When you ask someone to define “relevance,” you often get one of those Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart answers. Famously, when asked in 1964 to define “obscenity,” Justice Stewart responded “I know it when I see it.” So it often is when someone is asked to define relevance.
But relevance can be defined. And even measured. Relevance is about the willingness of people to pay attention. To be curious about you . . . even if their curiosity is essentially pointing in the direction of their rejection, hate or disgust. Relevance is the quality of a person, organization or thing that makes it irresistible to look away from it. Relevance is what draws you in, sometimes to support, sometimes to rebuke.
A car peacefully passing you on the highway is almost completely irrelevant. A car weaving in and out of traffic to pass you is more relevant. A car exploding in flames into another car (maybe even your own) is intensely relevant. The peaceful passer is the good driver. But the reckless driver or crasher is the relevant driver.
The thing about the crasher, however, is that he changes the rules for everyone on the road until the crash can be cleared away. He causes traffic to stop. He changes the ETA to your destination. He makes it impossible for anyone else on the road to approach the same level of relevance he has.
How do you spell relief?
It’s useful, perhaps, to think about where the word “relevance” comes from. We all know that it means something like “the condition of being connected with the matter at hand.” A relevant thing is a thing that matters in the moment. When you are tracking an escaped prisoner whom you know has fled on horseback, the hoof prints of a horse are relevant. The paw prints of a dog, less so.
In information science, relevance is a measure of how closely a given object (file, web page, database record, etc.) matches a user's search for information. If you want to find a great steakhouse to go to for dinner, a positive online review by a respected food critic is perhaps more relevant to you than a restaurant’s website declaring itself “world’s greatest steaks” . . . for obvious reasons.
But the word “relevance” has ancient and important roots in Latin that do not simply mean the quality of being “on point” to the matter at hand.
Rather, the word comes to us from the Latin word relevare meaning “to raise” or “to lift up.” Our word “relevance” is a cousin of the words “relief” and “relieve” . . . In that sense, something that is “relevant” relieves us of anxiety, fear, pain or doubt by helping us lift the burden of deciding what to think or do.
A relevant thing says to us something like this: “Of all the things you might pay attention to in your quest to make a good decision, pay attention to me. I will give you the most beneficial guidance and provide the most relief from doubt for the least amount of your expended mental effort.”
That guidance may be affirmative (follow the hoof prints of this horse). But it may also be negative (avoid that guy weaving in and out of traffic). It may be guidance about what to do or think. But it may also be guidance about what not to do or think.
Relevance is not always about love or admiration (although it can sometimes be). Relevance is about what to pay attention to.
And today, Donald Trump (God help us) is intensely relevant.
For the approximately one-third of Republican voters in his camp, he is relevant because he is “saying things other politicians are too afraid to say.” He is “telling it like it is.” He is avoiding the mush-mouthed equivocation of “political correctness.”
For much of the rest of the US electorate (and, by all indications, most people around the world), Trump is relevant because he is the dangerous crazy driver that we, as drivers presumably trying to drive sanely and safely, would be foolish to ignore. This accounts for the phenomenon that even among dyed-in-the-wool progressives in the media (I’m looking at you, Rachael Maddow), the Trump sideshow is grabbing as big a slice of the attention pie as he is in conservative circles.
It's catnip. It's crack. It's the perverse but irresistible appeal of rubbernecking. Choose your reflex or addiction metaphor or choice, we're all hard wired to pay attention. We're all vulnerable to the ways Trump provides us with lessons and guidance . . . And perhaps that applies most of all to those of us who find him a despicable lesson in what to avoid.
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