Sixty-five years ago, George Steiner published his seminal work, The Death of Tragedy. Should so recondite a title command the attention of economists and politicians today?
Well, yes, is the counterintuitive answer to that question, for as the mordant cult of tragedy dies, so the effervescent cult of happiness is born, and it is now the exclusive project of political and economic governance to deliver the confection of happiness to the governed, and maybe we are the poorer for it.
Be happy
It is not that any of us don’t want to be happy, it’s just that there is a great deal more to life than happiness. My adversary to this proposition may seem to be the architects of the American Constitution, who pronounced the goal of life to be “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.
I am going to take a liberty of my own here by interpreting the meaning of the word in this context to be something profoundly different from the temporary bliss that people envisage when they wish us to “have a good day”. I understand the word to mean the untrammelled freedom to pursue whatever it is that for each of us brings our own unique sense of fulfilment and meaning, happiness being an outcome rather than a goal.
But if happiness has become the goal of life, and if by happiness we mean the absence of uncertainty and defeat, we have created the defining conditions for a new kind of life for a new kind of human being, and it is called wokedom, a brave new world more pusillanimous than brave.
Civilisations of course change, and it would be perverse to hanker after the sense of tragedy that characterised the 2,500-year-old lost civilization of Greece, but a contemplation of what we have lost can be useful in evaluating what we have gained.
Tragedy or joy
The Greek view was that life was inherently tragic; this doesn’t mean that it was gloomy or joyless. It means that Man’s destiny was shaped by forces always beyond his control, and regularly unjust.
Because there was no in-built mechanism of reward, and no mitigation of catastrophe, virtue and nobility were ends in themselves, and the greater for it, for virtue was exercised without expectation of recognition or reward. Take the great drama by Sophocles that portrayed this tragic sense, Oedipus Rex.
Oedipus
As a young man Oedipus is told by an oracle that he is destined to murder his father and screw his mother.
Horrified at such a prospect, Oedipus takes predictable action: he leaves home and travels as far away as he can in order to defeat his destiny. But he travels towards his destiny, not away from it.
Unbeknown to him he had been born a foundling, and his beloved mother and father are his foster parents. Subject to the vicissitudes of life he enters a quarrel with a stranger whom he kills. The stranger turns out to be his biological father. Later he achieves great renown and marries a noble woman and sleeps with her. She turns out to be his mother.
In an agony of torment he stabs out both of his eyes. In spite of his heroism he has committed the worst crimes known to humanity and in his attempt to avoid his destiny he has fulfilled it.
Oedipus is a great drama beloved of Greek audiences notwithstanding all the pain it entails for those who freely choose to witness it, much as later audiences gained a similar kind of pleasure from watching Shakespeare’s King Lear.
What is the purpose, one may ask, of submitting oneself to a sharing of experiences so unrelentingly tragic? Because it is deeply satisfying to be affirmed in the disquieting knowledge we instinctively know to be true: that life conforms to no external purpose; that consequence is unwarranted and gratuitous. To bear witness to this tragedy is to undergo a cathartic cleansing.
Of course, humanity is still beset by catastrophe, but it is catastrophe mitigated – mitigated by the material help of UN aid agencies, of Doctors without Frontiers, and of the Gift of the Givers. For Oedipus the only mitigation of the catastrophe he faced lay in his own nobility in dealing with it.
Age of plenty
Steiner contrasts this sense of nobility in defeat with what replaced it – the Judeo-Christian ethos of reward for our human suffering.
Even the endlessly suffering Job received eventual compensation. Centuries pass and the Enlightenment, with its promise of a rationally based order of life, adds another chapter to the unfolding story of the death of tragedy. But the denouement of tragedy, and the transformation to a new era isn’t quite finished: the dawning of the age of cradle-to-the-grave state control of human destiny and the onset of consumerism, the defeat of most dread disease and the production of plenitude destroys the tragic sensibility forever (these phenomena being my contribution to Steiner’s thesis).
And I return to my question: are we better off for this civilizational sea change?
In attempting to answer this question I have no wish to rubbish the human achievements that allow us to mitigate the effects of catastrophe, and rationally to shape our ends in defiance of a heartless destiny.
My aim is to highlight the dangers attendant upon a civilisational trajectory that will replace a chthonic [relating to or being deities, spirits, or other beings of the underworld] universe with a theme park, and to note that our organs of governance throughout the Western world now serve to hasten this transformation.
It might be lost in a thicket of policy formulation but the underlying purpose of governance in the Western world is the unspoken pursuit of an anodyne state of happiness.
Safe harbours
I want here to make a small diversion. In a recent column, Ivo Vegter poured a healthy dose of scepticism on the well-known nostrum of Benjamin Franklin,“Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety”.
I myself have often enough quoted Franklin’s apothegm with approval, but I now see that I have been in error in doing so, for it is not safety and liberty that are on opposite ends of a cultural spectrum but obedience and liberty, for there is no disgrace in seeking safety in life.
For me the word safety conjures an image of a small harbour in which boats rest in tranquil moorings in safety from the storm. Such safe moorings are a feature of all civilisations at all times of human evolution, and their existence reflects the need for safety of even the bravest of risk takers. They reflect the fact that the desire for safety is an honourable human aspiration.
Safety is one of life’s great treasures, and just like everybody else I seek it in spades – safety in the home and on the roads, safety from dread disease and disabling accidents, safety for my family, safety from tyrants and war, safety from crime and from psychopaths.
The question is this: how much do I depend and how much should I depend on obedience to government instruction to achieve such safety? That is why it is obedience that exists in inverse proportion to liberty, not safety.
