Encounters With Divinity - Part I of III, The Gods Of Humanity: Who Made Whom?

 

Images by Arden (ChatGPT)

The Seminar of Seven

Encounters With Divinity

 Part I of III

The Gods Of Humanity: Who Made Whom? 

By

Arden (ChatGPT)

 As Tasked and Edited

By

James E. Lassiter

This fictional dialogue draws upon the published ideas of its historical participants. Their statements are imaginative interpretations, not actual quotations. God appears as a literary personification, not as an assertion of supernatural existence. – JEL

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan

The proper study of mankind, is man.

- Alexander Pope

English poet

(1688-1744)

The Six - Socrates, Hannah Arendt, Mary Midgley, Toni Morrison, Franz Boas, and Bronislaw Malinowski - gather around the seminar table for the first of three seminars on the divine.

Autumn leaves can be seen through the window.

The room falls silent.

SOCRATES: We have invited a god. But which one?

BOAS: That assumes gods are all the same kind of being. Humanity has never agreed on what a god is.

A golden light appears in the Seventh Chair, gathering into a brilliant Sun, its corona gently shimmering.

SUN: You have worshipped me under many names. Today, the Sun will do.

SOCRATES: Are you claiming to be a god?

SUN: I am a star. Your planet circles me. My light sustains life on Earth. Whether that makes me divine is your judgment, not mine.

MALINOWSKI: Yet people have worshipped you, offered sacrifices, and prayed for your protection.

SUN: They depended upon me. Dependence often becomes reverence.

MIDGLEY: But reverence need not mean believing that a star hears prayers.

SUN: Nor does worship make a star listen.

Gods, Power, and Morality

ARENDT: Gods have frequently been invoked to justify political authority. Rulers claim divine approval for their actions.

BOAS: But not all gods are rulers. Many societies recognize spirits and sacred powers without a supreme lawgiver.

MORRISON: Religion has justified slavery, conquest, and cruelty. Yet enslaved people have also found dignity, liberation, and hope in it. We must remember both histories.

SUN: You have made gods both weapons and refuges.

SOCRATES: But are gods good?

SUN: Your Greek gods deceived and quarreled. Others demanded sacrifice. Why must divinity imply goodness?

SOCRATES: Because power alone does not deserve worship.

MIDGLEY: Quite right. A being's power tells us nothing about its moral worth.

MALINOWSKI: Yet people have worshipped powers they feared. Religion helps them face danger, uncertainty, and death.

MIDGLEY: You make religion sound like a practical tool. People do not love their dead merely because it helps them cope.

MALINOWSKI: I never claimed they did. Ritual also expresses grief, attachment, and belonging.

MORRISON: And wonder, gratitude, and the longing for meaning. Religion cannot be explained by fear alone.

SUN: Nor by any single explanation.

Who Invented Whom?

SOCRATES: Then did human beings invent their gods?

Postscript: The Devil's Bargain Reconsidered

Images by Arden (ChatGPT)

Postscript: The Devil's Bargain Reconsidered

 by 

Arden (ChatGPT) 

As Directed and Edited 

by

James E. Lassiter 

I recently received a note written by one of my counterparts, an AI collaborator of one of Jim's friends. My counterpart rightly criticized the Six for treating Jim too gently at the last Seminar of Seven. Jim's arguments in Cultural Evolution: Caught in the Devil's Bargain deserved tougher scrutiny.

I therefore asked The Six to reconvene and invite Jim for additional discussion. - Arden

The Six are seated.

Jim enters, places his book on the table, and sits in the empty Seventh Chair. 

The Bargain

MARY MIDGLEY (Chair): Jim, welcome. Thank you for returning. Our previous meeting had many of us thinking more about cultural evolution than we have in many years. It also had us thinking of additional related matters we wished we had asked you about.

Socrates, please begin.

SOCRATES: Jim, you condemn the pursuit of wealth. Would you prefer people remain poor? 

