Are there any uninterrogated platitudes occupying your mind?

Writer and photographer Teju Cole asks the question about those standard and inevitable reactions we have to any given action.

He calls them annoying cliches--expressions and gestures that are expected but the maker of those expressions and gestures believe that what they are generating are fresh insights.

Cliches come about as a result of laziness, prejudice and hypocrisy among other blockages that inhabit our minds when the mental space has been emptied off thoughts.

Cole cites Flaubert and his absolute hatred of the inevitable and the expected in what people say and do.

Cole has his own list of modern day cliches. The one's I loved pertain to places:

AFRICA. A country. Poor but happy. Rising.

INDIA. Work your tolerance of or aversion to spicy food into the conversation as quickly as possible. “A land of contrasts.”

JAPAN. Mysterious. Always “the Japanese.” Mention Murakami.

PARIS. Romantic, in spite of the rude waiters and Japanese tourists. Don’t simply like it; “adore” it.

HARVARD. Source of studies quoted on BBC. Never say “I went to Harvard.” Say “I schooled in the Boston area.”

The agon between recieved notions and (fresh) thoughts is an interesting one.

Thinking in Black and White

"It just wouldn't look right to have the world without color television in today's society."

The above is a sentence in a student-essay on the topic of technology and how it could both "free" us as well as enslave us to itself, simultaneously.

The one thing I like in the sentence is the stupendous conviction. The writer firmly believes in what she says.

But everything else radiated by the sentence is ripe for critical thinking.

The writer is technically stating the obvious: Color televisions are the only televisions available today in the market, is my guess. Black and white TV’s are out, aren’t they?

Perhaps, the child is implying something else?

Were you to be discovered with a black and white television set in your possession, you might be perceived as someone not belonging to this era, or you might simply be perceived as “weird”. Would you not you look askance at the owner of a flip-phone?

In the world of certain types of technology, I believe, the progression from old to new is mercilessly linear. In the world of audio-visuals, the march from black and white to color and silence to sound, among other marches, is irreversible such that black and white is now a subset of color and silence, as is demonstrated so exquisitely by the 2011 Oscar nominated film The Artist, is a part of the wholeness of sound.

However, what the writer of the sentence does is not just confine the statement to a specific context, but draw an absolute truth of “life”, as it were, from it.

And that is precisely where the trouble—of me accepting the sentence’s conviction at face value is—begins.

The writer believes, I feel, that the movement from black and white to color is a movement of progress in general. To have color is to be modern, but to have black and white is to be anachronistic. 

I feel the writer reflexively draws from the advancement in the field of technology an unexamined truth and applies it to the field of life.

The syllogism is faulty, reducing the sentence itself to black and white.