Rays of hope in global gloom

Apromise is a promise. And so, even as the USA descends into depression and division, and even as the world becomes more aware of its own frailty than at any time since the Black Death, and even as we in the south Pacific gawp at our own viruslessness and find ourselves the envy of every country on the planet, I shall keep the promise that I made last week and address a subject that I hope and trust will meet the needs of this moment in the history of our species. And that subject is … drum roll, Shakespearean tucket etc … the joys of the emoji.

For anyone who’s been living in a Guatemalan monastery these 30 years, cut off from the delights of electronic society, an emoji is a stylised human face. It comes in a seemingly limitless variety of expressions and is most often to be found appended to emails or texts. Like most things on the internet, it is used mainly by the young. This is either because eyes more than 50 years old struggle to tell one emoji from another, or because minds more than 50 years old struggle to see the point.

The emoji’s purpose is to convey an emotional state – sadness, anger, amusement or whatever. In this it is similar to lmao, lol and other acronyms discussed last week. But whereas these perform the task by means of a cliche´ reduced to its initials, the emoji-user uses a little picture. And it’s hard to imagine a more regressive mode of communication. We’re back at the cave.

When the earliest human beings had an idea, which wasn’t often, the only way they had to record it was to draw it on the wall. This was all very well but there’s a limit to the number and complexity of things you can say about a bison by drawing one.

It was the evolution of language that enabled us to think more clearly and productively about the bison and everything else, but it wasn’t till we had developed writing that we were able to safely record those thoughts and pass them on with precision. This process is the root of human learning, it took thousands of years to evolve and it is those thousands of years that the emoji-user chooses to erase because the written word is just too hard.

In this he or she is in sympathy with the most powerful person on the planet, the President of the United States of America. Trump spends his days slumped in front of the television, staring at images and hoping to hear himself praised. For the few hours a week that he is required to emerge and play the role of leader of an advanced society he is so ill at ease with the written word he can barely stumble his way through the simple little speeches that others have written for him. He is evolution in reverse, degeneracy in a suit and tie.

But let’s end on a note of hope, for it is always in adversity that the human spirit soars to its zenith, as demonstrated last weekend in Brooklyn, New York.

There, despite a pandemic, despite degeneracy in the White House, corruption in Congress and riots in the streets, Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating contest somehow went ahead as usual and a gentleman by the name of Joey Chestnut was crowned champion for the 13th time. In 10 minutes Mr Chestnut put away no fewer than 75 hot dogs, bun included, thus breaking his own previous record of 74.

Is there an emoji for feeling pride in one’s own species? Consider it used.