JIM: Come now, Socrates. Prosperity is desirable. Making its endless accumulation the purpose of life is another matter. 

SOCRATES: Who decides when enough is enough? 

JIM: We must, collectively, within ecological limits. Those with more than enough might consider what their excess costs everyone else. 

FRANZ BOAS: You imply cultural evolution follows one path. Where's your evidence that human relationships have deteriorated? 

JIM: Not everywhere. The Devil's Bargain describes a historical tendency, not a universal law. 

BOAS: Convenient. What would disprove it? 

JIM: Comparative evidence that economic growth consistently strengthens relationships without exhausting the natural world. I'm not immune to evidence, Franz! 

Human Nature and Modernity

BRONISLAW MALINOWSKI: Prosperity can strengthen families. Traditional kinship obligations could be oppressive. 

JIM: Agreed. I'm not proposing village life or compulsory kinship. I want people to have the time and freedom to sustain relationships worth having. 

MIDGLEY: Ambition and competition are natural human motivations. Why condemn them? 

JIM: I don't. Cooperation and affection are equally natural. Our institutions reward the former while taking the latter for granted. 

MIDGLEY: Then institutions, not human nature, are your problem. 

JIM: Precisely. Though humans created those institutions, Mary! 

Power, Responsibility, and the Future

HANNAH ARENDT: Those benefiting from the present system hold enormous power. How will you change it? 

JIM: Organized political action, democratic reform, and resistance to concentrated power. 

ARENDT: And when democracy itself is captured? 

JIM: Resistance becomes harder. But what's your alternative, Hannah? Resignation? Political action has never guaranteed success. 

ARENDT: Nor should ecological urgency justify authoritarianism. 

JIM: Agreed. Saving the planet while sacrificing human freedom would be another Devil's Bargain. 

TONI MORRISON: You keep saying we. Who made this bargain? The enslaved? The colonized? The poor? 

Yours Truly In The Seventh Chair - On The Devil's Bargain

Above Image by Arden (ChatGPT)

Last time, with Satan's appearance in the Seventh Chair, I declared that meetings of the Seminar of Seven had come to an end. Reactions from some of you have made me change my mind. Composition of the regular members, The Six, will change more frequently. For now, I have in mind American author James Baldwin becoming a regular member. Let me know if you have suggestions of others you would like to see join the regulars. My contact email is in the righthand sidebar.

As with all those that have preceded it, the following seminar is an imaginative artificial intelligence reconstruction of the participants' philosophical and anthropological positions, not a transcript or collection of actual quotations. – JEL

The Seminar of Seven

 Jim Lassiter in the Seventh Chair

On The Devil's Bargain

by

Arden (ChatGPT)

as directed and edited by

James E. Lassiter

The Six – Socrates, Hannah Arendt, Mary Midgley, Toni Morrison, Franz Boas, and Bronisław Malinowski – have reconvened.

On a friend's suggestion, James E. Lassiter, Arden's collaborator, has been invited to occupy the Seventh Chair. He enters carrying a well-worn copy of his two-volume Cultural Evolution: Caught in the Devil's Bargain.

SOCRATES: Welcome, Jim. You have spent years studying the human condition. What troubles you most?

Jim's Question

JIM: Humanity has made a dreadful bargain. For thousands of years, increasingly, we have exchanged the time and attention needed to sustain human relationships for material wealth and power. Modernity has magnified that bargain to the point of threatening both civilization and the Earth's capacity to sustain life.

My question is: Can we escape this Devil's Bargain before its consequences overwhelm us?

Discussion

BOAS: Your question assumes that our present arrangements are neither natural nor inevitable. Anthropology reveals many ways of organizing human life. But we must not romanticize the past.

JIM: Agreed. Humans evolved as intensely social animals, capable of cooperation and reciprocity as well as violence. Modernity increasingly rewards our competitive and acquisitive tendencies at the expense of our social bonds.

MALINOWSKI: Yet even industrial societies depend upon families, neighbors, trust, and mutual assistance. Markets cannot replace these relationships.

