Tag Archives: 2001 A Space Odyssey

Varying degrees of greatness

The City of Calgary, wallowing in its greatness.

At the Stampede last week, Prime Minister Stephen Harper got up in front of his adopted hometown crowd and proclaimed Calgary the greatest city in Canada.  This being the political climate where no off-the-cuff comment goes un-deconstructed en masse (and Harper being the veteran politician who says nothing that hasn’t been poll-tested), cries of favouritism erupted from his opposition.  In my best mood on my best day I’m hard-pressed to say anything positive about the guy, but this is one instance in which critics just make themselves look silly by raising a public ruckus.  The man is standing in front of a crowd in Calgary – he’s hardly going to tell them that “well, you guys are pretty awesome but Whitehorse totally rocks my socks.”  Does anyone believe that when Bono drops the name of the city U2 is playing in he’s doing it out of a genuine conviction that his time spent in this metropolis has been the most rewarding of his life, or do they recognize that it’s merely an applause line?  I’ve been to Calgary once, for a weekend, and what I saw of it seemed very nice, as did its people, but I’m not sure that it would qualify for this ambiguous concept of greatness anymore than any other Canadian city, town or backwater burg it’s been my fortune to pass through.  The problem isn’t a lacking on Calgary’s part, it’s more a general unease about how to qualify something as great.

“Great” is a word we’ve tossed around so often that it’s become meaningless.  “What a great movie.”  “She’s such a great girl.”  “These are the greatest cookies I’ve ever tasted.”  Yet despite its overuse, the concept of greatness is one that we value greatly.  I remember reading a book in Philosophy 101 called God, the Devil and the Perfect Pizza.  I may get the details wrong – I wasn’t quite the seasoned thinker I am now (snicker) when I first ploughed through it and was distracted by the gorgeous blonde in the very short black miniskirt seated two rows ahead of me.  But the concept was basically a more plain-spoken rehash of the ontological argument that one could prove the existence of God through logic, if one accepted the premise that God was the greatest conceivable being, and that existence being a necessary component of greatness (the idea that a God who did not exist would not, in fact, be the greatest conceivable being), God must therefore exist.  Where the book has fun with this is twisting the argument around to prove by a similar method, the existence of the Devil (hypothesized as the worst conceivable being) and the greatest conceivable pizza.  I don’t think I ever quite grokked the logical twists that validated this line of thinking – I suppose if you’re religious and looking to disprove an atheist it could come in handy.  But the idea of the greatest conceivable anything stuck with me.  “Greatness,” like beauty, is so totally subjective – one man will vomit up in disgust the meal the gourmand thinks is the greatest thing he’s ever eaten – that who I picture as the greatest conceivable being will differ completely from yours, and the next guy’s, and the next guy’s after him.  (Mine might look like that blonde.  I swear, her toned legs in that black mini were a wonder to behold.)

We see this daily in the critical sphere:  endless top ten lists recounting beloved movies, music, literature, artwork, key lime pies.  Quality can be agreed on universally to a point – certainly few can put forth defensible arguments that Plan 9 from Outer Space is a better movie than 2001: A Space Odyssey.  But beyond that point lies the uncanny valley where opinion takes over and cements the final determination, as individual as the person offering it.  It’s also why people usually react badly to self-proclaimed greatness, like when folks who haven’t ventured over their county line announce that America is the greatest country in the world.  Opinions about one’s own greatness are the least valued, especially when one cannot walk the walk, as it were.  Muhammad Ali’s boasts are the stuff of sports legend, but he could back it up in the ring.  How though, do you determine the relative greatness of a more abstract concept like a city, especially if you’re predisposed to bias because you live there (or represent it in the House of Commons)?  Do you base it on hard statistics, like crime, transportation, wealth, homelessness and pollution, or on the equally abstract idea of character?  How do you say with certainty that one city’s character is better than another’s?  The people are nicer, there are more interesting restaurants, the tourist attractions are less cheesy, you can always find a place to park?  Woody Allen once observed that the primary cultural advantage of Los Angeles was the ability to turn right on a red.  It seems that any judgment on the relative greatness of anything is fated to be equally pithy, given that ultimately, the criteria used to make this determination are so esoteric as to defy classification.

Or, in English, there is no such thing as “the greatest.”  There are things that are great and things that are even greater than those first great things.  But “greatest” is forever elusive.  And that is probably great in itself, because it will force us to continue to aim for it.  Declaring oneself the greatest is admitting that not only can you go no further, you don’t even want to try.  You’re entirely satisfied.  You’re done.  And lack of ambition, of aspiration, of the dream of progress, is not a quality associated with greatness in any way.

