Four responses to tragedy

Imagine a spectator who watches your life pass as we might watch a film. Imagine one who watches your civilisation pass in the same way. It seems to me that for this spectator the genre of our lives and of this civilisation would be a particular form of tragedy.

I mean tragedy in Aristotle’s sense, a story of misfortune that evokes fear and pity in the audience: fear because the misfortune can be anticipated before it arrives but cannot be stopped; and pity because the characters are neither inhumanly good nor bad, just the usual mix, yet they lose everything.

Schopenhauer described the subgenre of tragedy that our lives belong to. He distinguished between three types of tragedy: those caused by ‘extraordinary wickedness’, those caused by ‘blind fate’, and another:

‘…the misfortune may be brought about by the mere position of the dramatis personæ with regard to each other, through their relations; so that there is no need either for a tremendous error or an unheard-of accident, nor yet for a character whose wickedness reaches the limits of human possibility; but characters of ordinary morality, under circumstances such as often occur, are so situated with regard to each other that their position compels them, knowingly and with their eyes open, to do each other the greatest injury, without any one of them being entirely in the wrong.’

Although the world does contains extraordinary wickedness and blind chance, and some eras have been tragedies of these types, it is this ordinary sort of tragedy that characterises our times.

Let me illustrate what I mean. A man is born poor but ambitious. He promises himself he won’t die poor. He develops a habit of working hard. It becomes second nature; and, in time, what seems difficult to others feels easy for him. He becomes successful, but still drives himself hard. It has become ingrained by years of repetition. He seldom sees his family and, when he does, he treats them as another task to be completed. He hardly knows how to treat anything in any other way. In time, he is divorced. His children refuse to see him. Feeling a failure, he drives himself harder. Life has taught him that this is how problems must be overcome. He becomes unyielding, and even his closest colleagues become unhappy and conspiratorial. Eventually, his company is taken from him. He is no longer poor, yet he finds he has nothing.

Let me illustrate what I mean again. A society discovers a new way to exploit buried energy. It uses it to improve the life of its people and to unearth even more fuel. Growth spirals upward as the energy liberated in one stage allows more energy to be liberated in the next. Each wave of successively cheaper energy changes the society and its habits. Things that were once impossible become possible: first as luxury goods, then as everyday consumables, and finally as basic requirements for a normal life. Over time, the fuel that remains is buried deeper in the earth, so more and more energy must be used to reach it. Eventually, almost as much energy must be used to reach the distant veins as they will supply, so little is gained in the process. The society nevertheless continues to become more extravagant with every generation. The habit has become ingrained by years of repetition. One day, its children find they have nothing.

As the Bard put it:

So, oft it chances in particular men,

That for some vicious mole of nature in them,

As, in their birth--wherein they are not guilty,

Since nature cannot choose his origin--

By the o'ergrowth of some complexion,

Oft breaking down the pales and forts of reason,

Or by some habit that too much o'er-leavens

The form of plausive manners, that these men,

Carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect,

Being nature’s livery, or fortune’s star,–

Their virtues else–be they as pure as grace,

As infinite as man may undergo–

Shall in the general censure take corruption

From that particular fault

As Schopenhauer observed and Hamlet illustrates, knowing that you’re living in a tragedy doesn’t stop it from being a tragedy; but how should we respond to this genre of our lives? I see four possibilities, two childish and two adult. The childish responses are denial and aestheticism, and the adult responses are religious and Zhuangzi’s.

The denial of tragedy is the defining attitude of the age. It manifests everywhere: in the assumption that unlimited economic growth can be achieved on a finite planet; in the faith that legal reforms will generally achieve their goals; in the use of the word ‘fatalism’ to dismiss. I cannot do justice to our denial of tragedy here. The subject is too big. We have built a world on its foundations. I will limit myself to a few observations.

One stark form of the denial of tragedy denies that life involves any difficult choices or unhappy compromises. An example is the belief of some in the fat acceptance movement that health is completely ‘independent of body weight’, regardless of the scientifically uncontroversial evidence. The same impulse occurs in politics more widely, from Fully Automated Luxury Communism on the left to American monarchists on the right. As I have said before, what looks like polar extremism might be better understood as a shared denial of tragedy.

A less obvious flavour of denial treats tragedies as problems to be solved. The ‘levelling up’ agenda is a good example. The government has announced that it will ‘end geographic inequality’ by raising the wealth of the lowest areas to match the highest. This inequality has existed for generations, our fossil-fuels-and-finance economic boom is over, and nobody has the vaguest notion of how the change could realistically be achieved. In these circumstances, what function does talking about ‘levelling up’ serve? I would suggest that it serves a valuable one for the political class. It recasts a misfortune beyond their control as a technical problem that will fixed shortly. They don’t actually have any idea about how it could be fixed, but that is not the point. The point is to hide reality behind a wall of positive thinking. The instinct is common. It gets taken to self-satirising extremes. Some say death is just a problem to be solved by mind uploading.