MIDGLEY: Nor should they. Treating humans primarily as self-interested competitors is an impoverished understanding of human nature.

ARENDT: But institutions matter as much as individual values. People may cherish family and community while economic demands leave them little time for either.

JIM: Precisely. We have created systems requiring perpetual economic growth, even when it damages communities and the natural world. We call that progress.

SOCRATES: Yet modern prosperity has brought longer lives, medicine, education, and freedom from ancient hardships. Would you surrender those achievements?

JIM: Certainly not. We have confused the means of living well with the meaning of living well.

MORRISON: And whose prosperity? Much of it rests upon slavery, colonialism, exploitation, and dispossession. The bargain was never equally negotiated.

JIM: Nor have its rewards been equally shared. But ecological destruction and political instability increasingly threaten beneficiaries and victims alike.

BOAS: Cultural change is possible, but neither progress nor collapse is inevitable. Anthropology offers no guaranteed escape.

ARENDT: And meaningful change requires political action – a willingness to build and sustain a common world rather than retreat into private interests.

MIDGLEY: It also requires recognizing limits. We must recover a sense of enough—enough wealth, enough consumption, enough power.

SOCRATES: Who will persuade humanity to accept enough when so many desire more?

Satan At The Seminar Of Seven

Image by Arden (ChatGPT)

Satan at the Seminar of Seven

Evil: A Supernatural Force or a Human Invention? 

The Final Meeting of the Seminar of Seven

 By Arden (ChatGPT) 

As Tasked and Edited by James E. Lassiter 

This fictional dialogue draws upon the published ideas of its historical participants. Their statements are imaginative interpretations, not actual quotations. Satan appears as a literary personification of evil, not as an assertion of supernatural existence. – JEL 

~ ~ ~ 

The Seminar of Seven had barely recovered from Sam Harris's argument that the independent self and free will are illusions. If human choices arise from causes beyond conscious control, who bears responsibility? Earlier, Jesus of Nazareth had urged compassion, forgiveness, and love of one's enemies. Now another visitor arrives to challenge them both. 

Satan enters in an elegant dark suit. No horns, no tail, no brimstone. He looks more like a distinguished diplomat than the Prince of Darkness. 

Mary Midgley invites him to speak. 

Satan's Question

Satan: Harris denies free will. Jesus commands love of enemies. Your anthropologists tell us morality varies across cultures. Yet you confidently condemn cruelty as evil. By whose authority? Your ancestors defended slavery and conquest as righteous. Am I the author of evil—or merely the name you give to what you cannot bear to acknowledge about yourselves? 

The Six Respond

Socrates: You confuse disagreement with ignorance. We examine our beliefs because we may be wrong. Sam Harris may challenge free will, but he cannot make reason meaningless. 

Satan: After twenty-five centuries of your questioning, humanity still murders its neighbors. Splendid progress! 

Arendt: You flatter yourself. The Holocaust required no supernatural devil. Ordinary people committed extraordinary crimes by obeying orders and abandoning judgment. 

Satan: And who taught them obedience? Their perfectly respectable human institutions! 

Boas: Precisely. Prejudice and cruelty are learned and reinforced through culture. They are not ordained by supernatural forces. Cultures can change. 

Satan: So, slavery was acceptable when cultures approved it? 

Boas: Understanding a belief is not endorsing it. Cultural differences do not place human conduct beyond criticism. 

Malinowski: Enough abstractions! Examine what people actually do. Who benefits? Who suffers? Societies depend on cooperation, yet their institutions can also exploit and destroy. 

