Too cool for school

A very smart friend of mine once told me that one of contemporary western society's major ills is the valorisation of cool. By this, he meant (don't worry, I had to ask him too) that being cool is one of the things people strive for. Whereas, previously, people might have sought to cultivate thrift, nobility, charity, manners -- that peculiar 'virtue' of the Victorian Era -- moral rectitude or, dare I say it, godliness, today, cool is what many of us are after.

As I've reflected on my friend's statement, and on my life and the lives of those around me, I've become convinced he is on to something. I haven't thought much about the particular shape of our cool-lust (see my last post on neologisms :-]) or about what drives it, though I think the ubiquity of visual images must be one important driver. (Think 2 to 3 TVs per household, kids walking around glued to their portable DVD players, digital cameras that enable us to take hundreds of pictures in a single hour, iphones that produce an array of images at the press of small buttons.)

The following excerpt from Jonathon Franzen's The Corrections puts its finger on this pursuit of cool, and, on its perhaps more insidious older sibling, the 'pursuit of feeling extraordinary':

Gary wanted to enjoy being a man of wealth and leisure, but the country was making it none too easy. All around him, millions of newly minted American millionaires were engaged in the identical pursuit of feeling extraordinary -- of buying the perfect Victorian, of skiing the virgin slope, of knowing the chef personally, of locating the beach that had no footprints. There werer further tens of millions of young Americans who didn't have the money but were nonetheless chasing the Perfect Cool. And meanwhile the sad truth was tht not everyone could be extraordinary, not everyone could be extremely cool; because whom would this leave to be ordinary? Who would perform the thankless work of being comparatively uncool? (p. 197)