YESTERDAY A READER COMMENTED on reddit that a post of mine was not precisely new. The reader was probably right about that.
The context was another comment that said it was new, so the reply was appropriate, as well, but it got me to thinking about a larger question.
What makes a post worth posting, an idea worth mentioning, a thought worth mulling over publicly?
I've often heard criticisms of books or articles based on the fact that they were not new, but is that really a criteria we want to use?
I suspect that it isn't, for the following reasons:
- Newness doesn't imply truth.
New ideas are often wrong. I'm not sure whether I could make a case that they are more often wrong than old ideas—they probably aren't.
But nevertheless, newness does not, in itself, lend an idea any merit. - Newness doesn't imply relevance.
We don't find ideas valuable just because they are true, but also because they are useful.
For this reason, an article on the prevalence of silicon in one region of the planet Mars would not find a place in the daily mull—unless, of course, it turned out that there was some sort of practical implication for readers.
It might very well, however, find a place in a journal read by scientists who study silicon, or Mars, because it would be relevant to them.
But in the end it would not matter to either readership whether the information came from the latest Mars expedition or had been known for years. - Newness does not imply importance.
There are plenty of ideas floating around that are both true and relevant, but not all that important. It is very true, and very relevant, that we require oxygen to breathe, but since there seems to be no shortage of oxygen at the moment, we don't spend a lot of time thinking about it. - Newness does imply one important element—the probability that an idea is not well known.
This can be a significant issue. It might well be worth talking about our dependence on oxygen if most readers hadn't heard of it before—especially since that dependence is both true and relevant.
But newness isn't the only way that a fact or idea can relatively unknown.
Until very recently, it was relatively unknown in the U.S. (though not, I hasten to say, among readers of the daily mull) that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. Yet that information was certainly not new. - Newness can be a distraction.
When we are overly impressed with newness, we may pay attention to the novel at the expense of the true, the relevant, the important, the relatively unknown.
When we dismiss an idea because it isn't new, we may well be missing a chance to think more deeply about an important and relevant truth which we have not given enough consideration to.
What makes a post worth posting, an idea worth mentioning, a thought worth mulling over publicly?
It should be true, it should be relevant, it should be important. There should be at least a suspicion that it has not yet received enough attention.
Whether it is new should not be considered. (This is one reason that the daily quotes at the mull come from so many periods—from ancient writers to current.)
So much has been thought and said, by so many, that even a thought which is new to the author will probably not be new to all the readers.
I won't say that there is nothing new under the sun—and not just because it's been said before. But I will say that it is nearly impossible to consistently produce completely novel ideas without consistently producing trivial ideas.
Which is why you rarely find anything important or relevant in a novelty store.
At least, that's what I think today.
