Two Americas
01-02-2007, 10:25 PM
Our Story
Since the last century the material conditions of most people in the West and some other places have become better. There are more clothes, houses, food. We can't know whether we are now happier, but it's sure that we do not think we are.
In the past people found ways to explain their good and bad times. The explanations were stories because they gave meaning to what they described. They appeared in language: coloured words, drove idioms, prescribed rational language and evoked poetry. The story was served up on plates and eaten. It was worn. It was beaten into weapons. People lived and died for it.
A culture's story is a plot which binds its people to their place and means of existence. It gives life meaning and so it is the source of judgment. It isn't reason that makes us human, it's imagination. Einstein's reason is a more complicated form of the reasoning of a rat. But no rat – no animal – ever imagines. Animals have no stories.
The child who never told stories would be a human shell. If it did not imagine, it could not reason. Stories structure our minds. In fact we are our story, it's what we live. And as it relates us to the world, the imagination that creates the story is logical and disciplined – more so than reason. We used to call this logic fate, and thought the gods owned the story. Really it is our story and we are the storytellers. When stories lose their logic – when things are too chaotic to be shaped by the story – the storytellers go mad.
Stories let us live and create civilizations, but they concern a wound. One reason for this is that we are limited and mortal. But because stories tell of a wound, if we cure the wound we die and civilizations fall. Only madness and discipline are left.
Without the real world there would be no story, but without the story there would be no real world. Always the story placed daily life in a larger frame so that people could find meaning for all things. Because they told stories they were able to farm and escape starvation. But stories were told in a time of scarcity and need (which was another part of the wound). When a story tells of a need it must also tell of justice. Justice is the desire if the imagination.
The story told in need must have a Utopia, a heaven in earth or sky. There could be no stories or human beings without Utopia. But suppose there was no scarcity? Suppose we were so affluent that we could say we were all better off (we might even postpone death) – how would the story change? The gods would no longer own it and its plot would not be justice. It would be owned by the administration and its plot would be law and order.
Affluence abolishes need and with it the common-sense 'reason' for discord and crime. Yet these things continue. Why? The wound has stopped being part of the cure and become our disease. More and more we will use criminals, the asocial, the unregimented, as the medieval ages used heretics. They burnt them. The imagination is very logical and that is why step by step, prison by prison, law by law we return to the age of barbarism.
The story told in our lifetime of affluence concerns not creation but consumption – the frantic consumption we need to maintain the economy. The story no longer relates us to the real world but turns in on itself and shuts out reality. Now there is no Utopia, no heavenly or earthly city of justice. There is no eternity, not even a tomorrow. The story becomes a repeated 'now' and justice mere political convenience. But because the imagination is logical it knows that this 'now' is a living death. That is the present state of our minds. The real world breaks down and we invent a world of fantasy and violence.
We begin to lose our humanity. The affluent Utopia becomes a prison. In earlier times stories of gods and demons related their people to their world in a more human way than our supermarkets and machines relate us to ours. Perhaps we will go on being less cruel but we are no longer the guides to our own existence. Our stories are obsessed with the appearance of justice but not its reality. Justice must always question itself. But the criminal-and-detective ethos of our newspapers, TV, films and stages – the ethos that haunts us – asks only 'who dunnit.' It seeks victims, it does not define justice.
To conceive of justice yet question it – not bind it in fetters of law and conformity – was the story's most vital thread. It civilized us. And we have lost it. Our obsessive stories make justice mechanical and try to galvanize it with violence and sentimentality. The two always go together.
Once the story related the community to the world. But the consumer consumes alone. Our democracy sustains itself by systematically de-democratizing the people. Justice flourishes in communities which know how to question justice and recreate it. If there is no community, no society, there is no justice. The economy grows, the means of material well-being and happiness increase – yet socially we are sicker. Our affluence is a higher form of poverty. In the past, the story searched for truth, now we search for lies. And so our angst will turn into terror and escapades of sickening communal violence.
Just as our democracy de-democratizes people, religion becomes the enemy of God. It needs the Devil to explain away 'evil,' not a God of justice. The regimentation of education is another part of the dehumanization. Capitalism is a human perversion. It forces the imagination to consent to a world run for the sake of the market. We slip into the past.
Drama is the fullest version of the story because it most directly re-enacts our situations and tensions. Consumer democracy saturates us in drama because it must coerce imagination into creating its fake reality. Once, all stories allowed some freedom; consumerism allows less and less. Our drama - our theater – is part of this corruption, deeply involved in the work of de-democratization. It takes the great questions and trivializes them.
Those who make the story trivial and false – who do not allow justice to question itself – corrupt justice. But because the imagination is logical, it seeks justice even more when it is denied. The imagination must seek to create the world as it is, not as market democracy wants it to be. That is what makes us human. But often the imagination seeks blindly, reacts without understanding, and the chaos worsens. There is conflict in us and in society. Words change their meanings, crime becomes law, violence becomes policy, and we have no way – no story, no drama – of stopping it. A world of misery opens before us.
The question is not whether in the next hundred years there will be a new Auschwitz and a new Hiroshima. There will be. The question is only what new names will be made famous and what new horrors will be done there.
This will be because our democracy corrupts drama- makes false the story we need to create ourselves.
