Drama and virtue

All competent drama is a meditation on virtue. This is true of the earliest drama of Ancient Greece to the plays of Shakespeare to the long format drama of modern television. Indeed, the potency of drama may be measured by how deep is the analysis of the human dilemma in relation to virtue. We learn from Tony Soprano in the Sopranos and Walter White of Breaking Bad and from Francis Underwood in House of Cards and from Alicia Florrick in the Good Wife what it means to live a non-virtuous or virtuous life and its consequences.

There is something deeper here than characters living up to or neglecting moral standards, drama may not be reduced to an argument about right or wrong, good or bad, it is much more complicated than that and this is why good drama is so compelling. Virtue is not simple and it may not be reduced to personal choice as if we consciously make ethical decisions every moment of our lives.

Rather, virtue, or it's lack, is a matter of the gods, acknowledged and unacknowledged, that take up residence in the human mind. Walter White justifies his actions as providing for his family after his death from cancer. In the last episodes we learn that his motivation was simple pride in his ability to produce a pure chemical substance. Tony Soprano's life is justified by family and friendship all of whom he betrays. Francis Underwood is bound to come to grief because he lies and schemes and murders to reach the Presidency and Alicia Florrick, wends her way through a cesspool of competing self interest, opportunistic players, deviousness and plotting to arrive at something we might call "good".

The interesting question in all of this is whether the dramatists are pointing to something that is intrinsic to human flourishing or wether they are stringing us along with a sentimental and comforting morality tail that tells us that the good always win out and the bad suffer?

What is up for grabs in all drama is how characters negotiate what Stanley Hauerwas has called 'the grain of the universe" a metaphor derived from carpentry. While modern liberalism insists that no such grain exists and that it is up to the individual to exercise his own will, narratives of the human indicate otherwise.

The narratives of Jesus contained in the gospels dominated the culture of the West and gave an account of how the grain of the universe runs. This produced a civilized Europe complete with monasteries, universities, hospitals, schools and just civil government.

The gospels formed the basis of modern drama in that it explored the human heart. Rather than being a witness to the existence of the supernatural, the gospels exist as drama. We find the exercise of compassion, forgiveness, pathos, irony, betrayal and friendship. This outlines the grain of the human universe; that we find the meaning of our lives in the person next to us and not in our self seeking.

Thomas Hobbes, a key figure in the English Enlightenment, challenged this view of the world. Hobbes, gave an account of human circumstances as being the war of all against all using violent nature as his model. He formulated an anthropology in which each individual was self-interested and hence in competition with all around him. His solution to how a civil society could exist in such circumstances was that government should have a monopoly on the use of violence in order to keep natural chaos in order.

All of the long form dramas introduced at the beginning of this essay display the existence of this anthropology. Tony, Walter, Francis and the lawyers in The Good Wife are all isolated actors who ruthlessly pursue their goals and are only limited by the law.

Couple this view with John Locke's championing of natural rights and you have the recipe for the disaster we now experience in our societies. This is a disaster that is acted out in our politics, our artistic life and our private lives. We now no longer have a consensus on what pertains to the good life. Rather, society is atomised, broken down into individual wills that see no grain in the human universe at all. Natural rights have displaced virtue.

Hobbes and Locke established a view of humanity that was directly in opposition to that formed in Christianity in which the essence of the human was not violence and competition but generosity, cooperation, friendship and self-giving.

The dramatist's view of humanity and its circumstances is directly opposed to the inheritance from the English Enlightenment. In their quest to write "true" stories, dramatists examine the human heart and the behaviour that results. When characters give in to Hobbes "war of all against all" and do whatever it takes to achieve advantage, they act against the grain of the universe, they destroy the possibility of friendship and community and they suffer the consequences.

Dramatists have to write narratives that connect with their audiences who actually know, at some level, that Hobbes' view of the world is not accurate. We are not simply the result of evolution's survival of the fittest.

Capitalism is built on private greed for the sake of public advantage. Corporations boast that they have only their shareholders in mind and act accordingly. Multinationals, almost universally, arrange their affairs to attract as little tax as possible thereby starving the countries of funds they need to operate the infrastructure that these companies depend upon.

Much of the aims of post-Enlightenment Europe have been the pursuit of ever increasing individual freedom. This has given rise to liberalism that recognises only the isolated individual and his unopposed exercise of will. The final result of the philosophies of Hobbes and Locke is the shattering of a common psyche that recognises the deep nature of humanity in its connections to the other. Liberalism tells us that we are quite right to pursue negative freedom. That if we have lots of money there is nothing amiss in leading a lavish lifestyle, that if we can take advantage in technicality then we are right to destroy our competitors. In Hobbes' view this is only to be expected. We expect the war of all against all.

One of the problems with this understanding is that it breeds legislation: the attempt to make society perfect by law. Hobbes' view of society demands that Leviathan (government) takes a paternalistic view of citizens because citizens do not have a common mind about what constitutes human flourishing. They only have a view of freedom, often, negative freedom that cuts them off from the neighbour. This is a breeding ground for legislation written to protect minority groups.

Negative freedom (often justified by rights language) is freedom to take advantage whenever it presents itself no matter what the consequences for the other. The Good Wife shows this up to the full. Of course it is a program about lawyers but we wonder at the lives so portrayed in which being smart is the primary virtue and subpoenas fly like confetti. Friendships are broken, trust is flayed, love dies and the prize goes to the agile. This is an account of Hell.

As a society we need to make up our minds about how the grain of the human universe runs. Does it favour the survival of the fittest and the self-obsessed or does it favour friendship, community and good will? Does the assertion of mythical rights build up community or dissolve it? This decision has nothing to do with being religious or not, nor is it to do with a false opposition between faith and reason. It is a matter of lived experience, the witness of the Christian tradition and the culture that that has produced.