I’ll spare you the details of this particularly nonsensical dinnertime debate. But, in short, what happened was that — over fried-chicken sandwiches he had cooked himself following a recipe from TikTok that re-creates a menu item at a chain restaurant called Raising Cane — it transpired that I wanted him to pronounce the word “paprika” as I pronounce it myself, with the accent on the first syllable (“pap”), while he wanted to pronounce it as everyone does on the internet, with the accent on the second syllable (“reek”).
This turned into a rumble, the Sharks versus the Jets — both of us snapping our fingers down by our knees, Bob Fosse-style (not really!) — about whether it was better or worse that regional accents have disappeared. And that turned into a duel over whether or not we should be happy that teenagers the world over are now performing the same dances — dabbing, doing the “woah” or the Renegade, or I’m not sure what — rather than doing dances unique and particular to their own small village or their own city block.
Advice: Don’t try to tell a 16-year-old anything.
I keep asserting this same point in my “Shipwreck Rose” columns, but I say, again, how strange it is to be the generation straddling the analog-to-digital gulf. We in Gen X and the Boomers remember life as it was before Canva made our bake-sale posters for us with impeccably generic good taste. I remember. Do you remember? I certainly do! The mess and the humanity.
In my 20s, I lived in Budapest. This was circa 1993 to 1995, when I was a bit of a wandering beatnik, head in the clouds, nose in a book. I was what they used to call a Bluestocking, but an aging punk, one a bit too old to have a hole in my black, opaque 1990s tights over either heel. It was in this period of my life, as I strolled aimlessly beneath the blooming chestnut trees, pausing on the path in Margit-Sziget park to thrust my face into the passing purple lilac bushes (side by side with an ambling Central European young man in a handknit scarf and blazer with the collar turned up against the sweet breeze blowing off Lake Balaton), that I had my One Big Idea.
My One Big Idea — and I think the decades since have proven me right, right, right — is that while, sure, I get it, there are no universal truths and it’s a mistake to be certain of anything, there is one solid and true exception, one universal truth. And that one solid and true exception, the one universal truth, is that multiplicity is good. Variety is good. Homogeneity is bad.
The catchword of the moment, in 1993 and 1994, when I was young and lived in Budapest, was “globalization.” International businesses were coming to Hungary. A second McDonald’s had opened by the Nyugati Railway Station and the red-and-white awnings of Kentucky Fried Chicken franchises were popping up like a rash across the city, the culinary measles virus. The year I had my satori, my One Big Idea, was 1993: Any force that wipes out variety and multiplicity is a bad force. (You might not say evil, but I would.) It suddenly became clear to me that the reason this “globalization” thing felt so wrong, on a human level, was because wiping out variety and multiplicity — in any form, whatsoever, whether variety of local dialects or variety of insects in the Amazon — is never healthy. Not for any ecosystem. Monoculture is bad for the birds and the bees and it’s bad for human happiness.
And that’s why I wanted Teddy to pronounce the word “paprika” as his parents and grandparents had done before him, and not to pronounce it with the accent on the “reek” as everyone does on streaming services and social media.
We Gen X are the last generation of hand-makers. We grew up making our own punk rock T-shirts (in my case, a hand-drawn portrait of Iggy Pop’s face on a white Hanes tee), spray-painting our sneakers, and drawing inky, goofball cartoons for our rock-and-roll zines. The homogenizing power of the digital age came first for the visuals, the graphic design: One of the first things we noticed as we moved into the computer age was that the graphics on posters, in magazines, and party invitations got so much slicker, so much more professional (but homogeneously so, with tasteful trends shared across continents and the uniqueness of the human ironed out). Now, in the 2020s, the ChatGPT decade, the slickening and smoothing out has come for the written word. We are engulfed in machine-writing, and it’s not good.
What I am trying to express with this anecdote about paprika and my lost years in the cafes of Central Europe is actually a simple idea. I’m making it more complicated than it really is: The uniqueness and multiplicity of the world is its beauty.
This feeling was expressed much better in my favorite poem, “Pied Beauty” by Gerard Manley Hopkins:
Glory be to God for dappled things —
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced — fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
The time has come, in our human march forward into progress and technology, to recognize that uniqueness and variety that is lost as A.I. takes over everything, and uniqueness and variety is the beauty of this world. Machine production, ChatGPT writing, computer-assisted design — the design of boats or of cars, the creation of pop music — is a homogenizing force, wiping clean the uniqueness of the world and the beauty of human fallibility.
We need a movement for the preservation of human art and creativity. Pro Humanitate. All things spare and strange.