And here's what I have to say this week.
I've been thinking about a specific concept that humans have. It comes in many shades depending on the culture involved, but it's always esoteric. As the title of this post suggests it's "cool," or "awesome," a bevy of hippie slang, "badass," etc.
My first thought is that this is an aesthetic cultural concept, and that this is why it's hard to pin down or even translate it from person to person. But I think the specific kind of aesthetic it belongs to is the category shared by both glory and beauty. It shares traits with both of these, because it is heavily died to appearances as beauty is, but is also associated with a specific way of being as glory is.
So how is "coolness" like beauty? Both are aesthetic traits to which people aspire on a level that can approach or cross the threshold of madness. People get surgery to "fix" their face in hopes of becoming more beautiful, and some people tattoo and pierce themselves in accordance with a more "badass" aesthetic. Both of these traits are considered attractive, and both can elicit jealousy and even malice because of their social value. Anyone regardless of gender or race can be "cool," but I will say in my own experience coolness is a trait males want to embody and beauty is one females are encouraged to reflect.
There's also a connection to efficiency in movement, be it called grace or brutally mechanistic. This of course isn't the sum of beauty or "cool," but rather one shape the concept takes. When we watch a dancer, or a warrior wading through battle, we thrill in the spectacle of a work well-executed. And speaking of thrill and spectacle, it's time to talk about glory!
Glory is defined in the dictionary as "very high praise" or "honor," which is pretty close to my own sense of the word as it is understood today. Its Latin origin is the source of its sense of "magnificence," splendor, and a whole load of other words tied to the idea of good, bright things. One of the senses is tied directly to a specific glory or honor you win in battle, and demonstrates a descent into evil through resplendence. What I mean is nationalism and similar movements glorify destroying the enemy in battle. This can be tied to the spectacle of the thing, and even the beauty of movement, but often enough it can be divorced from everything but the demonstration of power that is victory.
I feel safe assuming you know of the philosophical iconoclasm that occurred in the twentieth century. We fought wars that pulled unprecedented number of combatants into Hell. People decided Nietzche was right about God being dead. I think something happened to the way we look at glory and beauty in this culture after that. Glory--with its old ties to religion--and the innocence of beauty both seemed to be lies. We started looking for new aesthetics that didn't attend to the moral spectrum.
We said, "This and this look good, even with the grit and debauchery. Because of the grit and debauchery."
That is where I think "cool" came from. Not the word itself, but the idea. I also don't think this was a movement. People didn't sit down and say, "Beauty and glory are dead, and badass is born." It was a shift in focus.
Now I'm hardly a historian of any calibre and I've got no training in sociology or whatever, this is just the synthesis of my logic and stuff I picked up during my education. But it makes sense to me.
The question now I guess is why does it matter? I don't suppose it does to most people, but I like to wrestle with ideas that trouble me, and this is one that does just that.
That's it from me for now. See you next week, possibly not on Monday because I might be visiting dear friends for much of that day. We'll see!