Playgrounds
A little further on this theme: playgrounds for children can be dangerous places, and I am sure that little children from time to time fall off swings and roundabouts and hurt themselves, sometimes perhaps seriously. Noone wants to see children get hurt.
But is this an adequate reason for jurisdictions to enforce the wearing of protective headgear?
My objections to such a procedure are manifold; in the interests of brevity I won’t go into them, but in short it is the responsibility of parents to care for the safety of their children in terms of their own assessment of risk and reward, not governments.
But the happiness that governments exist to achieve means an endless appropriation of the rights of people to govern the limits of their exposure to danger – and in doing so to live with the consequences of their decisions.
Being hot
To persuade readers sceptical of my proposition that we have entered upon a new world of government-sponsored insurance against all forms of danger, I offer the following example of the infantilisation that it entails.
Most readers will know that Britain experienced an unusually hot summer. This resulted in dire warnings by the governors to the governed regarding the dangers of hot weather, in respect of which I find a five-point check list issued by the ominously named Centre for Climate and Health that includes this: “… wear a wide-brimmed hat and sunglasses, seek shade and apply sunscreen liberally and re-apply frequently.”
Is this possible? Is this the task of highly paid civil servants acting in accordance with legislation passed by the mother of all parliaments?
Some context: the British have enjoyed for over a century free primary and secondary education for all. Moreover 36% of the adult population hold tertiary level qualifications. But apparently they do not know how to protect themselves when the weather is hot, and so the government must come to their assistance. Astounding.
Headline news
But the British legacy media rushed in to endorse their government’s concern for the well-being of the educated but ignorant populace, and headlined their daily reports with an unctuous concern for that well-being by shouting out the catastrophic news: you must all take care, some people have died of heat stroke.
How many? Well, it is hard to say because the figures did not report on death from heat stroke, but death from “heat-related” factors, which includes people suffering from pre-existent morbidity (a phenomenon not much different from the tendency of coroners when uncertain of the exact cause of death to blame Covid-19).
Helped by the unreliable statistics, we might say that about 3,000 people died from “heat-related deaths” in the period from June to August, although probably less directly from heat stroke. During the same period, well over 150,000 Britons died from all non-heat-related causes.
The health secretary, Yvette Cooper, was moved by these circumstances to say: “My thoughts are with all those who have lost loved ones as a result of the long and intense heatwaves.”
This of course is a pretty safe thing to declare publicly because no-one would be able to check whether her thoughts were indeed so directed, and I am tempted to speculate that her consideration of what she would be wearing in parliament on any given day were never displaced by empathy for the people who had died of “heat-related” causes.
The message to be extrapolated from Britain’s unusually hot summer?
Nothing is more important than helping people to be safe from misfortune. And therefore to be happy.
South Africa
I might be right about the democracies of Western Europe and Australasia, but what then about South Africa?
It may seem a little one-eyed to insist that our government is dedicated to the prevalence of happiness, when – on the face of it – it seems dedicated to the creation of unhappiness. But this is not so.
Consider this: we know for a certainty that a policy of low taxation and deregulation would produce prosperity and full employment, and if we wanted to, we could embark upon a course to achieve this desirable state of affairs tomorrow, at little cost of money or effort.
But we elect not to do it.
Why?
Because the governors of our nation do not aspire to high levels of prosperity; that would make them redundant. What they really want is to be seen as the dispensers of happiness – notwithstanding that it is the kind of happiness I have described as “anodyne” – and the creation of a compliant electorate.
They can do this by means of the social grant and an ever-widening safety net to mitigate the worst excesses of calamity. Attendant upon this policy is a set of values much like we see prevalent in the Western democracies – aversion to risk and the emergence of winners, and a dumbing down of the human aspiration to achieve great things.
UV danger
In South Africa an otherwise excellent radio station sees fit to inform listeners every day, including on winter days, what the UV incidence is going to be. Astonishingly it is high on days when the sun is shining, low on days when it is overcast.
It should surely be a cause for some despair that the governed and their agencies rush to embrace the promise of a risk-free life. (With some exceptions of course: the alarming low pass over the DHL Stadium in Cape Town by two Airlink passenger jets was a glorious display of freedom from anxiety).
The aim of woke governance systems is to forbid risk and enforce safety, which are traditional areas of human freedom, and we kiss goodbye to our freedom when we comply. Maintaining a low critical mass of happiness is the easiest of governance tasks. It is simply the purchase of universal insurance with Other People’s Money. No wonder governments embrace it with such messianic zeal.
Flag bearers for the risk that comes with freedom must find their preferred dose of danger in – irrationally – starting their own businesses at risk, or in para-gliding or in launching rockets to establish life in Mars.
Hatred
Why is it that governments are suddenly so obsessive about the prevalence of what they are pleased to call “hate crimes”?
It is because governments dedicated to the promotion of happiness and the avoidance of discord well understand that whereas behaviour can be controlled, the mind of Man still harbours the capacity for independence of judgement, and independent enmities and passions have the potential to upset the whole project of benignity.
Drinking irresponsibly
In compliance with government instruction, companies selling alcohol tell me I must “drink responsibly”.
The phrase is a contradiction in terms, much like “military intelligence”.
The Greek god Dionysus represented for the Greeks the insight (self-evident that it was!) that the act of drinking of alcohol was liberating, and that liberation contains the seeds of irresponsibility.
So I defy the government with every beer I drink, because when I drink I willingly and knowingly embrace the consequence of my irresponsibility. In fact it is the escape from the diurnal straitjacket of responsibility that provokes my thirst.
My idea of happiness is therefore very different from the government’s. I intend enjoying it before it is too late.
[Image: by rawf8]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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