Reference reading
Novelty Worship
The next idea can receive a hearing merely because the previous one has acquired a history.
Habitually treating newness or unfamiliarity as sufficient grounds for superiority, at the expense of relevant evidence or enduring value.
Imagine this: A reader tears the wrapper from a new notebook, admires its blankness, and moves on to opening another. A growing pile of unused pages records an exceptionally busy afternoon.
How the pattern works
Novelty can attract attention before it earns trust. Novelty Worship turns that initial attraction into a standard of superiority: an explanation is profound because it is unfamiliar, an old insight is exhausted because it has been understood before, and a fresh vocabulary is credited with discoveries it has merely renamed.
An intellectual or artistic culture needs experiment. New forms can disclose experiences an inherited form obscures, and settled work can be wrong. The problem is treating newness itself as sufficient reason. Evidence, expressive achievement and enduring usefulness are displaced by the date on the wrapper.
What it costs the work
Insight is abandoned before its possibilities are explored, and useful work must repeatedly introduce itself under a new name. The apparent freedom to move anywhere can become dependence on the next arrival. Those doing patient development may be dismissed as unimaginative while others keep announcing beginnings.
A distinction worth keeping
Curiosity seeks something worth discovering; Novelty Worship presumes the latest discovery worth more. Inconstancy abandons considered commitments without adequate reason, sometimes for comfort rather than novelty. Contrarianism opposes what prevails and can favor an ancient view. Neither beginning a new project nor changing one’s mind establishes any of these.
What a useful response can change
A new proposal can be asked what it explains, makes or enables that the earlier account did not. A concrete difference deserves more attention than a dramatic announcement of rupture.
An old insight can be tried in a new situation before being dismissed as familiar. Repetition sometimes makes understanding possible; recognition of the words is not exhaustion of their meaning.
A project can distinguish exploration from adoption. It is possible to investigate a new form without immediately declaring everything else obsolete, or to retain a useful older method without refusing experiment.
Questions for reflection
- What achievement am I crediting to this idea besides its arrival?
- Which older insight have I recognized without actually using?
Other perspectives
We have discarded the fixed costumes of our forefathers; every one must still dress like other people, but the fashion may change once or twice a year.
John Stuart Mill · On Liberty · Read the source
Mill contrasts changing fashion with the continuing demand to resemble others. Novelty in costume can therefore coexist with conformity in judgment.
Whatever changes may be made in the customs of society, whatever new machines we may invent, whatever new manufactures we may supply, Fine Art must remain what it was two thousand years ago, in the days of Phidias; two thousand years hence, it will be, in all its principles, and in all its great effects upon the mind of man, just the same.
John Ruskin · The Two Paths · Read the source
Ruskin’s strong claim for continuity in artistic principles supplies a countervoice to automatic novelty. The article need not accept his timeless formulation to distinguish enduring insight from mere age.