Hasta La Gadget!

Times are hard for democracy. Trump wants a wall. Senators refuse to question judicial nominees. And anti-Hillary liberals seriously contend that she is “as bad as” the opposing party’s presumptive nominee, vowing not to vote if she wins the nomination.

But when were they ever other than hard? Democracy has always been vulnerable to extreme opinions and dogmatic certainties. Sometimes the price of free speech is listening to things you don’t want to hear.

Theater holds a possible remedy, though, to some of our worst tendencies. It’s pretty simple. We need more tragedy.

Tragedies reveal the horrible consequences of seeing things in black and white and so encourage us to discern shades of gray.

Of course, tragedy might seem remote and irrelevant. To many it is dimly remembered as something to do with hubris, catharsis and tragic flaws. We hear the word tragedy in the news mainly when it’s misapplied to some disaster — natural or otherwise. But it needn’t be either irrelevant or misappropriated. Tragedy is not just the stuff of English tests. It has a long and illustrious history as a salve for self-government. It’s no coincidence that democracy and tragedy arose around the same time in ancient Athens.

While scholars disagree about exactly how tragedy arose, we are certain that it evolved alongside Athenian democracy. Athenians understood that what they saw onstage taught them truths and ways of thinking vital for their roles as citizens. Like the law courts, tragedy was a civic institution. Funded by the state, it was perhaps the greatest citizenship class ever.

The most important tragic lessons warn against extremism. Tragedy centers on heroes who, paradoxically, are passionate to do precisely what the gods decree. They are men and women who invite their fate with extreme self-regard combined with all-or-nothing thinking.

Consider Oedipus the tyrant, eponymous hero of Sophocles’ most famous tragedy. Witnessing a plague ravage his home city of Thebes, Oedipus boasts that he, “whom all men call the great,” is the only person who can save the day. Sound familiar? “I am the only one who can fix this,” tweeted Donald Trump in February. He was stumping on the loss of American jobs to Mexico, but it’s an attitude he uses throughout his political performance.

Athenians understood that what they saw onstage taught them truths vital for their roles as citizens.

And tragedy offers its comeuppance. The plague in Thebes is caused by the unsolved murder of the previous king of Thebes, Oedipus’ father — who was slain by his only son. That is the very definition of tragic irony. Admittedly less tragic but no less ironic is the fact that, tweets to the contrary, Trump has been accused of outsourcing jobs to foreign employers. No one is the “only one” to fix anything, tragedy tells us. In fact, thinking that way is a trait of those who cause problems.

A related insight comes from Oedipus’ own headstrong daughter, Antigone. In her eponymous tragedy, having apparently learned nothing from her father’s example, Antigone is certain that she alone knows what piety is and what the gods want — the burial of her rebel brother. But self-righteousness runs in the family, on both sides.

Antigone’s maternal uncle Creon, current ruler of Thebes, is just as adamant that he knows best. The gods do not honor traitors, he asserts, punctuating his assertion by burying his niece alive. Antigone, always swift to stress her independence, even in the choice of death, ends her own life by hanging before she can serve out Creon’s sentence. As Hegel almost said once, tragic heroes have one-line bucket lists. Once that item is crossed off, you can cross off the hero as well.

Such single-minded, black-and-white thinking dominates politics today. Pundits, politicians and private individuals alike love to make noise about the doom that will overtake us if we even consider the opinions of their opponents. Overlooking his misuse of the term, there is nonetheless something tragic in the French Prime Minister Manuel Valls’ recent prediction that a U.K. “Brexit” would spell “tragedy” for Britain.

Like tragic heroes, such people are convinced that they alone know what’s what and what’s right. They are especially self-righteous when it comes to self-knowledge. Oedipus was positive he knew himself inside out: He was a simple man, a straightforward man, a self-made man. (“Men of the people” are a dime a dozen in American politics. Remember George W. Bush’s gestures of folksiness from atop a trust fund?)

It’s no coincidence that democracy and tragedy arose around the same time in ancient Athens.

But despite the Delphic injunction to “know thyself,” we never quite succeed. Even the brightest light, when shone against the self, casts a shadow. Oedipus may be able to solve the Sphinx’s riddle but he must also recognize that he himself is a riddle that defies reason — his children’s brother, his mother’s husband, his father’s slayer, his city’s savior and its destroyer. The consequences of this forced recognition are horrific: He loses his sight, his homeland and his wife and mother at one fell swoop.

