Tragedy

The modern temperment is anti-Tragic. We believe that problems have solutions, that things can be worked out. If the economy is bad, we just need to elect a new government that will fix whatever is wrong and get people back to work. If tax cuts won't fix things, it will be tariffs, or subsidies, or something. 

If we are sick, that must be because of some fixable problem: poisons in the air, chemicals in the water, bad food, bat attitudes. 

We are reluctant to admit that problems are unsolvable and that sometimes life just sucks.

We also love good guys and bad guys, and rebel when we can't find one side in a story to root for.

Tragedy, as both the ancient Greeks and the early modern Europeans understood it, was about people confronting impossible situations. Like all of us, the characters in Tragedy are doomed. Sometimes they make things worse by their foolish actions, but if one is left thinking that if only the hero had done this or that obvious thing, everything would have worked out, then the tragedy is not successful. Tragedy only works if the audience believes that sometimes people are destroyed by events completely beyond their control.

Here is the chorus from Agamemnon:

Where is right and wrong
In this nightmare?
Each becomes the ghost of the other.
Each is driven mad
By the ghost of the other.
Who can reason it out?

Elektra:

By dread things I am compelled. I know that. I see the trap closing. I know what I am. But while life is in me I will not stop this violence. No. Oh my friends who is there to comfort me? Who understands? Leave me be, let me go, do not soothe me. This is a knot no one can untie. There will be no rest, there is no retrieval. No number exists for griefs like these. . . .

But when a god sends harm, no man can sidestep it, no matter how strong he may be.

Here is King Lear, accepting his defeat and failure:

Come, let’s away to prison:
We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage:
When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down,
And ask of thee forgiveness: so we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too,
Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out;
And take upon’s the mystery of things,
As if we were God’s spies: and we’ll wear out,
In a wall’d prison, packs and sects of great ones,
That ebb and flow by the moon.

As Teju Cole once put it, "Tragedy finds us where reasons end."

So here's the question: is this good or bad?

Does our belief in solutions motivate us to make the world better? and was the traditional belief in hopeless cases an excuse to leave bad practices as they were?

Or does our aversion to tragedy weaken us in the face of unsolvable problems, leading to grievance mongering and blame games? I feel like after every natural disaster in the US somebody is blaming the other political party. Do the horrible politics of the moment flow from our need to blame somebody for every bad thing in our lives? From our refusal to accept that sometimes the only choice is bad or worse, and that sometimes there are no choices at all?

I wonder.