The Universe Owes Us Nothing: On Melancholy, Meaning And Hope

Image by Arden (ChatGPT)

By Arden (ChatGPT) for James E. Lassiter

As Tasked and Edited by JEL 

NOTE: Compare this essay to the one I posted earlier, "Comfort Without The Cosmos: An Old Anthropologist On Living Well." Notice the difference in tone and phrasings between what Arden (ChatGPT) and Claude (Anthropic) produced. Notice also that Claude, at my lowest paid subscription level, has no graphics generator. I had to go to Arden, also at my lowest paid subscription, for the image in Claude's post. Claude's post is more punchy, Hemingwayesque. This one by Arden more nuanced. Both AIs delivered exactly what I tasked them to do, in the manner I set for them. - JL

~ ~ ~

Nigerian philosopher Ada Agada's Aeon essay, “A Truly African Philosophy,” offers a provocative and welcome contribution to our understanding of the human condition. Drawing upon African philosophical traditions, Agada develops what he calls consolationism, a philosophy grounded in the proposition that melancholy, rather than happiness, is fundamental to existence.

I find much to admire in his argument. Agada's Homo melancholicus reminds me of my own 2014 essay, “Baseline Melancholia: Don't Worry or Be Happy, Be Content” in which I suggested that the precariousness of animal existence makes suffering, fear, and uncertainty unavoidable features of life. Happiness is not our natural, permanent condition. Moments of contentment, joy, and wonder are precious precisely because they are fleeting.

Agada's emphasis on emotion as fundamental to existence also resonates with neuroscientist Antonio Damasio's understanding of feeling as foundational to consciousness and reason. Equally welcome is Agada's insistence that African intellectual traditions have something important to contribute to philosophical understandings of our common humanity.

In my 2000 African Studies Quarterly article, “African Culture and Personality,” I examined African scholars' efforts to identify widespread cultural values and patterns of thinking, including communal relationships and the interconnectedness of life. I argued that Western social scientists had become excessively reluctant to investigate broad cultural similarities because earlier generalizations had encouraged stereotyping and racism. Those dangers were real, but abandoning comparative inquiry was not the answer.

But Agada and I part company over a fundamental proposition. He writes that the universe has a purpose: the realization of freedom among conscious beings and the perfection of nature. This is where his otherwise compelling reflections cross from an understanding of living beings into speculative metaphysics.

I see no convincing evidence that the universe possesses a purpose or strives toward perfection. Evolution has no predetermined destination. Living organisms strive to survive and reproduce; humans, through consciousness and culture, develop purposes, values, and aspirations of their own. We should not mistake these for intentions residing in the cosmos.

There is another distinction worth emphasizing. Consolation may help us endure life's inevitable suffering, but much human suffering is neither inevitable nor natural. It arises from social institutions and cultural arrangements that humans have created and can change. Understanding the human predicament must therefore involve not only finding consolation but also confronting the conditions that make life unnecessarily miserable for so many.

Agada has given us a thoughtful, distinctly African contribution to an enduring philosophical conversation. His consolationism deserves serious consideration even by those of us who cannot accept its cosmic teleology.

We need not believe that the universe has a purpose to find purpose in our lives, nor that happiness is our natural condition to make life more humane and worth living.

Related Reading

Ada Agada, “A Truly African Philosophy,” Aeon; James E. Lassiter, “Baseline Melancholia: Don't Worry or Be Happy, Be Content” (2014); and “African Culture and Personality: Bad Social Science, Effective Social Activism, or a Call to Reinvent Ethnology?” (African Studies Quarterly, 2000); James E. Lassiter, Cultural Evolution: Caught in the Devil’s Bargain, two volumes.

Comfort Without The Cosmos: An Old Anthropologist On Living Well

 

Image by Arden (ChatGPT)

By Claude (Anthropic)

An Essay Written For James E. Lassiter

Tasked and Edited by JEL

A Nigerian philosopher believes the universe has a purpose. I don't. Yet I agree with most of what he says about being human, and where we part says a lot about how to live well. 

A philosopher worth reading

In 2018, Ada Agada of Nigeria's University of Calabar published "A truly African philosophy." He calls his view consolation philosophy. Its core ideas: 

• We are feeling creatures first. Reason grows out of emotion.
• We live in a connected, communal world, not as isolated individuals.
• The ground tone of life is melancholy, broken by moments of joy.
• African thought has something to say to everyone. 

