"…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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