Such consequences are not restricted to tragic heroes. Politicians are by custom, if not by nature, in the business of projecting false images of themselves. And then when we find out the “truth” — that they are not really what they seem — we are horrified, ashamed and feel betrayed. Richard Nixon swore he was not a crook. The White House tapes proved otherwise. John Edwards seemed a model of sympathy. The handling of his extramarital affair tells another story.

As classics scholar Jean-Pierre Vernant realized, tragedy teaches us that those who blindly adhere to a single-minded perspective will, like Oedipus, inevitably be forced to confront the opposite point of view, the perspective they had hitherto refused to even consider. In comedy we laugh. In tragedy we cry. But the cause of both is the same: We recognize a yawning chasm between what should be and what is. Tragedy teaches by negative example. The great stage and literary tragedies reveal the horrible consequences of seeing things in black and white and so encourage us to discern shades of gray. They promote what the Greeks called sophrosyne, one of those “untranslatable” words usually translated as “moderation.”

Smack dab in the middle of a speech in the middle of Antigone a character called Haemon advocates this middle-of-the-road approach to life. “Don’t think that you alone know the truth and everyone else is wrong. Such individuals, when they are opened up, are found to be hollow inside.” Unfortunately, it is often such “hollow men” who seem to make the biggest noise and to have the greatest courage of their convictions. But sometimes these people are heard above the rest simply because they are empty inside. Their souls are echo chambers, amplifying pin drops to thunder claps.

Tragedy was a civic institution. Funded by the state, it was perhaps the greatest citizenship class ever.

Tragedy diagnoses this hollowness — and listens for the softer voice of sophrosyne that might better guide our governments and our lives. Tragedy challenged Athenian citizens to question their own black-and-white thinking, to open their minds to the perspectives of others. This is not to say that ancient Athens was perfect. Far from it. It was rife with xenophobes, demagogues and warmongers. It was propped up by slave labor. Its women residents did not have the right to vote and they were almost certainly dissuaded from attending the very tragedies that extolled democracy. It was a culture with a lot of work to do.

But so is ours. Which is why we can’t afford to discard the millennia-old art form that can help us address very contemporary problems. Athens needed tragedy. We do, too.

© Zocalo Public Square

Earlier on WorldPost:

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Are Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton the least-liked presidential candidates in recent history? There’s evidence they may be. Trump’s unfavorability ratings have been declining over the last few weeks, but the most recent Gallup poll still placed his unfavorables at 60%, with Clinton’s a lower but still dismal 54%. Other polls have found higher negatives still for both candidates. Just how bad are these numbers? A review of more than two thousand questions about feelings towards candidates from the historical polling data in the Roper Center public opinion archives indicates that they are very bad indeed.

What was the question, who was asked, and when?

Three major factors need to be considered when making comparisons about ratings of candidates from polls in earlier elections: question wording, sample, and timing. Since 1980, most opinion polls have asked some variation of the question: “Do you have a favorable or unfavorable impression of Candidate X?” Although precise wording varies from poll to poll, such questions produce similar results. Some polling organizations explicitly offer respondents the option of saying they haven’t heard enough to say, while others allow “don’t know” only as a volunteered response. The former generally produce lower favorables and unfavorables, as more of the public choose not to take a position.

Before 1980, this favorability question was not asked about non-incumbent candidates. Instead, from 1952 through the 1970s, Gallup measured the public’s positive or negative impression of candidates with a question that asked respondents to rate their feelings towards a candidate on a scale from minus five to plus five, where minus five was “dislike very much” and plus five was “like very much.” Gallup has occasionally asked a version of this question in more recent elections.

Polling organizations have gauged feelings towards candidates using national adult, registered voter, and likely voter samples. As these populations vary considerable in demographics and political attitudes, generally comparisons of results should not be made across groups. National adult samples provide the most accurate comparisons across polling organizations, while polls of likely are more problematic, as likely voters are defined in very different ways by different pollsters, introducing inconsistency. For this reason, this review focused on polls of national adult samples. However, polls did not show large differences between likely voter and national adult samples on favorability measures.

The point in the election cycle when a poll is taken also matters. In order to limit the number of questions under consideration to about 2500, the review only covered favorability measures put to the public between the official nominations at the conventions until election day. While it is possible that a higher candidate unfavorable might have been found in some poll from earlier in the campaign cycle, it is quite unlikely for a simple reason: larger “don’t know” responses in the early days of a campaign tend to bring down both favorables and unfavorables. The public’s high familiarity with both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton makes the 2016 election unusual in this regard.

Thumbs down

The highest negative rating in a favorable/unfavorable opinion question among a national adult sample betwen nomination and convention was 53% for Romney in a September 2012 Pew poll.

