Novelty And Frivolity
By DONALD DeMARCO
Novelty is a momentary release from boredom. In the words of British writer John Wyndham, “novelty is a wonderfully short-lived thing.” We cannot build a life on novelty or bequeath it to our descendants. Yet, it can have an intoxicating effect on us and therefore it is something that is ardently desired.
American historian Shelby Foote knew something of this effect when he remarked that “Of all the passions of mankind, the love of novelty most rules the mind. In search of this, from realm to realm we roam. Our fleets come loaded with every folly home.”
Beauty, truth, justice, and other attributes of being that belong to the gallery of great ideas cannot be determined either by the clock or by the calendar. They are eternal verities. Fashion lends novelty its fragile grace and endows it with fleeting popularity. Novelty entertains us for the moment but soon surrenders itself to another form of novelty. Each novelty comes with an expiration date.
For C.S. Lewis, who was more interested in values that survived the test of time, “All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.” Therefore, newness is not a virtue.
For Pastor John Stephen Piper, Lewis’ notion had a powerful impact on him. It “freed me,” he wrote, “from the tyranny of novelty and opened for me the wisdom of the ages.” Novelty can obscure our appreciation for greater and more lasting things. It is bait that distracts us from more important things.
The Ecclesiastes writer tells us that “There is nothing new under the sun” (1:9). On earth, which is to say, apart from God, everything that comes into being is a repetition that had its origin in the past and will be repeated in the future. There is a certain folly, therefore, in thinking that one can produce something that has never appeared before. It belongs to human pride for a person to believe that he can say something of any value that has never been said before.
Nonetheless, there is a prize for saying something novel that seemingly has value. The prize is the bubble reputation. If an academic can come up with something entirely novel, he will stand apart from his peers, gain media attention, and don the mantle of fame. But the sheer effort to bring about novelty often ends in frivolity, or worse.
Let us consider “postgenderism,” a recent contribution from the feverish minds of academics who are determined to say something new. George Dvorsky and James Hughes, Ph.D., have written a white paper entitled, “Postgenderism: Beyond the Gender Binary.” The authors contend that “the erosion of binary gender will be liberatory.” That is to say, that by doing away with the traditional notion that there are two sexes, male and female, people would become free to rise above sex limitations and fulfill their potential on a higher level.
Some may regard such a view as more inhibiting than liberating. It would be like saying that if we cut off our legs we could jump higher.
Dvorsky and Hughes are utopianists who believe that if there are no sexes there would be no patriarchy, no sex discrimination, no sexual harassment, and no unequal pay. Being male or female is considered not part of one’s identity, but a limitation that must be overcome by technology. After all, as the authors state, “gender is an arbitrary and unnecessary limitation on human potential, and [they] foresee the elimination of involuntary biological and psychological gendering in the human species through the application of neurotechnology, biotechnology and reproductive technologies.”
The authors close their lengthy paper by looking “Toward a Postgender Future”: “Postgenderism,” they conclude, “is a radical interpretation of the feminist critique of patriarchy and gender, and the genderqueer critique of the way that binary gender constrains individual potential and our capacity to communicate with and understand other people.”
This would be the logical end of Romeo and Juliet. In fact, all of previous literature would become not only outdated, but unintelligible. Consequently, it is difficult to believe that “postgenderism” would improve human-to-human communication.
In a Christian context, there is an important place not for novelty but for the “new man.” In his meditations on the life of Christ — The Lord — Msgr. Romano Guardini writes: “The Christian is a battlefield on which the struggle constantly rages between the ‘old man,’ rooted in his rebellious self, and the ‘new man,’ born of Christ.”
Here, Guardini is expanding on the words of St. Paul: “It is no longer I that live, but Christ lives in me” (Gal. 2:20). How profoundly different is the Christian life as compared with a life that is merely human. They are poles apart! It is one of the objectives of the secular world to rob the Christian of his awareness of this profound difference.
C.S. Lewis compared the difference between the “old man” and the “new man” with the Greek words Bios (biological life) and Zoe (the spiritual life that is in God). For Lewis, “A man who changed from having Bios to having Zoe would have gone through as big a change as a statue which changed from being a carved stone to being a real man.”
The quixotic search for novelty, especially when mechanical means are employed as a way of improving the human being, ends either in frivolity or in sheer nonsense. The Christian, however, can become a new man by putting on Christ.
As Christians fail to become true Christians, the world attempts to improve man not through divine grace but through technology. This effort is doomed for two reasons: 1) because it completely ignores man’s spiritual dimension; 2) because it devalues his bodily dimension which is also an essential part of his identity. The Christian will flourish only by becoming more Christ-like.
(Dr. Donald DeMarco is professor emeritus, St. Jerome’s University, and an adjunct professor, Holy Apostles College. He is a regular columnist for St. Austin Review. His latest book, Apostles of the Culture of Life, is posted on amazon.com.)
