Contemplating Humbleness

It's a trait we do well to cultivate

Yesterday I read an article in a literary journal that really got under my skin. I was bothered by it while I was reading it. Now, a full day later, I’m still bothered with it. Because the writer portrayed herself as somehow better than the great mass of humanity.

Photo by William Farlow on Unsplash

I fear that she doesn’t have the sense to realize that if you have to tell people that you are somehow an elite individual, you aren’t in fact an elite individual.

Anyway, her essay started out by informing her lowly readers about her elite university education (does anyone who has seen the goings on at places like Harvard over the past couple of years actually believe those ivies to be elite any longer?) and then launched into her premise that the vast majority of her countrymen are idiots, and working hard to increase their level of idiocy each and every day.

In her view, it all comes down to what her fellow Americans read.

You see, we could do as she does and read novels that make us smarter. She called out some Russian novelists here as examples of those writers we should be reading.

But we don’t follow her fine example. Instead we read trash novels that make us even dumber than we already are. She particularly calls out Romance novels, with a special mention of smutty Romance novels. (She seems to really like the word ‘smutty’ for some reason, and uses it a lot in her commentary, so I’m following her lead here.)

Me? Well, I don’t read Romance novels.¹ Melinda does though, tame ones as far as I can tell. Her grandmother used to go for the smutty ones though. This I know, because once in a while I was the guy who had to go to the library and pick them up for her.

But I do read loads and loads of the stuff the literary journal writer would term trash. Fantasy, and Westerns, and Horror oh my! I don’t think of them as trash though rather I think of them as pulp fiction (not the movie darn it, we’re talking lowbrow literature here!) and great entertainment.

I’ve read my fair share of those classic Russian novels to. I’ve found them to be quite good, the folks from the land of Putin can write. Sometimes they can get mighty long for an American audience though.

Anyway, I’m getting way too far from her point here.

Her point was that all of us, the great masses of humanity, are idiots from the start, but then we read this trash and it serves to make us even more idiotic than we were before.

It’s all a big downward spiral you see. Here in the Bailey house we were already morons, but then we read something from Dean Koontz and we get just a little bit dumber than we were before it. Next, who knows, something from Piers Anthony, well there goes a bit more of our ability to reason. Throw some Louis L’amour on top and heck we just might be out back swinging from the trees. Maybe the neighbors will throw us some peanuts and bananas once in awhile.

But, as mentioned above, I do read the ‘serious stuff’ once in awhile. The literary stuff. Heck, I really enjoy reading The New Yorker. So, I’m not sure how that messes up the whole downward spiral into complete idiocy thing.

Honestly, the woman’s premise is more than a little bit nuts.

Frankly, I’m shocked that she actually found a rag willing to publish her rambling egotistical rant.

Sure, we can read to be enlightened. That is in my view a very good thing.

But we can also read to be entertained. And that is a very good thing as well.

I think it pretty clear that our Freemasonic teachings would encourage us to strike a balance between these two reading goals. Indeed, I seem to recall equilibrium or balance to be the Royal Secret.

And certainly reading genre pulp fiction for entertainment won’t make us stupid. No matter what the chick who went to an overpriced university might claim.

Indeed, didn’t Anais Nin and Henry Miller, two literary giants, partner up in order to write pornography for cash so that they could support their serious writing? It didn’t seem to turn them into drooling morons.

I feel I must also mention, given that the article was so concerned with smutty Romance novels turning Americans into idiots, that I believe, without any doubt, that Pauline Reage (pen name) crafted one of the very finest literary achievements in human history with the publication of her novel in the middle of the last century. It wasn’t a Romance, but it was plenty smutty.

I’ve written this essay, thus far, in perhaps a playful way.

But I hope that doesn’t detract from the seriousness of it.

And indeed, while the commentary that has me so fired up was about books, the attitudes portrayed stray far from the confines of literature. Indeed they are infecting every aspect of our society.

I think it is probably fair to say that our society is more divided now than at any time other than the two eras marked by the Civil War, and the Vietnam War. Civil discourse seems impossible, and factions are dug deep into their trenches.

These artificial divisions between men are the antithesis of Freemasonry.

Artificial divisions that we as Masons are called to stand against.

And they are largely fueled by this pseudo elitist nonsense.

It seems that large numbers of our institutions have been taken over by those who view the people as somehow less intelligent and less capable. Taken over by those who talk down to people instead of with people. Taken over by those who believe that they can lie with impunity because the people won’t remember their lies.

The people like this in education, media, government, and other institutions aren’t somehow elite. Indeed their claims to be such stand as proof that they are not.

But people rebel, rightly rebel, against those claims. All the division tearing our society apart, well a lot of the blame for it can be laid squarely at the feet of those at the top of our formerly respected institutions who talk down to and lie to those they supposedly serve.

The flex isn’t in telling someone that you went to MIT.

The flex is in being humble, speaking and dealing with everyone On The Level.

Someone else will tell them that you went to MIT. That’s the real flex.

And this has implications in our Lodges as well. If we open our eyes to see them.

1. OK, I’m lying to you here, sort of. You see, the other day I started reading the first Romance novel of my life. But it is Dark Romance. The story, as I’ve gotten it figured out so far is that our heroine has been kidnapped and marked for torture and death by the friendly neighborhood serial killer. But, they are slowly starting to feel the first pulls of love.

Now, I do know how the book will end, because every genre of fiction has its rules, and the rules for Romance are very clear and very firm. Even Dark Romance. You see, for a book to be classified as a Romance novel, it must have a ‘happily ever after’ ending. If it doesn’t have that, it isn’t by definition a Romance novel. So the only real question in my mind is what form the HEA will take. Will she join our friendly neighborhood Ted Bundy wannabe as his accomplice? Or will they fall madly in love and he murders her when they are at the height of passion? That would count as an HEA by the way, the ‘ever after’ would just be short.