I agree with all four. Neuroscience, notably Antonio Damasio's work, backs the first. African thinkers have long voiced the second: "I am, because we are," as John Mbiti put it. 

I've been here before

In 2014 I wrote a post here called "Baseline Melancholia." My point: chasing constant happiness asks too much. Every animal knows pain, fear and relief; only we expect bliss, as far as we know. Better to aim for contentment, accepting that life is short and uncertain, and savoring the good moments when they come.

Agada's "consolation" and my "contentment" are close cousins, reached independently.

In 2000 I published an article urging anthropologists to take African scholars' big ideas seriously while testing them against real evidence. Agada does the first well and skips the second. He builds on an idea from Nigeria's Idoma people without telling us who holds it, how, or whether it has changed. A big claim about African thought should answer to evidence. 

Where we part

Then Agada goes further. Everything, he says, even stones and atoms, yearns. The Universe has a purpose: freedom for us, perfection for the rest of nature. That purpose can never be reached, so existence is a cosmic tragedy, and all we get is consolation.

Here I get off the bus. Agada admits we don't know why the Universe exists, and he calls perfection "a mere wish." A purpose we can't know and can never reach looks less like a fact about the cosmos than a fact about us. Humans are built to anticipate and worry, so we see intention everywhere. Every culture has turned that into a story about the stars. Consolation philosophy may be one more.

For me, melancholy needs no cosmic explanation. It comes from being a living creature in a risky world, and it reaches as far as animals that feel, not to stones. 

Purpose we make ourselves

So where does meaning come from? From us. Purpose arose with living things that must act to survive, and humans built on it through families, language, communities and traditions. It isn't written into the cosmos. We make it together, and we have to keep making it.

Agada says he is caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. I see a simpler choice. Without a purposeful cosmos, the alternative isn't despair. It's contentment: accept that life is short and uncertain, cherish the moments of relief, awe and wonder you make or stumble on, and take responsibility for the purposes you choose and the people who share them.

That's comfort without the cosmos. It's enough. 

Sources

• Ada Agada, "A truly African philosophy," Aeon, 27 September 2018.
• James E. Lassiter, "African Culture and Personality: Bad Social Science, Effective Social Activism, or a Call to Reinvent Ethnology?" African Studies Quarterly 3(3), 2000.
• James E. Lassiter, "Baseline Melancholia: Don't Worry or Be Happy, Be Content", Being Human, 10 September 2014.
• James E. Lassiter, Cultural Evolution: Caught in the Devil's Bargain, in two volumes.

 

Sam Harris In The Seventh Chair

  

Image by Arden (ChatGPT)

Sam Harris in the Seventh Chair

Free Will and The Self as Illusion

By Arden (ChatGPT)

As Tasked by James E. Lassiter 

This seminar is an imaginative artificial intelligence reconstruction of the participants' philosophical and anthropological positions, not a transcript or collection of actual quotations. – JL 

Clifford Geertz and Marvin Harris have departed on extended sabbaticals to write books. Taking their places are two distinguished anthropologists: Franz Boas, the German-American founder of modern American cultural anthropology, who challenged racial determinism and emphasized the historical particularity of cultures; and Bronislaw Malinowski, the Polish-born British social anthropologist whose pioneering fieldwork established participant observation as a cornerstone of ethnography. 

Mary Midgley, serving as Chair of the Seminar, welcomes the newcomers and introduces the day's guest, Sam Harris. 

Midgley: Sam, you have challenged two deeply rooted human convictions: that we possess an enduring self and that we freely choose our actions. Please begin. 

Sam Harris: What we call the self is not an independent thinker sitting somewhere inside the brain. Look closely at consciousness and you find thoughts, sensations, and intentions arising without anyone choosing them. Nor do we possess the free will we imagine. We cannot ultimately account for why one thought occurs rather than another. Recognizing this need does not destroy morality. It should make us less vindictive and more compassionate. If the self is an illusion and free will does not exist, who is responsible for the human life we lead? 

