Great tragedies always contain that moment of anguished joy - Oedipus
tearing out his eyes, Medea standing over the bodies of the children she loves
and has just slaughtered, Lear repeating “Never” again and again over the body
of his daughter. It is that instant when the ordinary is ripped apart and what
is lost reveals Truth without illusion, a staring into the abyss. Tragedy is
transformed into a kind of triumph. The Greeks called it catharsis and sought
it for a cleansing of the soul.
Such thoughts come to me as I drink my Saturday morning coffee over
newspaper accounts of Trump rallies in Chicago disrupted by the protests of college
students. The irony of such events of course is that both sides are protesting
for the same thing. Both express the burning need for freedom and a deep
misunderstanding of it. They are the raw material from which tragedies are
made. What we lack is a great playwright to transform them into a new and
better America.
The Trump followers protest on behalf of the freedom to stay as they
are – for some that means to sit at the table muttering about “damn furriners”,
tell coarse jokes, come home from working with people they understand to a
moderately comfortable household where childhood values are not questioned. Others
have more complicated reasons, but for all, being “P.C.” is not acceptable. They
seek comfort without drastic value change. They, like Garrison Keillor’s Lake Woebegone
farmers, “are what we are” and remain proud of it. They rally both against the
loss of jobs threatening their existence and against changes to the world that
makes those losses inevitable. They denounce the hostility of an outside world
without recognizing the things their own world has done to contribute to that
hostility. The students protest against the fierce resistance to the need for a radically changed future and on behalf of a
brave new world of their own creation, whose outlines they do not yet
understand but which they long to enter. Both sides, in their values, are
essentially American.
For freedom is both the freedom to change and the freedom to stay the
same. We recognize that at the Holiday table when we sit without commenting as
Uncle Henry rails on about things in ways with which we totally disagree, and
we recognize it in that most American of old sayings, “Well, everyone’s
entitled to their own opinion.” The discord comes when we ease our own
discomfort by setting rules for others. Pure freedom is opposed to that. But of
course, setting rules for others is frequently necessary in the life of a
community. Liberty, as J.S. Mill noted, involves responsibilities that cause us
voluntarily to limit our own personal freedom for the good of the community.
Pure freedom is only viable for hermits in the desert. We recognize that, more
or less, at the traffic light. And adapting society to fit newly emerging needs
and pressures requires new rules. We mostly recognize that when we accept
requirements for infant car seats without too much griping.