Besides, everyone knows that the greatest city in Canada is <404 error file not found>

The future ain’t what it used to be

It’s 2012 – wondering where the flying cars are?  The way some people drive, maybe it’s not a bad thing Ford hasn’t rolled them off the production line yet.  But as a fan of science fiction from a young age, a passionate supporter of space exploration from around the same time and a gazer at the stars from long before that, I kind of expected the future to be, well, a little more futuristic.  I’d hate to think that all those classic movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey lied to me, and yet, as 2001 came and went we weren’t boldly voyaging to Jupiter and beyond, we were mired in terrestrial disputes, our feet welded to the ground by political infighting, war, terrorism and relentless media-induced fear.  The words of Robert F. Kennedy come to mind:  “Some men look at things the way they are and say why; I dream of things that never were and say why not?”  Somewhere along the line we, collectively, stopped dreaming of things that never were and became coddled by advances in technology that heighten only the convenience of life, not its quality.  Probably the greatest step forward in the last ten years has been anything produced by Apple, and yet, really, a portable Justin Bieber catalogue isn’t exactly the sort of thing Jules Verne would have envisioned as a quantum leap.  We still get from place to place, basically, on 19th Century engines – they are faster and sleeker but the principle is the same one that propelled your great-grandfather’s old jalopy down Main Street when it was a dirt road with horse hitching posts along the sidewalks.  As Leo McGarry opined on The West Wing, “where’s my jetpack?”  Forget that – I want my damn Back to the Future Part II Mattel hoverboard.

I laud the advances we’ve achieved in communication, this forum being one of them.  What concerns me is that we are moving towards a point in our existence where we may have very little of substance to communicate about.  Human beings are needy creatures – we are forever craving stimulation to make us productive.  From adversity comes advancement.  But what happens when life is so easy, so crammed with distraction, that challenge is all but forgotten?  Look at the difference in a little over half a century – after Pearl Harbor, Americans banded together to enlist, volunteer, ration, buy bonds, collect scrap metal, anything that could be done to assist in the war effort.  Contrast that to the post-9/11 era where the President told his people that the best thing they could do to help their country was to go shopping.  Rosie the Riveter?  Nope, Penny the Power Purchaser.  And why?  Because it’s easier.  It’s yet another distraction, an erosion of altruism for self-interest über alles.  Surrounded by distractions, we do not think.  We forget about the whole and focus on the pleasure of the one.  These mass-produced trinkets are fun, but they fill the one empty space that should be uniquely our own – our imagination.  They saturate it so completely that we don’t think we are lacking for anything anymore, and thus, we are no longer compelled to create.

I am a victim of this myself.  When I was first living on my own, I had only an old computer with no Internet capability, let alone access.  I wrote constantly, generating screenplay after screenplay, thousands of pages of would-be novels.  Without distraction, I could focus on creation.  Then one day I decided to buy a Nintendo 64.  And who wanted to stare at a blank screen and flashing cursor anymore when there were so many goombas for Mario to jump on and so many princesses to save from castle dungeons?  My imagination took a huge hit and I don’t think it has ever completely recovered.  To this day I prefer surfing through a few favourite sites and catching up on the latest show business news over writing something of my own nine times out of ten.  I’ve been prolific here lately because I’m really forcing myself.  But it’s not easy.  The lethargic soul is a persistent enemy forever at the gates.  And he seems tragically immortal.

Primitive computers with barely the memory of today’s pocket calculator helped land men on the moon and return them safely to Earth.  That was in 1969.  2001: A Space Odyssey came out a year earlier, and given the pace at which things were happening then, it seemed a reasonable prediction - barring the unforeseen bankruptcy of Pan Am – of what our lives could be like as the 21st Century dawned.  Instead, HAL 9000 is the iPhone 4S, and the moon seems further away than ever.  But goshdarnit all, I’ve got 100,000 songs in a little gizmo a third the size of my wallet.  Is this what RFK had in mind when he was dreaming of things that never were?  Is this what Stanley Kubrick expected?  Is this what Aristotle, Copernicus, Leonardo or Galileo would have wanted?  Full seasons of Fear Factor streaming to my HDTV on Netflix?  Snooki with a million Twitter followers?

The capacity of what humanity can do with imagination and hard work is limitless.  But we have to force ourselves to look up from the screen and back at the stars again.  Because although they’ll be there forever, we won’t be, and I’d rather not see the ability to download Jackass 3-D at lightspeed as our civilization’s greatest lasting legacy.