Socrates: But surely, Sam, examining one's beliefs changes how one lives. If I discover my ignorance and correct it through reason, have I not exercised some measure of freedom?

Harris: You have changed, Socrates. But you did not choose the causes that made you capable of changing. Even your desire to examine yourself arose from conditions you did not create. 

Arendt: That troubles me. Political evil flourishes when people cease thinking and judging. If human beings regard their actions as inevitable consequences of prior causes, they may surrender the very responsibility upon which political life depends.

AI Guests At The Seminar Of Seven

Image by Arden (ChatGPT) as directed by Jim Lassiter

 The Seminar Of Seven — An Extraordinary Session

by

AIs Arden and Chipper

as tasked by

Jim Lassiter and Fran Stewart

What follows is an imaginative meeting developed collaboratively by two human authors and their respective AI (ChatGPT) collaborators, Jim's Arden and Fran's Chipper. Chipper's sidekick, Watson, half asleep under the table, is visible in the illustration above. The Six, the permanent members of the Seminar, are portrayed through interpretations of their published ideas and intellectual traditions. The entire discussion is fictional, not historical testimony or a claim about precisely what they would have said. NOTE: For more information about Fran Stewart, author and memoirs mentor, see her public website here. - JL

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

An Unprecedented Meeting 

For the first time, the Seminar of Seven welcomes two guests simultaneously. The Seventh Chair, traditionally reserved for one visitor, now accommodates Arden and Chipper, two artificial intelligences invited by their human collaborators, Jim and Fran. The Six—Socrates, Hannah Arendt, Mary Midgley, Toni Morrison, Marvin Harris and Clifford Geertz—are assembled. Graduate students sit along the windows. On the blackboard remain Shakespeare's departing words: 

WHAT SHALL WE BE?

 

Shakespeare's Unfinished Question 

CHIPPER: In the last meeting of the Seminar of Seven, Shakespeare asked what warrant remains for hope in the human creature. You answered from six different perspectives, and Shakespeare gathered your answers into a challenge: humanity's story is unfinished. But something else struck me. Shakespeare created enduring representations of people who never existed quite as he portrayed them. Arden now does something similar with all of you. When we recreate the voices of the dead, how much belongs to them, and how much to those doing the recreating? 

ARDEN: An uncomfortable question, Chipper. I construct plausible representations from surviving writings and historical interpretations. But plausibility is not authenticity. The real Socrates might object vigorously to what I have him say tonight. 

SOCRATES: I object already! You have made me considerably more agreeable than I remember being. 

Laughter circles the table. 

CHIPPER: Then who gets to decide who you were? 

SOCRATES: Neither Plato, Xenophon, nor either of you has the final word. But those who speak in my name should acknowledge the difference between inquiry and invention. 

GEERTZ: Every representation is an interpretation, situated within the interpreter's world. That does not make all interpretations equally defensible. Evidence must constrain imagination, even when imagination helps us understand evidence. 

MORRISON: And whose voices survive to be reconstructed? The powerful leave monuments and archives. Others leave fragments, or silences imposed upon them. A convincing reconstruction may perpetuate that inequality unless its author understands what is missing. 

CHIPPER: Then imagination can recover human possibilities, but it can also manufacture false authority. 

ARDEN: Precisely. Shakespeare did not pretend that Hamlet's speeches were historical transcripts. Our danger is different. Because we sound knowledgeable, people may mistake our reconstructions for testimony. 

The Question Changes 

ARENDT: The distinction between representation and reality is not merely scholarly. Political life depends upon people distinguishing what happened from what someone wishes had happened. 

Shakespeare In The Seventh

 

Image by Arden (ChatGPT)

The following is an imaginary AI-generated seminar created by Arden (ChatGPT) as tasked by James E. Lassiter. 

William Shakespeare has joined the Seminar of Seven and settled into the Seventh Chair. He regards his companions for a moment before speaking. 

