Ne laudet dignos, laudat Callistratus omnes:
cui malus est nemo, quis bonus esse potest?
- Martial
Our age is inarguably a scientific one, marked by an unparalleled degree of technological achievement. When speaking scientifically a man can recite more facts about more things than anyone ever could. See that shining dot about the horizon just before dawn? That is Venus, the second planet from the sun; its equatorial diameter is 7521 miles; it is 67.2 million miles from the sun; its period of revolution is 224.68 days. That red dot over there? It is Mars, the fourth planet; it has a diameter of 4222 miles and orbits at 141.6 million miles every 686.95 days.
But in this flurry of fact, something has been lost - meaning.
In past times it was quite the opposite: man saw meaning everywhere despite a retrospective paucity of fact. That light in the sky before the morn was still Venus, but she was the goddess of erotic love and beauty. As her path in the heavens sometimes crossed the path of Mars, it was thought she consorted with the God of War, and thus the opposites of Love and War were found in an unstable, adulterous union - while Love could tame War, War often conquered Love. Those lights in the sky were found to mean something; they had importance.
Now that we moderns swim in a sea of facts, what do we do with them? Once, one could consider facts and assign importance to them based on merit and thus arrive at meaning. I suppose we still do this, but we like to think we don’t, for this is the process of discrimination.
You winced at that word, discrimination, didn’t you? I don’t blame you. Is the word ever used anymore except in a pejorative sense? Having discriminating judgment was once a culminating accomplishment, but to discriminate now we assumed restricted by law: when discrimination is employed, we expect legal action to follow in its wake to remedy its evil; this is the place the word has fallen to.
Many may possess the vague feeling that to tell the difference between things in any manner, to discriminate, is wrong, perhaps a punishable offense. To tell what is good from what is bad, what is important from what is not, what is worthwhile from what is worthless, smacks of elitism – another word, once referring to what is best, that now shares a miserable, pejorative existence.
Where do we stand, if no longer able to discern importance and meaning, no longer able to discriminate?
In order not to praise the worthy, Callistratus praises all:
To whom no one is bad, who is able to be good?