Searching For A Playwright

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.

What is gripping us today is the fragmentation accompanying rapid change and the penetrations of globalization into our own local living. It is that which creates both Trumps and Chicago incidents. We lose sight of the things and values common to us all. We talk past each other, and lose sight of the common good in pursuit of our own self interests. Nothing demonstrates that better than the remarks last week by the president of CBS News when he said that he knew that constant reporting about Trump was probably bad for the country, but it was making lots of money for CBS, so it was full speed ahead on it as far as he was concerned.  In “The Spirit of the Laws”, Montesquieu pointed out that Democracy as an institution only works when the laws themselves are infused with the willingness of the people as a whole to work together, despite differences, for the common good.  In losing sight of that, we risk losing our democracy as well. And that would be a Tragedy.