Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Hamlet, Fortinbras, and the Third Way



As the years go by, I notice that more and more of my peers, mainly middle-aged white guys, are retiring. I guess that’s what many white men (and women) get to do at this age. Some of us don’t get to do that and have to go on making a living to support kids in college, old cars that need repair, pay for health insurance, rent, and bags of bulk beans to cook over a modest campfire under the local bridge.

My peers, needless to say, sometimes puzzle me with their smug complacency. I (the somewhat bitter wage-slave "I") want to slap them; I want to DO something, anything. But I (the better "I") want to understand them too, to see how this self-absorbed soaking up of comfort is possible and figure out what to do about it.

So, these lucky ones, I have noticed, tend to share a kind of passive tolerance of the way things are. “Hey,” they say, “Things look fine to me. What’s your beef?”

One of them, who is quite educated, at an Ivy League School no less, and, not so surprisingly, is fond of quoting and pontificating on the merits of hedonism and passivity. He says things like, “There a have always been wars and alpha dogs and injustice and pestilence; they are the ways of this world. It’s best not to trouble yourself too much with them. Plus, who am I to tell anyone how to do things? I just don’t know for sure what is best.” They point to such great philosophers as H.L. Menken who wrote “Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on ‘I am not too sure.’"

We can call this figure Hamlet.

Well, of course, I think. Who knows anything for sure? But is that an excuse to sit and do nothing if you have even the slightest inkling of what is happening to our fellow humans or our lovely planet? I will not enumerate the litany of crises facing humanity in the coming years. If one peeks, even briefly, at headlines, one sees a careening disaster in motion. And here, one can either despair and opt to be skewered on the horns of hedonism or nihilism. Or one can act, sometimes rashly, inspired by such thinkers as Edward Abbey who writes “Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.”

A logical extreme of this worldview is Fortinbras, the "man of action," the "Decider," if we want to invoke a recent president.

In other words, one might be tempted to look at the question of reflection vs. action and answer it with an either/or argument: either “I don’t know what is best to do, so I will do nothing,” or “something must be done, so I’ll do the first thing to comes to mind, right or wrong.”

In spite of this particularly Western way of understanding things, one can imagine a third way, a both/and of reflection and action. Some people criticize meditation as “navel gazing,” but the Dalai Lama doesn’t see it that way. He says “the most important meditation is critical thinking – followed by action.”

To my mind, there are few icons of literature who embody or characterize this complex, paradoxical, dynamic process. 

Even without the telling detail of a name to go with the idea, I like avoiding the horns of a dilemma with a third way. It’s a both/and kind of thing, a dynamic system of thinking and action. 

Of course, now we have to figure out what he means by critical thinking, and, sadly, that is not something that is a priority to framers of educational policy – teachers, yes, but not policy makers.

Maybe, when I retire, Hamlet, Fortinbras, and I can chat and then do something good. I'd like that too. 

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