The Essayist #22: Politics and the Oedipus Effect

The Greeks believed in destiny. Unlike Old Testament prophets, Greek oracles weren't interested in changing behavior. If the gods let you know that something was going to happen, then that thing was going to happen. That thing was not going to change, no matter what you did. The message was not "Check yourself," but "Brace yourself."

Oedipus proves this perfectly. His parents, and then he, were told that Oedipus would murder his father and marry his mother. Everything that Laius, Jocasta, and Oedipus did to prevent this guarunteed that it would happen. By abandoning baby Oedipus on a hillside, Laius and Jocasta guaruntee that Oedipus grows up not knowing who his real parents are. By getting away from the people he thinks are his parents, Oedipus puts himself into his true parents' path. As Camille Paglia put it in Sexual Personae: "Oedipus, fleeing from his mother, runs right into her arms."



The smartest guy in the world.

This supreme irony is the lens through which I view the reaction to the Gifford shooting over the weekend. The Left has more or less decided, without evidence, that Loughner was motivated, or sparked, or whatever, by the rhetoric of Sarah Palin and the Tea Partiers. By speaking, by challenging, by rudely denying the progressives their assumed history-given right to rule, we have put the gun in Loughner's hand and the will to use it in his mind.

For me, this argument is so far from a reasoned consideration of the facts as to be self-refuting, so I will not expend the energy to tear it down (If you insist, Ace has a pretty good takedown of the irresponsible Sherriff Dupnik, and Other McCain gives Keith Olbermann precisely what he deserves). Rather, I'm interested in the effect of the argument itself, and whether, like Oedipus, it serves that which it deplores.

Aristotle's first statement in his Rhetoric makes rhetoric the "counterpart" of dialectic, or philosophical argument. Rhetoric aims not at truth but at persuasion. Reason, or logos, is part of persuasion, but not the only part. One's ethos (credibility) and pathos (passion) also persuade. Human beings are moved by such. Philosophers may (and will) damn this reality until the seventh seal bursts open, but I doubt they will ever change it.

By this framework, political rhetoric will be serenely rational perhaps a third of the time, obsessed with status and image a third of the time, and blood-churningly shrill the other third. This is unfortunate, to say the least, for those of us who have no interest in the determined shuffling by politicians to the top of the greasy pole. It is even counter-productive to the theoretical goal of politics as the creation of a just and orderly society (ah, but if we could agree on what that meant...). But it is not surprising.

So when one side hurls down phillippics upon the other side, denouncing even their tone, what is the forseeable result? Persuasion of that other side to reconsider its position, or of one's own to man the barricades? To ask the question is to answer it. So when Dupnik and Olbermann attack right-wing rhetoric, is their goal really to calm everybody down? As Glenn Reynolds writes in today's WSJ:

...those who purport to care about the health of our political community demonstrate precious little actual concern for America's political well-being when they seize on any pretext, however flimsy, to call their political opponents accomplices to murder.

Where is the decency in that?

When Oedipus, caught in a web of lies not of his making, cornered by every element of the society of which he was king, became aware of who he was and what he had done, he accepted his own role in it, and took upon himself the punishment of the gods and the shame of men. One cannot imagine any modern politician or pundit so acting, regardless of ideology. Our society does not reward politicians or anyone else for admitting error, and the rewards of society is the one thing our politicians seek without ceasing. Truth has been democratized.

Therefore, look for no willing scapegoat to accept blame for the shrillness of our rhetoric, the bombastity of our bloviation. Rather, look for each howl for peace to be returned with greater scoffing, and every glum offering about the power of our partisanship to sit comfortably upon the bonfire. Like Oedipus,  we are the problem we seek to solve. We have not only met the enemy, we have made him.