Special

In my late teens, I had a pointless argument with one of my friends, while sitting in a school minibus on a daytrip to learn about the geomorphology of the Surrey Hills.  Who, we debated, was the more important American singer-songwriter: Bob Dylan or Billy Joel?   Dylan, said I, because his lyrics are more meaningful.  Joel, said my friend, because he has sold more records.  That only goes to show, I said, that Joel appeals to a more popular audience, not that his songs are more important.  It goes to show, my friend said, that his songs are important to a greater number of people.  No, I insisted, for those people his songs are enjoyed along with many other songs by other artists, whereas for Dylan’s fans his songs matter more than anyone else’s ever will.  No, he replied … 

It was one way to pass the time before we arrived at our destination and observed the erosive power of a small river, when it crosses the border between heavy clay and fine sand.  Much of the soil has now been washed away, to be deposited downstream, although not quite every grain of sand. Forty years later, I have no idea whether my friend still likes the songs of Billy Joel, but I continue to listed to Bob Dylan’s music with admiration and deep appreciation.  Next month he will celebrate his eightieth birthday, and to commemorate that day, I am planning to meet up with a couple of old friends who are also life-time Dylan fans.  We will eat some nice food, drink some good wine – probably some whiskey too – and listen to our favourite songs.  There will be no pointless arguments about the relative merits of Bob versus Billy, that is for sure.

Nonetheless, when I remember the minibus debate all those years ago, it reminds me that there are two distinct sorts of method we use when we try to work out who is special: let me call them the Billy-way and the Bob-way.   The Billy-way relies on the availability of some credible quantitative data, which competent observers can measure, which allows us to create ordinal rankings of people or things according to their score in this relevant metric, for example which movie earned the highest revenues during last year.  The Bob-way relies on the judgements of a set of people who regard themselves as competent to identify some sort of quality or feature, the presence of which allows them to identify the person or thing who/which is best at some activity, for example, which movie won the Oscar for Best Film last year.  Just as in the arts, so too in sport, there is the person who scored the most points/runs/goals and there is the person who is voted by their peers as the standout player of the season.  There are two different ways – Billy-ways and Bob-ways – to be special.

Compared to when I was a teenager, it seems as if there are now a lot more special people.  First, because we measure so many things, which means that we have lots of new opportunities for scoring and ranking; and second because many more people think they have the skill of judging good qualities.  As well as the person who sold the most records or books, there is the person whose work was downloaded most, streamed most, cited most, liked most, followed most, and re-tweeted most.  Not only that, but every form of activity is now broken up into numerous sub-categories: there is the person who sold the most records or books, but there is also the person who sold the most jazz, rap, classical, soul, hop-hop, Latin, and indie music; and the person who sold the most fiction, non-fiction, science fiction, poetry, cookery, crime, and business books.  There are endless lists and sub-lists, and for some people, I suppose it matters that they were the ninth most cited person in the Journal of Online Endless Lists, up from seventeenth place last year.

As well as the Nobel Prize for Literature (awarded in 2016, I note, to Bob not Billy) there are in the UK the Booker, the Costa, the Ondaatje, the James Tait Black Memorial (for biography), the Gold Dagger (for crime fiction), the T S Eliot (for poetry) the Orwell (for writing on politics), the Commonwealth Short Story (guess), and many, many others.  In the US, there are Pulitzer Prizes in several categories, National Book Awards, PEN awards, plus prizes named after Wallace Stevens, Sherwood Anderson, Scott Moncrieff, and Edgar Allen Poe.   There is a page on Wikipedia listing literary awards by language, region, country, genre, and awards for translations.  It is a long page.  Is there a prize for the author who has won the most prizes?  Perhaps, there should be.  As in literature, so too in the other arts and in sports: prizes and awards are numerous.  The trend has now caught on among professional bodies and membership organizations. There is an actuary of the year prize, an award for the best estate agent specialising in converted barns, another for the most impressive rural bus driver under forty-five, and a lifetime award for services to the cement industry.  Today, within every field of human endeavour awards proliferate: there might even be a prize for the Diagnostician of the Year for Lumbar, Arteries and Nerves. 

Whether we assess a person’s performance quantitively or qualitatively, there is growing pressure to confer prizes to signal that in this field of activity, or this sub-field, or this sub-sub-field, this person is rather special.  Sometimes there is no award, just the list itself: the thirty-seven most influential people working on the application of machine learning to poker tournaments; the forty-three under 40s to watch in tea-towel design; the top seven people making cat videos on Esperanto-speaking social media sites.   If I discovered that there was soon to be announced a list of the top twenty-three people writing personal essays on diverse topics in ethics and the pursuit of wisdom, published on English language websites, I would of course be greatly disappointed if my name were not included.  We all want to be special.

I have been reading a newly published biography of Charles V, the Habsburg Emperor who governed more of Europe than any other single individual since the Roman Empire.  In January 1515, a month before his fifteenth birthday, Charles was granted his majority and thereby freed from guardianship, by his grandfather.  To celebrate, he instructed his officials in the Netherlands, where he lived, that from now on he should be referred to thus: By the grace of God prince of Spain, of Sicily and Naples, of Jerusalem, etc; archduke of Austria; duke of Burgundy, Lorraine, Brabant, Styria, Carinthia, Carniola, Limburg, Luxembourg and Gelderland; Count of Flanders, Habsburg, Tyrol, Artois, Burgundy and Hainault; landgrave of Alsace; prince of Swabia; marquis of Burgau, Holland, Zealand, Ferrette, Kyburg, Namur and Zutphen; lord of Friesland, Sclavonia, Portenau, Salins and Mechelen.  I imagine he needed quite a large business card.

There have always been those who thought that what matters most is the sort of person you are, rather than the list of titles before or after your name.  In The Lusiads, by Luíz Vaz de Camões – published in 1572, fourteen years after Charles V’s death, but which tells the story of Vasco de Gama’s voyage from Portugal to India, which occurred two years before Charles’s birth – the author makes clear that de Gama was a man to be admired for his character rather than his media profile.  At the close of Canto VI, he writes: So the heart develops a callous / Honourable contempt for titles / And wealth, rank, and money, which Destiny / Counterfeits, but is never Virtue’s way.   This might have been pure rhetoric – celebrating de Gama’s greatness by reporting on his affectation for modesty – but the verses do speak of an important truth, that what makes someone special is their character not their ranking. 

For which reason, we can only be truly special to our friends, to those who know us well.  I listen to and enjoy Dylan’s music, but I have never met him and have no sense of him as a person.  He has made use of various media persona, over the years, but I doubt that any of them are the real man.  Only his close friends will know what he is like, and what makes him special to them.  And what is true of him is true of all of us, that whatever lists we have been named on, whatever prizes we have won, whatever titles follow our names, these tell us nothing of importance about who we are.  I would rather be well regarded by my friends than to be the recipient of any award, or find myself at the top of any list, or to be called prince, archduke, duke, count, landgrave, marquis, or lord of anywhere.  For whether they are supported by measurement or by judgement, all claims to be special are specious. 

I am therefore delighted, no I am honoured, no I am humbled to announce that this month I have been named on the only list that matters.  It is not an actual list, more a conceptual one, not least because it would be impossible to compile it before it becomes out of date.  It is the list of the eight billion most important people in the world today, all of whom are special to their friends and none of whom is special in any other way at all.