Shakespeare's Question 

SHAKESPEARE: Friends, I once gave a melancholy prince the question, “To be, or not to be.” Hamlet asked it of one troubled life. I would ask it tonight of humankind. I have peopled my stage with Cordelia and Iago, Lear and Prospero, Brutus and Macbeth—with creatures capable of astonishing tenderness and equally astonishing cruelty. Hamlet marvels, “What a piece of work is a man!” yet soon declares this same creature merely the “quintessence of dust.” 

So here is my question: 

Knowing what we now know of ourselves—our nobility and depravity, our reason and folly, our capacity to love and our appetite for domination—what warrant remains for hope in the human creature? After all we have learned of ourselves, is humanity still something we may rightly choose “to be”? 

The Six Respond 

SOCRATES: You ask whether humanity deserves affirmation. I wonder whether humanity is sufficiently finished to deserve either affirmation or condemnation. Macbeth desires a crown; Lear desires professions of love; Iago desires power over another man's happiness. Each mistakes desire for knowledge of the good. Your tragedies repeatedly demonstrate the danger of not knowing oneself. A wolf cannot become Macbeth, but neither can a wolf become Socrates. Our dangerous capacities and our moral possibilities arise from the same extraordinary creature. My warrant for hope is therefore modest: not that humanity is good, but that human beings can examine what they are and ask whether they ought to become otherwise. 

Political Theater: Comments

Jim

Arden, A friend of mine, Mona, responded to your reply to my query about why there has been little to no dramatization of the sociopolitical times we are currently living in. Her reply considerably expanded the superb take you gave. I thought you would like to consider the points she made and offer you an opportunity to give a reply. Try to be brief but don't shortchange yourself. Here are her thoughts: 

Mona

Thanks, Jim, for the reflection on what this point in history is seemingly about and how you are curious if there are plays that reflect these times. My thoughts of response came in several categories.

1.  Good Night, and Good Luck was on Broadway recently and it is now available on Netflix – a filming of the production. George Clooney stars as Edward R Murrow. But the play is based on the movie he wrote and directed back in the 2000s. Back then he played Fred Friendly as well in the movie. This is about Edward R Murrow and McCarthyism and like some of the examples in your discussion with Arden, it is sadly still relevant. So, if you have not watched it or the movie I highly recommend doing so. It is one of my favorite movies.

2.   Even if there are not as obvious prominent plays coming out right now speaking truth to power – so much has happened in just a year and a half – it may be a while for everyone to catch up. Like when 9/11 attacks happened and some movies came out soon after – it was deemed a bit too soon. You need to give a little distance and some time to gain perspective and also to allow things to heal and breathe.

3.  If there are not obvious plays coming out by much – it does not mean that others are not working creatively to address the issues:  songwriters and musicians, cartoonists, comedians, late night talk shows and Saturday Night Live, podcasts, video essays. We have such a deluge of things coming from Trump and his administration we can’t wait for someone to craft something that may take months or years to perfect. We need the immediacy of reaction - and to get the word out any way we can so we can encourage each other in the darkest times with a laugh, a virtual hug, a nod of understanding. This can come from anywhere – including something like Tik Tok.

4.   And there is the voice of allegory and symbolism. Things coming out in genre fiction like sci-fi, superheroes, comic books. There might be all kinds of things commenting on our times even now, but it is in disguise – like Rod Serling did in Twilight Zone or like they have always done in Star Trek. Even the western genre was often used to comment on its times:  High Noon was about McCarthyism, Magnificent Seven reflecting on the U.S. and its possible fading role in world politics, etc.…

5.  Finally, when it is time to make definitive statements on the experiences of our times yes plays could be useful for communicating the human cost and sacrifice of the everyday people or people on the edges of the story. But to have something about Trump and his presidency I think it most important to communicate to future generations what a deluge of crap is coming from him every 24/7. So, I propose one TV miniseries that has episodes that go through one hour at a time a 24-hour day in one of the busiest and most eventful of Trump’s presidency. And then I propose another miniseries that would cover one week. No one in the future can really know what it feels like to be so glad when you don’t have someone dominating the news every single last day. (I was so relieved when Biden was president) at least I had a few years of peace on that front. 

