This piece has appeared as a newspaper op/ed in my very red congressional district (VA-06).
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In an earlier piece, I wrote that “I seem to yearn – more intensely than most people – for the world to be as it should be.” That was about people being “constructive, not destructive; kind, not cruel; fair, not unjust; honest, not deceptive.”
Another manifestation of my reaching toward the ideal is my orientation toward “the arts.” I see the essence of being an “artist” as plying one kind of craft or another to arrange things (music, paint, words, etc.) in as “right” a way as possible.
A concrete example of artistry rendering the reality of our world into an ideal form is the Japanese art of bonsai. With bonsai, human hands work to turn a real tree into a sculpture that represents what the artist sees as that tree’s ideal -- most beautiful -- form.
In a slightly different way, with his David, Michelangelo created in marble an ideal form of a man.
But my passions are most consistently engaged by the various ways that story-telling (including folk-tales, fables, written literature, and movies) renders the reality of human life.
For one thing, a story has more coherence than people’s actual lives.
With a great work of literature, there’s not a word said nor an action reported that doesn’t “belong,” doesn’t contribute to the overall rendition of our lives the story seeks to depict. (Like the way, in Shakespeare’s plays, the consistent weaving of themes and images in the various characters’ speeches creates an integrated picture of some important dimension of the human world.)
In real life, so many unrelated things are going on at once. But the art of story-telling clears out the “noise” in our reality to uncover some “signal.” Such clarity-- rendering reality less chaotic -- is one of the ways the art of story-telling presents an “ideal.”
Also, in stories – unlike in “real life” -- things happen only for “good” reasons.
In real life, for example, anyone might be hit at any moment by a bolt of lightning, or a heart attack, or a truck.
(An acquaintance of mine, who did valuable work in understanding the psychology of our times, just suddenly got obliterated. And it was for no “good reason.” It was simply because, while in the UK where they drive on the left, my friend looked the wrong way before stepping off the curb and getting struck by a car.)
But in a story, any deaths that occur will be part of the chosen design of the story. At a right time, and for a “good” reason. The randomness that can mark real life is replaced in art by deliberate, purposeful composition.
Having things “make sense” is another form of things as they “should” be.
But these days, it is to another form of “ideal” that I’m especially drawn: I crave the good outcome, the happy ending. In particular, I find it most comforting for the story to end with the good guys prevailing, and the bad guys finally getting what’s coming to them.
The ideal of “all’s right with the world.”
With so many films – especially of an earlier era – one knows from the outset that good will ultimately triumph over evil.
(We know, for example, in It’s a Wonderful Life that the good spirit of “Bedford Falls” will prevail, with the community rewarding our hero for his life of sacrifice for the greater good. The town will not become the ugly alternative we have been shown—where Greed and viciousness have created a cruel and mean-spirited place, Pottersville, where lives are stunted and injured. Like the Donna Reed character who, in that dark alternate universe, is the fearful spinster and not at all the radiant woman who is happily married to our hero.)
But the world we live in is not a place where good reliably triumphs over evil. We know from history that, in our less-than-ideal world, evil does sometimes triumph-- to disastrous effect.
(And the history we’ve now been living in America has made it clear that there’s no guarantee that things evolve into Bedford Falls instead of Pottersville.)
We’ve witnessed the evil side gaining power to reshape the world for the worse. We have watched, in some distress, as the Potters of our world have gained in power, ruling oppressively and cruelly, possessed by the spirit of Greed. We’ve watched the richer taking money from the poorer, the strongest serving their interests at the expense of the many. We’ve watched people condemned to live more broken lives because of the power of cruelty and mean-spiritedness.
A while back, I wrote a column “In Praise of Escapism,” explaining how our times have taught me that – when reality becomes too grim – one might reasonably place a higher priority on “comfort” than on “profundity.”
Storytelling that promises a happy ending may not be as profound as the literature of “tragedy.” But our yearning for the reliable triumph of good over evil – which, “escapist or not, is surely the world as it should be—is as profound a feeling as there is.