Tomorrow and Tomorrow

Today we pulled out Macbeth's seven soliloquies to examine the arc of his character, the trajectory of his fall from grace. In Act 1.2, he has it all: valiant warrior, distinguished thane, a new title.

Then he meets the witches, the weird sisters. He misreads their cues. He might have listened and walked on. But like the investment bankers, CEOs, and regulators, his interpretive skills are skewed. He wrestles with subtext. He mistakes sorcery for reliable sources. He is as good (and evil) as his advisors.

Macbeth heard only what he wanted to hear. Bewitched, he listened to whispers that fed his "vaulting ambition" and killed goodness everywhere. Regicide, parricide, war with foreign invaders. Noble soldier, weird brother that he is, Macbeth trammels or slays the entire next generation. A failure of the imagination. Childless, he cannot be a steward.

By Act 4, he mourns "that which should accompany old age/As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,/ I must not look to have; but in their stead/Curses"... Greek tragedy speaks of the moment of recognition, or anagnoresis.

Too little, too late.

The parallels are easy. Timing is everything, for traders and kings. The moments pass. "Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player/... It is a tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury/Signifying nothing."

Policymakers have recently announced the death of the humanities. They cry out for scientists, mathematicians, engineers. Too bad the number-crunchers, MBA's, and quant specialists, oriented toward pragmatism and utility, do not read more literature, or remember it.

Every high school student has read this play.

Humanists matter. It is time to remember to remember.

Pursuit

"There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired." That's Nick Carraway commenting at the end of Chapter IV of The Great Gatsby. It's kind of a thrill to teach this novel in 2009, parsing Fitzgerald's class distinctions about wealth, class, status with a new generation of divergent thinkers for whom money and celebrity mean just about everything.

James Gatz and his North Dakota dreamin'. A boy poised for change, loafing on the flat squat shore of Lake Superior. He had prepared. Even the name was ready. He borrows a skiff and paddles to Dan Cody's yacht. That green light, beckoning. The green of "Go." The color of money, green with envy. The cinematic morph into Gatsby. Once he had a dream. Of social mobility, of having it all. He had the audacity of hope.

Jay Gatsby "sprang from his Platonic conception of himself" but too easily sold his vision "in the service of a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty."

My students get it. Their Gatsby is P. Diddy: gun and bling and pinky ring. Or Bernie Madoff, with a scheme as shadowy as that of Gatsby's Wolfscheim, who fixed the 1919 World Series. This novel highlights the meretricious underbelly of the pursuit of wealth at any cost. It ends with three deaths.

Hopefully the correction that is now occurring in the financial sector will trigger a review of compensation. A friend reminded me of a passage from The Grapes of Wrath. "The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It's the monster. Men made it, but they can't control it."

Income inequality (a current political buzzword) exists because performance measures need re-evaluation. Obama's much maligned suggestion of "spreading the wealth around" challenges public policy to develop measures to assess the worth of soft capital (cultural, intellectual, social, etc.) vs. pure risk, and radically re-envision the compensation of those who choose to pursue the compassionate dream -- the dream of serving others.