The Politics of Tragedy: Finding Meaning in Terror

Rahm Emmanuel infamously advised: “Never let a good crisis go to waste”. But if there is opportunity in crisis there is treasure buried in tragedy-nothing else so effectively waters the seeds of craven political posturing. Ancient Greek tragedy produces catharsis but American tragedy results in technocratic management, or the construction of policy ramparts that make us feel protected from further danger and despair.

Our most recent tragedies-the horrifying execution of twelve innocent men, women, and children in Aurora, the cowardly murder of seven in a Wisconsin Sikh Temple, the brutal slaughter of seventy-seven in Norway by a crazed gunmen, the psychotic meltdown of an armed and disgruntled worker in front of the Empire State building-are all so chilling because so random, so disturbingly senseless. Confronted with such brute unpredictability, it is natural to pine for safety from future harm, and to especially fear the injury that potentially visits us again out of the unanticipatable darkness of unreason. It is also natural to turn to our politicians for reassurance since they style themselves as legislative saviors, immediately promising, however promiscuously, to ensure that capricious, untameable evil will never happen again.

The issues immediately raised are now as predictable as the atrocities they respond to are unpredictable: gun control, the public management of mental health, police enforcement strategies. And so even before the process of bereavement has begun, a wonkish war is waged on this or that imminently curable social disease, vowing to eradicate forever what hitherto presented itself as a permanent feature of the human condition. The bureaucratic sensibility wants to erase evil like an errant pencil mark and sees the the exacting science of politics as the ultimate solvent of moral ugliness, our human stain. This callow naivete explains our endless wars on human floundering: the war on poverty, drugs, the war on war itself, all in the service of our ultimate liberation from these burdens.

The crux of the modern ethos is technological control, what the French philosopher Rene Descartes called the “mastery and possession of nature”. The spirit of technocratic management is offended by the scattershot character of mortal risk, wild forces that threaten us and remain stubbornly resistant to our governance. It neglects the wise counsel of the great Russian dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn who remarked that the “dividing line between good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being”. It forgets the greatest lesson of the 20th century: that the impulse to engineer the tragic out of human nature has itself produced more tragedy than anything else.

Human tragedy, then, is a tempting source of political opportunism. In Federalist #48, James Madison notes the problem succinctly: “The legislative department is every where extending the sphere of its activity and drawing all power into its impetuous vortex.” The pain of tragic loss stokes our vulnerability and excites the ambition of lawmakers, always seeking justifications for their political agendas. But the impulse to legislate away our trepidation is not only philosophically obtuse but morally repulsive, even predatory. They respond to the feral exploitation of the defenseless with an urbane, sophistic exploitation of their own.

What then is the proper role of statesmen in response to the unspeakable? It is their job to steward the process of justice as best as they can, sublimating our natural desire for righteous vengeance into the dispassionate machinations of judicial process. They should lead us over foreboding emotional terrain to grieving, and slowly, respectfully, encourage their citizens to unharness their hidden reserves of mercy and forgiveness. Out of inconsolable despair the only opportunity they should discover is for greater civic solidarity.

Evil is described in the Bible as directionless, personified in the meandering of the devil. When God asks Satan, in the Book of Job, where he has been he responds: “From going to and fro on the earth, and from walking up and down on it”. Goodness, however, is always described as purposeful, and in the grand sense of God’s goodness, providentially designed. The bottomless mystery of human consciousness harbors dark recesses that cannot be fully understood or regulated, that transcend the limits of political affairs. The best we can do is take consolation in the fact that the same irreducible mystery, our obstinate defiance of facile explanation, is the abiding fount of our dignity as well. Our politicians should learn to chasten their attempts at political leadership with humility in the face of these insuperable bounds.

Ivan Kenneally is the Editor in Chief of the Daily Witness.

Category: Featured, Philosophical Asides