Overlooking The Power of Superficiality

Lots of us are what might be called, "depth snobs." 

A depth snob is someone who decides that the only things that are meaningful in life are things that have been officially declared as "serious," usually by academics. Serious things require prolonged philosophical reflection. The opposite of serious is frivolous.

So, a list might look something like this:

Hamlet: serious; American Pie: frivolous

Tennessee Williams: serious; Homer Simpson: frivolous

Beethoven: serious; Lady Gaga: frivolous

Chess: serious; World of Warcraft: frivolous

You get the picture.

I was thinking about this last night after reading a section from Dave Trott's new book, Creative Mischief. When I heard about the book, I checked and it only seemed to be available in the UK. So I ordered it. Turns out it's mostly a compilation of blog posts. Well worth the price. 

One piece in particular got me thinking. It's called Form Can Be Emotional Function. You can read the whole thing here, but the operative portion wasn't by Trott, but from the diary of a Lieutenant Colonel Mervin Willett Gonin, a British colonel who was amongst the first to liberate a Nazi concentration camp in 1945. 

Here's the quote:

It took a little time to get used to seeing men, women, and children collapse as you walked by them and to restrain oneself from going to their assistance. 

One had to get used early to the idea that the individual just did not count. 

It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived, though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we men wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things: food and medical equipment, and I don’t know who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did it; it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance. I believe nothing did more for those internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the post mortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick. At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tattooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity.

Lipstick: frivolous. Right?

Here we see the potential magic, transformative power of objects. 

Judging the things others enjoy as "superficial" is commonplace among depth snobs. We never shy away from snorting haughtily about everything from other people's clothing to their entertainment choices. The air of superiority we assume when we (proudly) tell people "I never watch that kind of show" or ask, "how do people spend all that time playing Facebook games?" is a dead giveaway that we're settling into a depth snob mode.

What we fail to recognize at those moments is our species' power to connect things and meaning: a snippet of lyrics from a silly romantic song ("darling, you-oo send me..."), a stone mindlessly gathered on a beach, the aroma of a madeleine.  

The next time I'm tempted to judge the choices others make, I hope I have the wherewithal to remember this lipstick lesson: the human spirit is buoyed in a dazzling array of ways. The only thing superficial about those ways is my appreciation for humanity's creative capacity.