Edward Bond
The Hidden Plot
Methuen Publishing, 2000
thanks to Enfant Terrible
Since the last century the material conditions of most people in the West and some other places have become better. There are more clothes, houses, food. We can't know whether we are now happier, but it's sure that we do not think we are.
In the past people found ways to explain their good and bad times. The explanations were stories because they gave meaning to what they described. They appeared in language: coloured words, drove idioms, prescribed rational language and evoked poetry. The story was served up on plates and eaten. It was worn. It was beaten into weapons. People lived and died for it.
A culture's story is a plot which binds its people to their place and means of existence. It gives life meaning and so it is the source of judgment. It isn't reason that makes us human, it's imagination. Einstein's reason is a more complicated form of the reasoning of a rat. But no rat – no animal – ever imagines. Animals have no stories.
The child who never told stories would be a human shell. If it did not imagine, it could not reason. Stories structure our minds. In fact we are our story, it's what we live. And as it relates us to the world, the imagination that creates the story is logical and disciplined – more so than reason. We used to call this logic fate, and thought the gods owned the story. Really it is our story and we are the storytellers. When stories lose their logic – when things are too chaotic to be shaped by the story – the storytellers go mad.
Stories let us live and create civilizations, but they concern a wound. One reason for this is that we are limited and mortal. But because stories tell of a wound, if we cure the wound we die and civilizations fall. Only madness and discipline are left.
Without the real world there would be no story, but without the story there would be no real world. Always the story placed daily life in a larger frame so that people could find meaning for all things. Because they told stories they were able to farm and escape starvation. But stories were told in a time of scarcity and need (which was another part of the wound). When a story tells of a need it must also tell of justice. Justice is the desire if the imagination.
The story told in need must have a Utopia, a heaven in earth or sky. There could be no stories or human beings without Utopia. But suppose there was no scarcity? Suppose we were so affluent that we could say we were all better off (we might even postpone death) – how would the story change? The gods would no longer own it and its plot would not be justice. It would be owned by the administration and its plot would be law and order.
Affluence abolishes need and with it the common-sense 'reason' for discord and crime. Yet these things continue. Why? The wound has stopped being part of the cure and become our disease. More and more we will use criminals, the asocial, the unregimented, as the medieval ages used heretics. They burnt them. The imagination is very logical and that is why step by step, prison by prison, law by law we return to the age of barbarism.
The story told in our lifetime of affluence concerns not creation but consumption – the frantic consumption we need to maintain the economy. The story no longer relates us to the real world but turns in on itself and shuts out reality. Now there is no Utopia, no heavenly or earthly city of justice. There is no eternity, not even a tomorrow. The story becomes a repeated 'now' and justice mere political convenience. But because the imagination is logical it knows that this 'now' is a living death. That is the present state of our minds. The real world breaks down and we invent a world of fantasy and violence.
We begin to lose our humanity. The affluent Utopia becomes a prison. In earlier times stories of gods and demons related their people to their world in a more human way than our supermarkets and machines relate us to ours. Perhaps we will go on being less cruel but we are no longer the guides to our own existence. Our stories are obsessed with the appearance of justice but not its reality. Justice must always question itself. But the criminal-and-detective ethos of our newspapers, TV, films and stages – the ethos that haunts us – asks only 'who dunnit.' It seeks victims, it does not define justice.
To conceive of justice yet question it – not bind it in fetters of law and conformity – was the story's most vital thread. It civilized us. And we have lost it. Our obsessive stories make justice mechanical and try to galvanize it with violence and sentimentality. The two always go together.
Once the story related the community to the world. But the consumer consumes alone. Our democracy sustains itself by systematically de-democratizing the people. Justice flourishes in communities which know how to question justice and recreate it. If there is no community, no society, there is no justice. The economy grows, the means of material well-being and happiness increase – yet socially we are sicker. Our affluence is a higher form of poverty. In the past, the story searched for truth, now we search for lies. And so our angst will turn into terror and escapades of sickening communal violence.
Just as our democracy de-democratizes people, religion becomes the enemy of God. It needs the Devil to explain away 'evil,' not a God of justice. The regimentation of education is another part of the dehumanization. Capitalism is a human perversion. It forces the imagination to consent to a world run for the sake of the market. We slip into the past.
Drama is the fullest version of the story because it most directly re-enacts our situations and tensions. Consumer democracy saturates us in drama because it must coerce imagination into creating its fake reality. Once, all stories allowed some freedom; consumerism allows less and less. Our drama - our theater – is part of this corruption, deeply involved in the work of de-democratization. It takes the great questions and trivializes them.
Those who make the story trivial and false – who do not allow justice to question itself – corrupt justice. But because the imagination is logical, it seeks justice even more when it is denied. The imagination must seek to create the world as it is, not as market democracy wants it to be. That is what makes us human. But often the imagination seeks blindly, reacts without understanding, and the chaos worsens. There is conflict in us and in society. Words change their meanings, crime becomes law, violence becomes policy, and we have no way – no story, no drama – of stopping it. A world of misery opens before us.
The question is not whether in the next hundred years there will be a new Auschwitz and a new Hiroshima. There will be. The question is only what new names will be made famous and what new horrors will be done there.
This will be because our democracy corrupts drama- makes false the story we need to create ourselves.
Edward Bond
The Hidden Plot
Methuen Publishing, 2000
thanks to Enfant Terrible