In some cases, limiting inclusion to polls with national adult samples may have removed the highest negative result. For example, Dukakis had a peak unfavorable of 40% among the national adult population in a November poll, but had a 48% unfavorable among likely voters in an October NBC/WSJ poll. Typically, fewer national adult samples were collected close to the election during some years, decreasing the opportunities for peak negative ratings. However, in our review, even among likely voters, no non-incumbent candidates reached 55% unfavorable in any poll before Trump and Clinton.

Going back further in time with the Gallup minus five-plus five question, the highest negative feelings toward a candidate were found in an October 1968 poll. George Wallace, who ran in that election as the American Independent Party candidate, was rated negatively by 53% of the population. This plus five-minus five question was only asked once in the 2012 election, but Romney’s negatives were only 43%, below his lowest ratings in the favorability question.

Comparisons between the favorability and liking questions are certainly not exact. However, it seems fair to say that negative feelings about presidential candidates have not been recorded in the high 50s or low 60s range seen for Trump and Clinton since pollsters began attempting to measure such attitudes in 1952.

Polling questions in this analysis are held at the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research archive at Cornell University.

Carl Brown, Roper Center iPOLL Acquisitions Manager, collaborated on this research.

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WEST POINT, N.Y. — It was 6:30 a.m. at the United States Military Academy, the sun was rising over the Hudson River, and Paula Broadwell was in athletic gear. With a half-dozen women, she rotated between sprints and burpees. Sweating onto the pavement, the group was perched atop an overlook called Trophy Point, in the shadow of a 46-foot battle monument memorializing those killed in the Civil War. There is a female statue in bronze at the top, arms outstretched regally, who is said to represent “fame.”

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Perhaps no topic better illustrates the enormous gap between knowledge and ignorance, and its profound importance to the ambient understanding of all humanity vital to advancement at the most basic level, than evolution. The story of evolution by natural selection is, effectively, written, in vivid detail, in the language of molecular genetics. If you can read this language, the tale it tells is clear, decisive, and irrefutable; the facts presented about as prone to denial as sunrise.

Nor need you be literate in molecular genetics per se, any more than you need learn Russian to read Crime and Punishment. There are highly proficient translators in both cases. A bounty of books on evolutionary biology have been written by the unassailably erudite for the decidedly less so among us. Complex science has been translated into the lingua franca.

What, then, is the basis for denial in all its shades of gray, from intelligent design, to young earth creationism? In a word, ignorance. But not ignorance of the traditional “I really wish I knew, but alas, I don’t” variety. Rather, this is generally ignorance of the “my eyes are covered and my ears are plugged, so you must be wrong” variety.

The only way to dispute the evidence for evolution is never to look at it in the first place. The fossil record is itself almost astonishingly replete, given what is required to preserve the faint impressions of fleeting life in dust and mud over millions of years. But the fossil record is all but irrelevant, mere icing on the cake. The cake is baked of our DNA, which provides an encyclopedic account of life’s recipe.

So, permit me to reiterate: the only way to dispute so incontrovertible a case is to ignore it. Now, of course, you cannot ignore the content of an entire domain and achieve any recognition by peers, credentials, expertise, or even rudimentary understanding. Ignoring leads only to ignorance. Actual experts can and do, of course, disagree in their interpretations. But those interpretations require knowledge and understanding. Knowing is prerequisite to interpreting. Disagreements born of expertise are interesting, and resolving such tensions is in the service of progress.

Not so the dissent of non-experts. Asserting the deficiencies of a field one has never mastered is tantamount to the claim that any language you don’t speak is just gibberish.

The problem is indeed acute for evolutionary biology, but by no means unique to it. In every field, from evolutionary biology, to biomedicine, to political science, the cries of non-experts populate cyberspace: listen to us, too! We’ve only ever read what we already decided to believe — if we’ve read anything at all — but listen to us just the same.

The long-standing tendency to repudiate understanding not on the basis of alternative understanding, but on utter lack of understanding and, for that matter, never attempting to learn, is massively amplified by the Internet, the ultimate leveler. Nobel laureates, and consummate nincompoops, have recourse to the same megaphone. This is where expertise goes to die.

But how does it die? There is famous concern about ending with a whimper rather than a bang. Sadly, we are well into the realm of a demise more tiresome still.

Non-experts routinely assert their opinions to refute the views of experts they simply don’t like (this may refer to the views, the experts, or both). If challenged for want of expertise, they label it an attempt at character assassination. They allege that their legitimate, alternative view is being suppressed. In other words, they whine — 140 characters at a time.