Healthcare workers might recognise something familiar in this urge to try to fix something that cannot be fixed. When someone has just been bereaved, just received bad news, or is in a mental health crisis, then the understandable human impulse to try to make things better can become a liability. Quite often, you cannot make it better. Then, your time is better spent quietly acknowledging the person’s tragedy and, unless you are a complete barbarian, making them a cup of tea. Students seldom begin with this skill, but it is a basic one for any health professional. This illustrates the childishness of the denial of tragedy. It is the response of a young person, not yet intimate with life’s losses or able to meet their eyes. In a child it is no crime, but in a society it surely is.

The second childish response is aesthetic. It is the reaction of an audience to a theatrical tragedy, a cathartic dwelling in fear and pity. When the misfortune is in the future, the aesthetics are of fear. Doomerism is an example, as is prepping as conspicuous consumption. When the misfortune is in the past, the aesthetics are of loss. The Romantics were masters of this form, but so are urban explorers. The aesthetic response sometimes occurs, too, in someone’s reaction to their own life. The person gripped by anxiety about future losses and the one who cannot move on from past losses are both common enough.

The aesthetic response has a place. Dwelling in tragedy can be a useful counter to a culture of denial. I indulge in it myself. It is, nevertheless, childish. To remain in fear and pity, allowing it to wash over you, enjoying the sensation: this is appropriate for the audience of a play. It is not appropriate when the tragedy is real. In truth, such dwelling is often little more than a tricky form of denial. The misfortune is acknowledged, even perhaps exaggerated; but whatever occurred becomes little more than stage-setting for the true centre of attention, the person’s own emotions. This sort of anguished self-reflection has a role in art, Shakespeare alone proves that, but it is an inadequate response to life’s tragedy.

The religious response to tragedy is different again. It is not necessarily the response of all religions or of all religious people, but it does usually require a religious context. Its attitude to tragedy could be summarised as “Yes, but that is not all”. By this, I mean that the religious response accepts that our lives are tragic, but it also asserts that there are more things in heaven and earth than we grasp. In Christianity, humanity is sinful and bound for death, the tragedy is absolute; but Christ’s resurrection provides hope that it will be transcended in ways we cannot fully understand. In Buddhism, the noble truths affirm our tragedy, life is unsatisfactory and painful and the cause is within ourselves; but they do not stop there, following the Eightfold Path allows tragedy to eventually be transcended.

There are many differences between Christianity and Buddhism, but these responses are of the same form. In both, tragedy is accepted. Indeed, it is emphasised: for the Christian, human nature is inherently fallen; and, for the Buddhist, suffering is prolonged through countless cycles of rebirth. Neither tradition engages in either outright denial of tragedy or in the sort of special pleading that treats each tragedy as a separate problem to be solved. Both use the aesthetic response: for instance, the Christian tradition of memento mori or the Mahāsatipaṭṭhāna Sutta’s nine cemetery contemplations. But both grasp the smallness of human reason and the vastness of what is beyond it, so neither is trapped in aesthetic brooding. Their response is unlike the first two. They affirm both the totality of tragedy and that it will, somehow, be transcended. Some religious people find secular culture to be increasingly childish. This may be because they have an adult sense of tragedy in a society that does not.

The only other adult response to tragedy I know is Zhuangzi’s:

When Zhuangzi’s wife died, Huizi went to offer his condolences. He found Zhuangzi squatting on the floor singing, accompanying himself by pounding on an overturned washtub held between his splayed legs.

Huizi said “You live with someone, raise children with her, grow old with her – not crying over her death is enough already, isn’t it? But to go so far as to pound on a washtub and sing, isn’t that going too far?”

Zhuangzi said, “No, it’s not. When this one first died, how could I not feel grief just like anyone else? But then I considered closely how it had all begun: previously, before she was born, there was no life there. Not only no life: no physical form. Not only no physical form: not even energy. Then in the course of some heedless mingling mishmash a change occurred and there was energy, and then this energy changed and there was physical form, and then this form changed and there was life. Now there has been another change and she is dead. This is how she participates in the making of the spring and the autumn, of the winter and the summer. For the moment a human lies stiffened here, slumbering in this enormous house. And yet there I was getting all weepy, even going on to wail over her. Even to myself I looked like someone without any understanding of fate. So I stopped.”

(Ziporyn translation)

This is not denial, Zhuangzi feels ‘grief just like anyone else’ and gets ‘all weepy’. It is not aesthetic dwelling either. Very obviously, he moves on. It has something in common with the religious response. Zhuangzi accepts the totality of the tragedy without bargaining, and he can do this because he has a sense of humanity’s smallness. Unlike the religious response, though, he offers no end to tragedy: neither salvation nor nirvana. Instead he merely reflects that tragedies are only so from our perspective and that the world is bigger than us and contains other perspectives.

Typically for him, Zhuangzi is both apparently inhuman and completely natural. It seems outrageous to sing and beat a washtub when your wife has died. But in the natural course of grief most of us eventually do the same. We carry some part of the wound with us; but, after the initial weeping, we slowly get on with our lives. In time, some of us even sing again. When this happens, we are not denying tragedy. We are living with it.

I doubt any society can survive long without an adult sense of tragedy, but it seems to me that our culture has little grasp of one. I doubt the West has the faith to recover the religious response of our grandparents; and I doubt it has the emotional maturity to take Zhuangzi’s route. We have tragically lost our sense of tragedy.

There are four ways that we can respond to this development…

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Image: Admiral Van Tromp by HJSP82 (CC BY-ND 2.0)