Transcript:
This is Shaun McMillan, and this is the Best Class Ever.
Last week we spoke about the utility of rest and entertainment as a way to deal with uncertainty. But to wield the real power of storytelling you must learn how to tell stories. For we are all telling stories all the time. Not just to others, but to ourselves.
The Magic of Storytelling
There is great power in storytelling. In fact it just might be one of the most powerful weapons human beings have against all of the challenges in life. We may have very little control over what happens to us in this world, and we will face some terrible monsters. Just when we are beginning to make progress we may suddenly find ourselves completely swept off our feet by unexpected failures, betrayal by loved ones, natural catastrophes, the injustice of indifferent economic systems, or simply being repeatedly unable to overcome our own weaknesses which lead to personal failures and humiliation. But what is amazing about us is that despite the fact that you are so often outmatched and overwhelmed, there seems to be no limit to how much you can endure and overcome. You repeatedly get back up, try again and again, and despite all evidence to the contrary, you manage to maintain hope for a better future.
It almost doesn’t even matter what happens to us. What matters is the story we tell ourselves about what happens to us.
The Difference Between a Good Story & a Great Story
A terrible story is one that captures your attention but doesn’t teach you anything. Stories can be so meaningful so why waste our time with something so unsatisfying?
A good story is one that captures your attention and leaves you with a lesson you can apply to future problems. But a great story is one that not only captures your attention and leaves you with a good moral lesson, but a story that introduces a paradox or two deeply conflicted philosophies. Maybe the hero believes in one philosophy but the villain believes in the opposite philosophy. The harder it is to say which is correct, the better the story. You know both have some validity but you also also know that they cannot both simultaneously be true. It should seem, at least on the surface, inherently contradictory thus forcing you to think more deeply. This irony perfectly captures the fundamental predicament of the human situation. It leaves you with a deeper problem to think about, not just some simple solution. Not only does it entertain and feel meaningful, but it also adds that third layer of mysteriousness. It provides us with a deep puzzle to think about and discuss with friends.
There is an art to storytelling but to what purpose should we use these powerful techniques? In the commercial world storytelling is used to sell products and promote brand names in the form of marketing. In the realm of politics storytelling is used to promote ideologies. Politicians often present themselves as saviors and paint their political opponents as weak ineffectual villains. This kind of rhetoric that fails to take the opponent’s philosophy seriously is nothing more than shallow one sided propaganda. By failing to take both sides seriously it oversimplifies the problem to sell us on oversimplified solutions. Ideas that are easy to present, spread very quickly, but fail to really solve problems in the long run. Simply saying we are good and they are evil brings out our ancient tribal tendencies.
Great storytellers are able to capture the full complication of the human situation by presenting totally different views as entirely valid even if somewhat contradictory. By showing that both sides contain some evil and some good, just as each human heart also contains some good and some evil, storytellers can produce a far more engaging experience for the audience.
This is why the stories of the Bible, Shakespeare, and the greatest literature is worth revisiting time and time again. Each time you experience these stories you discover some new layer of depth. Even if you revisit the same story that you read before, if you yourself have changed, your insights into the story also change to reveal layers of depth you couldn’t see before.
So let’s look at some of the conflicting philosophies presented in some of the greatest works.
Introducing Shakespeare
As a young child I was given a 400 page children’s Bible that went through and told a brief version of the Bible’s heroes. I read through all 400 pages within a year when I was in elementary school and so I began to read the actual Bible. In the Old Testament I found some very mature adult entertainment. Israel and its surrounding empires were like a foreign world.
In the Old Testament we have stories from each time period within the 4000 years. From Adam & Eve all the way up to the minor prophets, we have stories that are really old and stories from up to 400 years before Jesus came to a Roman ruled Palestine. But the New Testament which began 2000 years ago, only gives us stories from that first century after Jesus lived and died. But did history stop there? Have there been no wise or foolish kings since then? No religious wars? No foolhardy leaders willing to gamble the fate of great peoples or courageously defy empires? Of course there have been, so where can we find those stories?
It is for this reason that I have sought out great literature depicting the grand narratives of kings, religious wars, empires, and epic dramas from among the last 2000 years of history. And the single most popular body of classical literature apart from the Bible is the body of plays by William Shakespeare. So today let’s look at his historical plays about Roman Caesars and Christian kings.
Conflicted Themes
Q: Do Great Men Make History or Does History Make Great Men?
