a book idea

a book idea
by doctorzamalek
March 6, 2009

Someone once apologized to me for something (a gratuitous and rather nasty personal remark in the midst of an intellectual disagreement) and ended with the phrase: “I hope I don’t end up in your Gallery of *ssholes.”

I’d never heard the phrase before, and perhaps it was a fresh coinage. But it gave me an idea for a book that I unfortunately have never gotten around to carrying out. This was about seven years ago, and I told myself I would start keeping an exact description of *ssholish things done by various people in my vicinity.

The advantages would be twofold:

(1) it would allow for greater serenity in such cases. You could simply observe closely everything horrible they do, knowing that it will make your next book chapter even better.

(2) it would also allow for a thorough scientific treatment of the subject, and I don’t know if it has ever been done before. One of my favorite undergraduate teachers, a Mr. J. Cornell, once advised me that “there are a finite number of basic human tricks.” He may be right, but I would like to know just how many.

Tolstoy is famous for the remark that happy families are all alike, but unhappy families are each unhappy in their own way. I wonder if we could say a similar thing about individuals: benevolent people are all alike, but *ssholes are all *ssholes in their own way. I’ve noticed an awful lot of variation, in fact. It can come from so many different directions in the human character. Much would be learned, perhaps, from studying the variations we encounter.

It would also be nice to have some basic statistics such as: how many *ssholes do we meet in a typical month? And what is the range of gravity of their offenses?

It was very helpful for me to be able to calculate about how many new books I read in a typical month, about how many new people I meet, that in a typical month I may experience X number of good things and Y number of bad things.

I also wonder about the possibility of writing a “Gallery of Benevolence” as a counterweight to the first book. Are there surprising new ways for people to be good, or is Tolstoy basically right that good things of a type are all alike?