Early in The Hobbit, J. R. R. Tolkien mentions that the Baggins family was so respectable that you knew what a member would say on a given subject without the troubling of asking them. He meant that they were hopelessly conventional, and, despite his own conservatism, Tolkien leaves no doubt that Bilbo Baggins became a better person for having adventures and becoming an eccentric. I’ve been thinking about this comment a lot lately, because recently I’ve been feeling like I’m surrounded by the members of the Baggins family.
The specific trigger for this feeling was an effort to get back in touch with someone last week. I was reasonably certain I wouldn’t get a reply, but every once in a while, a Baggins does go off and have an adventure, so I tried anyway. Call it an act of cynicism, or a gesture of faith – you wouldn’t be wrong either way – but I was right.
Since then, I’ve had half a dozen other incidents in which people acted in the most predicable way imaginable. Maybe I’m just too observant for my own good, but I find this predictability disappointing. When, I keep wondering, are people going to stop acting like characters out of a movie or book, and start acting like people?
You know what I mean. I’m talking about the people who, if you know one of their opinions on social issues, you know most of the others ones. The people whose greatest wish is to be married – not because they’ve found someone special, but because all their friends are getting married or they’re afraid of the sound of their own thoughts when they’re alone. The ones who never rebel, or the ones who rebel by getting a tattoo or body-piercing just like millions of others. The women who see all men as predators, the men who see all women as prey. The businessmen and women who underpay employees but set up carefully selected charities so they can live with themselves. All the millions of reconditioned Victorians with their secondhand hypocrisies and emotions who cry at nationally declared tragedies that didn’t affect them or theirs and put flowers and plush toys on the roadside shrines for strangers, but won’t stop to help someone with a flat tire or give a dollar to someone begging on the streets.
What I really want to know is: Does everybody have to be such a walking cliche?
I don’t know if people are getting worse, or I’m simply observing more as I get older. Remembering Oscar Wilde’s comment that there was no fog on the Thames until artists painted it, I have a theory
(I always have a theory)
that people are taking their role models from the thousands of hours of sitcoms and reality shows that they watch.
That insight first struck me when I read a decade ago about a man who hired a hitman to go after his girlfriend. At the time, I wondered: Had he ever thought of talking to her? Or just leaving?
But, increasingly, I seem to run into people who act as if they are in a TV show scripted by a derivative hack.
It’s easier, I guess, than thinking for yourself.
The thought that people are basing their lives on bad art is depressing enough. Yet the real nightmarish thought is that maybe people aren’t capable of better.
What if they aren’t simply failing to live up to potential? What if they are living up to their potential, and the mediocrity of a bureaucrat refusing to bend the rules out of compassion or the petty mendacities of people who don’t have the decency to breakup with their lovers face to face are really the best that the average human can do?
If I truly believed that for more than a few seconds, then I would know what despair was all about.
So far, I still cling somehow to the belief that people are better than they let themselves be, that people could be foresighted, decent, and courageous if they chose to be, that people really could surprise me and shatter my gloomy cynicism. But, with all the petty daily betrayals of themselves, I have an increasing sympathy for Cassandra.
You remember Cassandra. The Trojan princess to whom Apollo gave the gift of prophecy, then cursed her so she would never be believed? When I predict how people will act based on my experience and knowledge of convention, I get the same dubious stares she must have endured. And, like Cassandra, I am just as tired of being right as I am of being doubted.
Sometimes, I almost feel like standing on the street corner and shouting, “Come on, people! Surprise me, just once! Prove me wrong!”
But, like Cassandra, I’d only get blank stares if I did. Apparently most people haven’t read The Hobbit. Or, if they have, they were cheering for the Bagginses instead of Bilbo.
Off the Wall 