In Shakespeare plays about Rome, it looks like he was exploring the contradictory idea of whether great men make history, or history makes great men. As a dramatist Shakespeare is working so hard to put important historical figures in very difficult situations that could alter the course of history. There’s something deeply meaningful about seeing an individual make a high stakes decision. In his exploration of these powerful political figures I am sure Shakespeare would love to think that each person’s decisions do ultimately decide the fate of their nations, but despite Shakespeare’s protagonists best efforts, they seem unable to stop the tide of destiny despite their courageous attempts to alter history.
In Julius Caesar for example, even the assassination of one of history’s most powerful men does not stop the Roman Republic from becoming a tyrannical empire. For 400 years Rome had been a Republic. A republic is NOT ruled not by one dictator, but by a sophisticated system of political representatives. Ambitious citizens could aspire to become military leaders. Property owners called Patricians could aspire to become Senators. The poorest citizens, known as Plebeians, had a representative called the Tribune. The highest position of power was divided up among two or three consuls. A consul’s term was only one year, so it was a system that encouraged leaders to achieve at least one major military conquest before their year was up. At any one time you had many military leaders who had already held the position and could offer advice or even replace whoever was currently in power. But over the course of 400 years these successful conquests made the rich richer, leading to a level of decadence that inevitably led to corruption.
In this story, the protagonists see Julius Caesar’s unchallenged authority as a threat to the Republic. As Cassius says to his fellow conspirator Brutus,
“Men at some time are masters of their fates. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.”
Cassius
In other words, the problem is not that our elected leader is quickly becoming a tyrant, but that we as citizens do nothing to stop him.
Though their plan is one of betrayal, they are heroic in that they boldly stand up against all the social and moral pressures of society and risk everything to commit to a deed that they hope will alter the tide of history. It’s the idea that fortune favors the bold. Just listen to the way Shakespeare says this through his character’s dialogue.
“There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat;
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.”
After publicly assassinating Caesar and presenting their reasons to the citizens it appears at first as though they might succeed. Yet, in the end, all their efforts only seem to delay the inevitable rule by one tyrant by one generation. If anything it seems to have cemented the fate of the Roman Republic thus turning it into the Roman empire. As the conspirators themselves say,
We all stand up against the spirit of Caesar,
And in the spirit of men there is no blood.
Oh, that we then could come by Caesar’s spirit
And not dismember Caesar
In other words, they are Roman citizens who refuse to be lead by a tyrant. But if only they could kill the idea or spirit of Caesar without having to kill his body.
Yet in the end, they cannot kill the idea of rule by Caesar, even if they killed his body.
These acts eventually lead to a civil war, which Shakespeare dramatizes in another play called, Antony and Cleopatra. We see Julius Caesar’s son Octavius take over all of Rome who later became known as Caesar Augustus. Caesar Augustus is the wise old Caesar depicted in the opening of the famous film titled, Gladiator. So is it true? Can heroes at the right moment with just enough courage boldly catch the opportunity and change the course of history?
Despite what Shakespeare as a dramatist might express through his beautifully crafted dialogue and the bold actions of his protagonists, he does not ultimately make it clear whether we are able to change the course of history or not. His version of history makes great arguments for both sides.
Classical Antiquity Meet Christianity
Shakespeare lived during the Renaissance, a movement in which Christians were rediscovering the epic achievements of the ancient Greeks & Romans. The artists found amazing Greek sculptures that idealized the human form, epic poems displaying the valor of epic human warriors, the engineers found inspiration in Greek architecture, Roman arches, and aqueducts, the greatest thinkers of the day revisited the writings of Golden age Greek philosophers like Plato and Aristotle. These epic achievements of classical antiquity revealed a humanistic ideal to aspire to. But how could these Pagan ideals be reconciled with Christianity, a religion that offered humility as its greatest virtue, provided hope to slaves, and promised eternal punishment for the same acts of passion that were upheld as courageous when seen in the Greco-Roman gods and their epic heroes?
Next Lesson
To be honest, I don’t know Shakespeare’s comedies very well. But we are all at least vaguely familiar with Shakespeare’s tragedies, even if we have not read them. Their ideas have been revisited time and time again through more contemporary books and films. And though we may find the more contemporary dramas much easier to digest, it is important to note that Shakespeare’s original plays have stood the test of time because they really were that entertaining, well written, and meaningful. They say that the genius of Shakespeare was that he knew how to give the crowds what they wanted, sex, humor, violence, and drama, but he knew how to do it while also providing very sophisticated and meaningful lessons about the human predicament. These are the same fundamental issues we still face. So next week we will take a look at MacBeth, Hamlet, and how they relate to more modern history.
