A Tragic Sensibility
Scott Nelson
19 May 2019
I recently finished reading Hal Brands and Charles Edel’s The Lessons of Tragedy: Statecraft and World Order, in which they argue that the United States should rediscover a sense of the precariousness of the current, largely peaceful, world order, and step up their game in an effort to preserve this order. This would be a politics informed by a tragic sensibility. In addition to acknowledging the fragility of the present order, a tragic sensibility includes “an understanding of the corresponding need for collective action and communal sacrifice”, a “sense of proportion and restraint”, and finally, the recognition that tragedy should lead to “timely and enduring action” instead of complacency and fatalism.
I found myself largely in agreement with the need to understand the miraculous anomaly of so many years of peace in the Western world, although I also found myself wondering if a tragic sensibility would necessarily lead to the policies favoured by Brands and Edel. It was precisely one specific component of the tragic sensibility – the “sense of proportion and restraint” – that has led some scholars, such as Richard Ned Lebow, to criticize American overreach and the sort of muscle flexing that Brands and Edel advocate.
I do not intend to write a proper review of Brands and Edel’s book; rather, I simply wish to use some of their comments to reflect on the notion of a politics informed by a tragic sensibility, since I think that tragedy can be interpreted in more ways than they have taken into account.
For instance, I have often thought that tragedy referred to the gap between an actor’s good intentions and the unintended negative consequences that can result from them. An example of this is the figure of Nicias in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, who is portrayed by the author as a quintessentially tragic figure: he attempts to dissuade the Athenians from embarking on what he knows will be a disastrous military campaign in Sicily. His attempts serve only to strengthen the Athenians’ resolve. He tries to dampen their enthusiasm by suggesting that the present Athenian forces would need at least to be doubled in order to stand a chance. The Assembly turns out to be more than willing to increase the size of the expeditionary force, figuring that if even the war-wary Nicias’s fears could be assuaged by these measures then the Sicilians surely wouldn’t stand a chance against the Athenians. And as Nicias also enjoys a reputation for being a fortunate general he is unhappily roped into leading the expedition alongside two other generals, one of whom is the wily but eminently capable Alcibiades, who is very much in favour of the expedition. As the fleet are underway word reaches them that Alcibiades has been recalled to Athens to stand trial for defacing the hermai, stone sculptures whose genitals he was alleged to have chopped off. Nicias suddenly finds himself more or less leading an expedition that he never supported in the first place, knowing that he had few options apart from victory or death (the Athenians being about as merciless with their failed generals as they were with their enemies). The expedition is defeated and Nicias is killed, provoking one of the very few authorial statements from Thucydides, who writes that Nicias was “a man who of all the Greeks in my time least deserved to meet with such misfortune, since the whole conduct of his life had been regulated by virtuous practices.” (Peloponnesian War VII.86.5).
Another way of understanding a tragic figure has also recently been put forward by Victor Davis Hanson in his book, The Case for Trump. In Hanson’s reading, there is a certain tragedy about Trump in that his nature is essential to solving the crisis of the very community that would rather see him ousted because of his nature. (I wonder how modern politics would look if we reintroduced the ancient Athenian practice of annual ostracism.) Trump is accordingly compared to figures both mythological and real, such as Achilles, Ajax, and George Patton. However, he does not curry favour with Brands and Edel, as his foreign policy runs along lines contrary to what they recommend. Hanson’s understanding of the tragedy of Trump, as opposed to the tragedy of Nicias, does not appear to take into account the actor’s intentions. It also opens up a dimension of the tragic sensibility that is explicitly rejected by Brands and Edel, namely a certain sort of fatalism. If we attribute the tragedy of Trump to the conflict between his nature and the sentiments of the American people (or America’s media and historians), then it is an unavoidable tragedy, as neither his nature nor American sentiments will be changed any time soon, if ever.
Yet another way of understanding tragedy is to see it as an unfortunate and inevitable outcome. I suspect Brands and Edel would oppose such a view, but Greek tragedies do provide us with figures condemned by fate. One of the best examples is Oedipus, whose decision to flee his hometown of Corinth and the prophecy that he will slay his father and marry his mother results in that prophecy’s fulfillment.
Tragedy is inevitable for Oedipus due to fate; however, we could also see tragedy as inevitable due to contradictions inherent to man’s nature. In the Oresteia and Antigone, for example, the protagonists are dragged unavoidably to a miserable end due to the antinomies involved in doing justice. Antigone is faced with the choice between divine and human law, where the former requires her to properly bury her brother, while the latter, by order of King Creon, expressly forbids this. In the three plays that make up Aeschylus’ Oresteia, Clytemnestra kills Agamemnon for having sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia in order to obtain fair winds on his voyage to Troy. Orestes, their son, commits matricide in order to avenge his father’s murder, and then finds himself pursued by the Furies for his heinous crime. Adherence to conflicting principles of justice is the source of these characters’ tragic end.
Whether we understand tragedy as the gap between good intentions and regrettable unintended consequences or as the inevitable, a tragic sensibility that would result from either of these understandings has certain repercussions. It would require that we acknowledge the imperfectibility of human nature, and that the good society we might seek to build on this nature will itself forever be imperfect and incomplete. To avoid the hubris that characterized the fall of some of the great tragic heroes, we would need to recognize limits in both our nature and in the goals we seek. This is not unlike the morality of prudence advocated by the French philosopher Raymond Aron. In discussing international relations, Aron stated that
To be prudent is to act in accordance with some system or out of passive obedience to a norm or pseudo-norm; it is to prefer the limitation of violence to the punishment of the presumably guilty-party or to a so-called absolute justice; it is to establish concrete accessible objectives conforming to the secular law of international relations and not to limitless and perhaps meaningless objectives, such as “a world safe for democracy” or “a world from which power politics will have disappeared.”
Aron, Peace and War, p. 585.
The morality of prudence and a tragic sensibility involve asking not “what is the best in theory?”, but “what is the least worst in practice?” To the extent, though, that tragedy is inevitable – whether due to unintended consequences, the role of fate, or the imperfections and antinomies of human nature – one of the casualties of a tragic sensibility could be the idea that any sort of progress is possible at all. And it is perhaps because we have grown so accustomed to thinking in terms of progress – and that peace and prosperity are the norm in the Western world – that we are well positioned to be shocked out of our slumber when tragedy visits us again.
I am unsure, though, beyond the very modest and tentative remarks I have made concerning how a tragic sensibility would affect policymaking, whether this sensibility would also justify the measures outlined in Brands and Edel’s book, regardless of the desirability of such measures. Tragedy has a way of confounding our best efforts.
