, and Glorious. I remember being taught these by an old nun in Catholic school. (Most of the religious education in that school was pop psychology and inspirational feature films, so this was a real exception.)

Then, in 2002, St. John Paul II introduced the Luminous Mysteries of the Rosary, and suggested they be prayed every Thursday. I follow this practice myself.

Today I learned about the Hopeful Mysteries of the Rosary, which were introduced by Bishop William Albert Wack of Pensacola–Tallahassee in 2024.

They are:

Creation
The Flood
Abraham's Sacrifice
Passover
The Immaculate Conception

I must say I'm impressed by Bishop Wack's audacity. Proposing a new set of rosary mysteries when you've been the Supreme Pontiff for over twenty years is one thing. Doing so as a relatively new and obscure bishop is another.

Still, I'm the sort of traditionalist who loves new traditions, so I'll definitely pray the Hopeful Mysteries at some stage!

My Latest Cartoon

Two Anniversaries

Today is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the day I began working in the library of University College Dublin, where I still work today.

By a complete coincidence, it's also the fifteenth anniversary of this blog. 

Why Is Excellence Always Receding?

If you borrowed and read a hundred books at complete random from the library, I imagine you'd really enjoy a small proportion of them-- maybe ten per cent.

Now say you borrowed a hundred books by the most acclaimed authors (acclaimed by some group and criterion you more or less approve of), you'd still only enjoy a small percentage of those books.

Now if you borrowed a hundred books which had been voted the hundred best books of all time, by competent judges-- you'd probably still only enjoy a small percentage of them.

I'm fascinated by this phenomenon of constantly-receding excellence.

If you listened to an album of "greatest hits" by your favourite band, you'd still only probably really love a minority of them. At least, that's been my experience.

This principle often occurs to me when I read a book of quotations. These quotations are already a sort of digest of everything that's been written or said-- the most interesting and historical quotations in history. But I still find myself really interested in only a relatively small numbers of them.

Nearly every great author, musician, artist etc. mostly produced less-than-excellent works.

Or think about the latest blockbuster movie-- presumably, everybody working on that movie has already been "pre-selected" to be at the very top of their profession, out of the vast throngs that want to act, direct, do special effects etc. But the rate of success (lasting success) of blockbusters doesn't seem any higher than any other artistic endeavour.

I suspect it works the other way, as well. If you watched a hundred movies that were considered the worst, worst, worst of all time-- you might actually enjoy about ten of them, to some extent. But I'm less sure of that.

It's as though there's some principle that we can only really enjoy about ten per cent of anything.