Critics

I interviewed an existentialist philosopher a few weeks ago and I asked him what the meaning of his life was. What he said was simple but it stuck with me.

“That is a very difficult question. I do know one thing about human existence that many of us have forgotten. It’s the philosophical conviction that humans are creative, and many of us have forgotten that, many of us live like consumers.” (He says consumers with distaste, easing over the word.) “In a technological society, we can use readymade cloth, food, furniture, and people have forgotten that we are creative, we create our lives, we can create meanings, we can create values. We can live like an artist and not like a scientist or a consumer. That really gives meaning to my life. I wake up in the morning and I suddenly realise I am the creator of my own world, I am here to create, I am not here to imitate. That’s very important. It makes me feel more authentic. It is very important to be yourself, it is very important to be authentic, so you don’t get lost here and there.”

I keep thinking about what he said because it resonated with where I am at present. It's so easy to live as a consumer, moving from paid experience to paid experience. The 21st century has been proclaimed by a few futurists to be the Age of Entertainment, in which the majority of new jobs created will be devoted to filling the senses of consumers. But as entertainment booms as the third long, decadent wave of the Industrial Revolution, it makes consumers more than consumers. It makes critics of us all.

Amongst youngsters like me, market research (however reliable that is) has found that music has taken up where religion and class left off, as the force which most young people conceive of as the biggest impetus to their identity, and following that, their differentiation from 'the herd'. So where once we had divisions rooted in history, now we have identity rooted in choice, in the nature of our consumption of entertainment. As a Johnny-come-lately to music, I was always been amazed at how snobbish and scenelike a genre can become, until Ben of Melbs.org got me hooked on indie and soft, pleasing electronica. Now, I find an astonishing streak of snobbishness in me when I'm talking to someone about music, even though I'm still an unfashionably late adopter of new bands. Despite ushering me into the fold, Ben has remonstrated with me over this, even making me CDs containing hidden pockets of Kylie in order to make me question my snobbishness (God, Slow is a classic, innit?).

I wonder if becoming critical is destroying our creativity. Criticism is inherently weighted towards passivity and negativity. In part, this is a reflection of the massive surge in the creative industries - something has to be pretty special to break through the consensus of mediocrity. When it does, you see a rare awe dawning on the faces of gig-going hipsters, a rare lowering of the guard. On the other hand, you could argue that only by immersing yourself in the stream of culture, only by comparing and competing and appropriating can you begin to innovate. Unheralded geniuses are rare and get a lot of press to make up for the early lack.

One of my writing lecturers at uni was a bitter man. I didn't understand why he constantly namedropped film directors until I heard he always wanted to be a filmmaker but didn't get there, and ended up as a teacher and critic. My greatest fear is no longer death but mediocrity.

To veer off topic slightly, I recently read an article arguing that the reason that the latter half of the 20th century has seen no Einsteins and no Newtons (although arguably Richard Feynman counts) is that genius is far more evenly distributed and far more common. My uncle has an IQ of 150. Average IQ scores are going up about 10-15 points per generation. But that means that it's harder to become a name brand amidst a proliferation of excellence. It means that it's no longer enough to excel at one field. Now, the polymaths are celebrated - the broadest people, able to turn their hands to many trades, those capable of reinvention. Newton was a polymath, Da Vinci as well.