Interrogations

By Ophelia Benson

An eclectic, literary challenge to everyday thinking.

Number Twelve: Mere

A single word, even a mere monosyllable, can often convey more than seems possible. Yes or no, for example.

'Mere' is one. If we call something mere, that can be a mechanism for making ourselves feel puffed up: more important, special, significant, valuable; for providing ourselves with an opportunity to feel superior. What I do is not mere, what I do is interesting, complex, profound, subtle, sophisticated. What those other people over there do is mere.

This is a highly unattractive maneuver. We've all seen people do it (and sneered or flinched or frowned, and probably felt superior), we've all done it ourselves. Sometimes we catch ourselves, and laugh and (if there are witnesses) acknowledge and mock the fault; sometimes we don't. Jane Austen's novels are packed with characters whose entire lives are centered on saying mere, and often for the worst possible reasons. Thorstein Veblen wrote a well-known book about people using money and the spending of it to say mere. The idea of saying mere is well entrenched in economics and sociology, in thoughts about positional goods, status, keeping up with someone or other. Much advertising and consumption and hence much of the economy is based on saying mere. People who drive BMWs get to think mere of all the poor drones driving Hondas and Fords. People who drive SUVs the size of a small house get to think mere of everyone driving one merely the size of a shed.

But however invidious and repellent it can be, and however people misattribute mereness, the idea behind it can be a useful motivator too. If we think some things are mere and we want the things that are not mere, we're always at liberty to decide for ourselves which things are mere. The self-congratulation and self-puffing-up may be only a minor, manageable side effect.

We can decide for instance that money and position themselves are the very things that are mere. We don't care about that dross, that mess of pottage, we're after bigger game. We look higher. Making the world a better place, making discoveries, conveying discoveries to others, creating beauty. Mere is a flexible word, and it is always possible for the people driving small old battered cars, not to mention the people walking or biking or taking the bus, to call the people in SUVs mere, too. Mere money-mad philistines, for example, mere polluters, wasters of resources, menaces to pedestrian safety, blots on the landscape, mere deluded materialists who can't think of any better way to spend their money or any more genuinely impressive way to show off. They are the mere ones, and we seekers of higher things look down on them.

So these nasty little power-moves, these sortings and arrangings and rankings, these decisions about position and hierarchy and worth and status - however invidious they are, they can be useful, too. From the point of view of economists, manufacturers, shopkeepers, of course, they're highly useful in keeping things ticking over. But they can be useful from a slightly less grubby, worm's eye view, as well. They are in fact probably inseparable from making the kinds of choices one has to make in order to live a good life, do the right thing, be a decent person. It is difficult if not flat impossible to separate the desirable, the indispensable activity of critical thinking, judgment, evaluation, from the traps of self-congratulation, self-admiration, feelings of superiority. We have to make decisions all the time about morality, ethics, aesthetics, accuracy, truth, justice, fairness, utility. It's hard to make such decisions without thinking we are right; it's hard to think we are right without thinking people who don't agree are wrong; it's hard not to think people who have it wrong are mere. It's this very quandary that leads so many people to see judgment as an invidious activity and avoid it as much as possible, but that system breaks down as soon as choices that really matter have to be made.

It's interesting that a word, concept, way of thinking, attitude, stance can be so equivocal, so double-edged. So necessary and fundamental for most of our actions and decisions and choices, and the source of reform, learning, invention, creation, discovery, forward motion; and also the source of much of our worst behavior, and of resentments and heart-burnings and rage, quarrels and brawls and estrangements, even murders and wars and genocides.

Wanting to escape the condition of being mere can inspire heroism, self-sacrifice, technical breakthroughs, research; equally it can motivate one-eyed money-grubbing and all the lying, cheating, customer-tricking and worker-exploiting that can go with that. Adolf Eichmann wanted not to be a mere salesman, a mere bureaucrat, a mere minor Party functionary; he was elated to have such a big, important job, and that's why he facilitated the killing of millions of Jews. Tiny, petty desires not to be mere can set in motion cataclysmic effects.

Well, there is no help for it. Like so much else in human life, there is no good or final answer, all we can do is keep negotiating, navigating between the two until our lifeless hand falls from the wheel, trying to judge and decide and choose well without humilating other people, trying to have goals and desires and lives we can respect without being preening condescending prats. It's never a mere doddle.

Ophelia Benson is editor of Butterflies and Wheels - http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com.

She can be emailed here.

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Interrogations will next be updated early May 2003

Previous Interrogations

1. Self and Internet
2. Perfection Isn't
3. Homo Quaerens
4. Showtime
5. Thinking Makes It So
6. Who's In There?
7. Gustave and Dawn
8. Sense and Sentimentality
9. Mind the gap
10. Weave a Net to Catch the Wind
11. Done and Not Done

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