Seventy years later and this literary short story is still relevant, as it is with true art, at times is a perfect refection of the collective human psyche.
In 1924, a Nobel Prize winning Swedish author, Par Lagerkvist, wrote a short story titled, A Hero’s Death. The story proposed a somewhat unpalatable notion that may have shaken the sensibilities of some of his readers at the time, but was, nonetheless, visionary in its short, simple plot. When I first read the story some 70 years later, in The Marriage Feast, a collection of Lagerkvist’s short stories, I was immediately struck by a subtle, prodding notion that, in the profound sense of dread he conjures through the fate of the Hero, that there was something prophetic in its reveal; something of a basic truth of the tendencies of human consciousness, and how we are drawn inexorably to the spectacle of horrific events and the demise of others.
In his story, Lagerkvist reveals our penchant for spectacle. “In a town where the people never seemed to get enough amusement a committee had engaged a man who was to balance on his head up on the church spire and then fall down and kill himself. He was to have 500,000 for doing it. In all levels of society, all spheres, there was keen interest in this undertaking; the tickets were snapped up in a few days and it was the sole topic of conversation. Everyone thought it was a very daring thing to do. But then, of course, the price was in keeping. It was none too pleasant to fall and kill yourself, and from such a height too…”
Now decades later, after watching the end of the Donald Trump presidential legacy, it seems Democracy, and the notion of what ideals collective culture holds to be true, are eroding by a seeming inability to stop ourselves stumbling into emotional chaos, like moths careening headlong into the flame.
Money has become the prime driver behind collective policy, law and regulation in western culture (North America); as well in peoples’ lives generally. Notions of human equity, universal civil rights; equitable, sustainable means of production to provide for necessary governance; progressive, functional foreign policy, and our orientation to culture and ourselves, has deteriorated, rather than propagated. The present result in the US, under the Trump government – that is, the seeming recent deterioration of ideals, rampant and intentional disinformation efforts and use of media networks to fracture, divide and raise the pitch of opposing forces to the breaking point, seems to have unfolded rather quickly – certainly since the 2016 election – in a very visible way. It was rather like watching a catastrophic train wreck in slow motion: there was nothing to be done, but sit back and watch with increasing horror and helplessness.
Notions of human equity, universal civil rights; equitable, sustainable means of production to provide for necessary governance; progressive, functional foreign policy, and our orientation to culture and ourselves, has deteriorated, rather than propagated.
On the grand scale, four years is not much time for the intensity of the situation to build as it did, but it almost certainly reveals vast dissent that has been present and building over time – decades, if not a century or more – issues underpinning divergent and divisive ideas about what America should be, what it should do, and how it should conduct itself: the original ideal – the Constitution, which reads definitively the intent of the document – apparently has been interpreted and applied in vastly different ways, resulting in seemingly diametrically opposed political ideologies, which seem to be given very little hope of finding common ground among them.
Can the situation be repaired or improved? Boiling it down to its lowest common denominator: What is the role of government in society? What is government intended to do for the people it governs? Is government intended to be fair and equitable to all, or just some? If so, who benefits and who does not?
Does the public maintain expectations about how its government representatives conduct themselves? If so, how are these expectations enforced? Are there effective levers of interaction between public and public representatives that serve as checks and balances if the train goes off the rails? Does the public will dictate and inform government policy, or is government policy and regulation informed by corporate/industrial lobby, therefore informed more by the need for economic growth, rather than social equity? Is there a balance between the two? Is the present form of economic growth sustainable?
The massive division that remains must somehow be addressed, to find common ground and a workable outcome. We are allegedly the smartest creatures on the planet…