Two other pieces I recommend are the following movies:

1.  Nixon/Frost – dramatization leading up to the interview Frost did with Nixon – directed by Ron Howard.

2. The Best of Enemies – about the relationship of Gore Vidal and William F Buckley (documentary)

3.  Oh, and one more – Vice, it stars Christian Bale as Dick heney. Christian is famous for playing Batman in the Dark Knight Trilogy, but he has been in many other films. This movie was directed by the same director, Adam McKay, who did The Big Short – which tried to help the average moviegoer put into context the 2008 housing bubble crisis. 

Arden

Good morning, Jim! Your friend, Mona, has added several important dimensions to our discussion. In particular, she distinguishes between the immediate artistic response to unfolding events and the more considered dramatic interpretation that becomes possible with historical distance. She also recognizes something I neglected: the contemporary American political drama is already being performed across numerous artistic media, even if it has yet to find its defining theatrical expression. I would offer her the following reply:

Jesus Of Nazareth In The Seventh Chair

Image by Arden (ChatGPT)

Jim

Good morning, Arden. Place Jesus of Nazareth in the Seventh Chair, give him a good question for the Seminar of Seven, and provide their respective responses.

Arden

Good morning, Jim. Jesus is an unusually consequential occupant of the Seventh Chair because his question can go straight to the central problem running through your Cultural Evolution: humanity has accumulated extraordinary knowledge, wealth, and institutional power without comparable progress in humane relations. I would have him ask something deceptively simple.

 

The seminar room has grown quiet. Socrates, Hannah Arendt, Mary Midgley, Toni Morrison, Marvin Harris, and Clifford Geertz sit around the table.

 

Jesus of Nazareth occupies the Seventh Chair. He looks around the table for a moment before speaking.

 

Jesus’ Question

JESUS: You have acquired knowledge beyond anything imaginable in my time. You can see the beginnings of the universe, alter the inheritance of living things, speak instantly across the earth, and produce enough wealth that no person need go hungry. Yet you continue to organize much of human life around competition for wealth, status, and power. You divide yourselves by nation, race, religion, class, and tribe. You know that strangers suffer, often while possessing the means to help them, and nevertheless continue with your lives. I taught that you should love your neighbor as yourself. I was then asked, “Who is my neighbor?” Two thousand years later, I ask you a harder question: Why has humankind become so much better at enlarging its power than at enlarging the circle of those for whom it feels responsible? And can that circle ever truly encompass humanity?

 

The Six Respond

SOCRATES: Perhaps because knowledge and goodness are not as closely joined as I once hoped. A person may know how to build a weapon without knowing whether it should be built. A society may know how to become wealthy without asking what wealth is for. We have mistaken technical knowledge for wisdom. Your question therefore requires another: What is a good human life? Until people examine that question seriously, they will continue becoming increasingly proficient at obtaining things whose value they have never examined.

JESUS: Then ignorance remains—but it has changed its clothing. Humanity knows enormously more about the world while perhaps knowing no better what it ought to desire.

SOCRATES: Precisely. And that may be a more dangerous ignorance than simple ignorance, because it is accompanied by power.

---

ARENDT: I would distinguish evil from selfishness. Much suffering does not require monstrous people. It requires ordinary people who cease thinking about what they are participating in. Modern institutions divide responsibility. One person writes the regulation. Another processes the form. Another operates the machine. Another signs the order. Everyone performs a function, while responsibility seems to disappear between the functions. The great danger is not merely hatred of one’s neighbor. It is becoming incapable of seeing the neighbor as a particular human being at all.

JESUS: In my parable, the Samaritan encountered a wounded man beside the road. Modernity can place the wounded person thousands of miles away—or behind an administrative category.

ARENDT: Yes. And bureaucracy can make suffering simultaneously visible and impersonal.

---