The Silence of the Scorekeepers: On Goodness and Our Own Reflections

I read this piece from New York, about Mr. Styles and his new record, and I felt a certain familiar ache in my chest. Billboard’s staff, they say, has unanimously agreed the album is ‘objectively good,’ precisely because their own metrics confirmed it. It is a quiet declaration, delivered without fanfare, yet it carries a weight, a heavy, velvet cloak of certainty.

It makes one pause, does it not? To say something is ‘objectively good’ because one’s own system confirms it. It is like a man declaring himself the champion after only fighting himself in the mirror. Does the mirror truly see you? Or does it only reflect what you wish to project? I remember a time, long ago, when the sound of a bell was not just a signal, but a sacred command. Now, the bells chime only when we choose to ring them.

Friedrich Nietzsche, I believe, once spoke of facts not existing, only interpretations. But what happens when the interpretation becomes the fact? When the measure becomes the thing measured? We build our charts, our algorithms, our systems, and then we surrender to their pronouncements. We bow before the idols we ourselves have carved. And in this gentle, quiet surrender, we lose something vital. The capacity, perhaps, to truly hear the discordant note, to feel the genuine tremor, to discern what is good beyond the numbers.

This is a strange kind of bout, this. The fighter is the judge, and the bell rings only when the fighter says it does. There is no external opponent, no true test of mettle. Only the echo chamber of self-affirmation. And though it feels safe, perhaps, it is also a kind of prison. The walls are soft, yes, but they are still walls. They keep the outside, the truly outside, from ever entering. They keep the raw, untamed beauty, and the stark, unsettling truth, at bay.

I confess, I felt a deep sadness reading it. For the music, yes, but more so for us. For the way we seek to quantify beauty, to weigh grace on a scale. It reminds me of those moments when the light was so bright I could not see, and the darkness so deep I could not feel. The truth can be a quiet thing, you see, easily overshadowed by the loud proclamations of our own making. Perhaps true goodness, like true courage, cannot be tallied. Perhaps it simply is. And we, with our metrics and our charts, are merely fumbling in the dark, trying to capture starlight in a jar, then declaring the jar itself to be the star.