What is greatness? My mind recoils as it spins and spins like the wheel of death on a dying Mac computer screen. It’s working really hard, but getting nowhere. It’s impossible to put a finger on how great something is because: It's all relative. I know, it's not the answer that you wanted to hear, but it's the correct answer. It's the entire answer.
The first thing we must consider in determining what is great is to decide what is something great at. For example, Barry Bonds was a great baseball player, Donald Trump is great at being rich and Tiger Woods is great at golfing. We must recognize that in order to evaluate greatness, we usually have to choose a single aspect to evaluate.
Being great at something doesn’t have to be a positive thing either. Barry Bonds is great at taking steroids, and Donald Trump is great at making a fool of himself and Tiger’s great at being unfaithful to his (now ex-) wife. When we view them in this light, we might reconsider how we define “greatness.”
This gets even more complicated though, depending on who is doing the evaluating. What is great to one person certainly does not have to be great to another. For example many people think that the Twilight book series is really great. For others, the books are among those works of “literature” Dorothy Parker was referring to when she said, “This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.”
Our minds have been shaped through our experience ever since we were born and perhaps even before then, if you believe in that sort of thing. I certainly do. We all value different things, which makes the various definitions of greatness as unique and varied as human beings are.
It blows my mind as much as Einstein’s theory of relativity does. Maybe this would make more sense if we were all going the speed of light.
I really liked how you pointed out that greatness depends on who is doing the evaluating. Also, going along with that, I like the example about Twilight, because to some it is greatness, but it just depends on the person. Good job (:
ReplyDeleteGood examples for people that are great at 2 very different things. What about the people that are just considered great? Ghandi, Martin Luther King Jr....
ReplyDeleteI' like to take what Brian said a step farther, I think there is real greatness. The trouble is people apply the word to things they shouldn't: not everything people call great actually is. Tiger Woods is a talented golfer, being a great golfer would have to mean more than that. Honestly, Stephenie Meyers books might be better called engrossing or addicting by the fans. Just because people incorrectly use the word doesn't mean that greatness is relative. I think true greatness is absolute.
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