"…A Tale Told By An Idiot"
By Stan Moody
26 September, 2007
Countercurrents.org
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.Macbeth, 5. 5
MacBeth had it wrong. It is not life that is "but a walking shadow." It is rather we players in the drama of life. In the words of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "Life is real! Life is earnest!/ And the grave is not its goal;/ Dust thou art to dust returnest,/ Was not spoken of the soul." More profoundly, he adds, "Not enjoyment, and not sorrow/ Is our destined end or way;/ But to act that each tomorrow/ Find us farther than to-day."
Logic, mathematics and, I suppose, sociology are sciences of the interaction between fixed and variable elements. If we view ourselves as fixed elements in a variable world spinning out of control, we justify any action to restore order. That is the stuff of which wars and lawsuits are made.
MacBeth desperately condemns life as the variable element in his contorted, murderous existence. In fact, he himself has spun out of control in an objective, stable universe that requires that the cumulative acts of the players be moving in a positive, contributing direction. The variable element – the human spirit – becomes the fixed reference point for the self-absorbed.The difference between MacBeth and Longfellow is that Longfellow sees life as the unfolding of objective truth, demanding that our acts be measured by their impact on that truth. To "…act that each tomorrow find us farther than to-day" is to see ourselves, not as islands, but as bound together in a common mission – the pursuit of and defenders of life.
Lately, with the explosion of blogging on the Internet, my sense is that the Internet is fast becoming a forum for those who, like MacBeth, are standing on quicksand, lashing out at a world that fails to welcome their self-styled advances. The blogs are replete with the simplistic rants of the unstable but strangely confident – truly a "tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
C.S. Lewis, in his struggle over the compatibility of Hell with God's justice and mercy (The Great Divorce), came to the conclusion that Hell, rather than being a punishment, is the act of a benevolent God who allows human beings to control their own destinies. God, as the fixed, objective element, says finally to those insisting on their own will, "Thy will be done."
We have, therefore, in the interaction between people and objective truth (life), the division of humanity into "good" and "evil." The "good" are those who believe in their unchallenged ideologies and little else; the "evil" are the rest of us to varying degrees. It is the "good" who fight to restore an out-of-control world to their own image by wrenching it from the hands of the "evil.
The agenda is the conquering of the fixed element by the variable.
9/11, then, rather than being the insane acts of the few became, in our worldview, the evidence of MacBeth's vision of life, a "poor player that walks and struts his hour upon the stage." The world can only stabilize when the "good" crush the efforts of the "evil." The problem is, of course, that the very process of eradicating "evil" in others only highlights our own.
"Evil" becomes a moving target. First, it safely retreats to the mountains of Pakistan, emerging in another forum at another time. Then it is hanged in Baghdad. It appears in places like Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and Fallujah. It is imprisoned behind the "Wall of Separation" on the West Bank or the bank of the Rio Grande. As the "good" eradicate the "evil," a strange phenomenon occurs. The world becomes more unstable, requiring a renewed advance by the "good."
Finally, the champions of "good" sacrifice their lives and reputations. We learn the hard way that there is enough "evil" to go around for all of us.
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