In our vulgar day there are people who are famous for nothing other than being famous. They allow cameras to follow them about daily to record their own personal reality. Their life, en camera, is a reality they shape by their own voice overs. To be in their reality, people have to sign a release or waiver. There is nothing actual in this reality, though it is all too real.
We should not care too much about this perverse reality, beyond telling our children not to imitate the inane. However, there is a loss to our culture in it all. We have lost greatness.
Celebrity and fame are not greatness. The Biblical writers say if we do something to gain applause or reward we may reap that harvest but that is all we will gain.
So, today, three days prior to Christmas Day, 2011, we stop to say what is greatness, since mere fame is not greatness, or even goodness, and may be a millstone tied around the neck, fine for ballast but lacking in bouyancy.
What is greatness? Let us say what may lead to greatness.
Greatness requires change. To be great one has to progress, to develop. Churchill was a failed student, a falling star, until posted to the Punjab, where he spent long hours reading, committing passages from Gibbons and McCaulay to memory. He changed. FDR was a foppish dilletante until the rigors of polio stranded him. He became an empathetic giant from the half-height of a wheel-chair. He changed.
Greatness is a journey. Progress needs a process. The process is the journey. Abraham left Ur with his father. Then he outdistanced his father's vision and his travels. Abraham's Biblical journey, through a wet-land later malformed by ecological disasters into a desert, Abraham walked out with Yahweh God. We get more information about his journey's end than about his journey, which is unfortunate. With the Moses story, the Jewish writers correct this error. They tell us all about the trip itself, Exodus, even giving us intimate details of preparation. We would do well to know about what Abraham had to do along the way. He seems a better leader than Moses, even replete with all his half-lies and pagan customs.
There is the journey to greatness, then. Abraham might have been a great man in Ur but he would not have been the man of God he grew to be on the way. He was a utilitarian pragmatist, which may explain why God made him wait so long for an heir. His journey was spiritual, not just physical.
Greatness is true, though it may have less of fact than legend, or myth. Myth is deeper truth. All of human truth is mythological, though small thinkers, like preachers and scientists, insist on mere verifiable fact. By deeper truth, we mean more than commercial prattle. Ritual worship is theoretical, just as is the hypothesis that all things can be proven by repetition.
Tragedy is a part of greatness. Abraham's descendants wipe out entire cultures, send whole civilizations into exile, enter exile themselves, repeatedly, then are almost wiped out entirely, themsselves, long after men have become "civilized." If tragedy is what the Greeks told us, ill omens pre-ordained by personal shortcomings, then the disaster of the seed of Abraham tells us how tragedy molds a people into something other than their shortcomings. Tragedy is a part of greatness.
Change, the journey, deeper truth, tragedy; none of these have anything to do with meager fame. Greatness is a cultural need. Celebrity? Well, not so much.
Opinions expressed here are mine alone.
Opinions expressed here are mine alone.
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