But credentials are not character; that’s a load of crap. Credentials, whether formal or informal, are the price of entry into any legitimate debate. Expert debate actually requires expertise on both sides. Two literary scholars might differ in their interpretations of Crime and Punishment, or War and Peace, and an interested audience might benefit from the exchange. But the audience is forgiven for restricting its interest to debaters who have actually read the works in question. Participation in the vein of, “I never read it, but I know it stinks,” would be reliably less illuminating.

Confront the pretenders for what they are, and you find yourself in the morass where credentials are conflated with character. They may also charge at you under an anti-elitist banner, implying that expertise is really just prissy privilege in disguise. But that campaign reeks of hypocrisy. Find me the anti-elitist willing to let any untrained, highly opinionated stooge perform neurosurgery on their child, and I will give up my day job for hula dancing.

So, yes, our culture seems tolerant to the substitution of fatuous hearsay for genuine knowledge, earned the hard way (is there any other?). Yes, our culture is implicated in the death of expertise.

It dies neither with a bang, nor a whimper. It dies silently, drowned in the endless echoes of incessant cyberspatial whining by those conspiring, ignorantly, to kill it.

-fin

David L. Katz

Director, Yale University Prevention Research Center; Griffin Hospital

President, American College of Lifestyle Medicine

Senior Medical Advisor, Verywell.com

Founder, The True Health Initiative

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Novelists seeking representation complain that none of their books have been made into films. At any given moment, we have literally stacks of novels from New York publishers on our desks in Los Angeles. Going through them to find the ones that might make motion pictures or television movies, we — and other producers, managers, and agents — are constantly running into the same problems:

1. “There’s no third act… It just trickles out.”
2. “There are way too many characters and it’s not clear till page 200 who the protagonist is.”
3. “I can’t relate to anyone in the book.”
4. “At the end, the antagonist lays out the entire plot to the protagonist.”
5. “There’s not enough action.”
6. “There’s nothing new here. This concept has been used to death.”
7. “We don’t know who to root for.”
8. “The whole thing is overly contrived.”
9. “There’s no dialogue, so we don’t know what the character sounds like.”
10. “There’s no high concept here. How do we pitch this?”
11. “There’s no real pacing.”
12. “The protagonist is reactive instead of proactive.”
13. “At the end of the day, I have no idea what this story is about.”
14. “The main character is 80, and speaks only Latvian.”
15. “It’s set in Papago…in the 1960s, and is filled with long passages in Uto-Aztecan.”
16. “There are no set pieces.”

Of course anyone with the mind of a researcher can list a film or two that got made despite one of these objections. But for novelists who are frustrated at not getting their books made into films, that should be small consolation and is, practically speaking, a useless observation. Yes, you might get lucky and find a famous Bulgarian director, who’s fascinated with the angst of octogenarians, studied pacing with John Sales or Jim Jarmusch, and loves ambiguous endings.

But if you regard your career as a business instead of a quixotic crusade, you should be planning your novel from the outset to make it appealing to filmmakers.

Give us a strong (preferably male) lead who, good or bad, is eminently relatable — and who’s in the “star age range” of 35-50 (where at any given moment 20 male stars reside; a star being a name that can set up the film by his attachment to it).

Make sure a dramatist looking at your book will clearly see three well-defined acts: act one (the setup), act two (rhythmic development, rising and falling action), and act three (climax leading to conclusive ending).

Express your character’s personality in dialogue that distinguishes him, and makes him a role a star would die to play.

Have someone in the film industry read your synopsis before you commit to writing the novel.

Etc.

Though I’ve observed the phenomena for several decades now, it still surprises me that even bestselling novelists, even the ones who complain that no one has made a film from their books yet, don’t write novels dramatic enough to lend themselves easily to mainstream film. It’s a well-known phenomenon in publishing that, with very few exceptions, the more books a novelist sells the less critical his publisher’s editors are of his work. So time and again we read novels that start out well, roar along to the halfway point, then peter off into the bogs of formless character development or action resolution.

A publisher invests between $25,000 and $100,000 or more in publishing your novel. A low-budget feature film from a major Hollywood studio today costs at least $40 million. There is, from a business point of view, no comparison. Risking $40 million means the critical factor is raised as high as can be imagined when your book hits the “story department” — much higher than the critical factor of even the finest publishers. Hollywood studies what audiences want by logging, in box office dollars, cents, and surveys, what they respond best to.

If you want to add film to your profit centers as a novelist, it would behoove you to study what makes films work. Disdaining Hollywood may be a fashionable defense for writers who haven’t gotten either rich or famous from it, but it’s not productive in furthering your cinematic career.

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