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Are we living in a Greek Tragedy?
Published about 11 hours ago • 2 min read
A Tragedy with an Ending
Thinking on Aristotle’s Poetics in our digital world
How many times do we have to see a father carrying his dead child, or someone being washed away by floodwaters, or a plane exploding as it strikes the ground? The 24-hour news cycle on repeat feels like we are watching tragic theatre play out again and again. When does it end?
Photo by Felix Mooneeram on Unsplash
Are we living in a Greek tragedy? I have been thinking about how our world has become ongoing theatre, and how this might be leaving us anxious and fearful, stirring the very emotions we would normally feel at a tragic play or movie. Let me explain.
Around 335 BC, Aristotle wrote the Poetics, a treatise on the value of art in its various forms. He briefly touched on music and visual art, but his main focus was theatre, particularly tragedy. (His thoughts on comedy are lost to us.) He believed that characters were secondary to plot, and that a well-made plot, carried through a series of scenes, stirred pity and fear in the audience. But in the end there was a catharsis, a release that allowed the audience to get on with their lives. Feeling those emotions mattered. Pity and fear are valuable, and it was important, according to Aristotle, that they had a place to be felt and, just as important, a place to be released. He also insisted that a tragedy must be whole, with a beginning, a middle and an end.
That is what we are missing. Our lives have become like watching a Greek tragedy play out in front of us, only we never get to the end, the catharsis.
I am not a news watcher. Everyone knows that I get my news from The Weather Network, but even there I am not shielded from tragedy: the massive mudslide in Nepal, the super typhoon overwhelming Guam and, of all things, an invasion of water hyacinths. Every channel, whether online, in print or on television, plays out the tragedies of people’s lives around the world. Every day, all day, we watch fearful and pitiful scenes unfold.
Except these aren’t actors. The father is a real father. The flood is a real flood. There is no curtain call, and no one walks offstage to take a bow. Perhaps that is why it weighs on us so heavily.
When does it end? When do we get the release, the catharsis, that allows us to carry on with our day? We don’t. Because letting us turn away, or see a story through to its conclusion, if there ever is one, is not profitable. The networks and the advertisers who keep them running need us in the audience. Keeping us there keeps us buying what they are selling: pity and fear, and distraction from them.
I wonder whether our modern fear, anxiety, overwhelm and pity come from living inside a Greek tragedy that never finishes. We don’t need a happy ending. Greek tragedy doesn’t end with the hero winning the day. It ends with Oedipus blinding himself when he realizes his fate. But it does end. And we can walk away thinking about how things could be, should be, will be different.
When I read a book, see a play or watch a show, it ends. No matter how much I don’t want it to, it ends. I get to feel, and then I get to close the book, leave the theatre or turn off the television. It ends, and I am different for the experience of it.
Perhaps, if the news will never give us an ending, we have to write our own. We can turn it off. We can let ourselves grieve. We can tend to what is within reach. That may be the only catharsis on offer, and it may be enough.
Join a community discovering how living lightly and deeply through seasonal practices of presence can heal both our scattered attention and our relationship with the living world. Because mending the world begins with mending our capacity to truly see it.
