I have copied and pasted the below passage from Shakespeare’s Politics by Robert Cooper
My commentary at the bottom, which may or may not illuminate. I am online instead of finishing two Chem lab reports.
For those of my thirty loyal readers not in the U.S. 🙂 It is the day before the Mid-Term elections and the air is abuzz.
It’s hard to be focused. Why does it uncork that nervous energy? It’s a heady combination:
Distraction via Social Media and Politics. So instead of being dragged around by my emotions, I look to answers from two reliable sources. Hard Exercise and Shakespeare.
But first, here is an emotions color wheel to help you through the next 72 hours: It’s not easy being green. Or any other color on the spectrum.
“The nearest Shakespeare comes to a lecture on politics is Ulysses’ speech in Troilus and Cressida to the Greek council of war, which is debating how to stop Achilles’ sulking. Ulysses’ theme is that “degree”—authority and hierarchy—is essential for society. Here is Shakespeare’s Politics. A takeout:
“O when degree is shaked,
Shakespeare’s Politics: Robert Cooper
Which is the ladder of all high designs,
The enterprise is sick. How could communities,
Degrees in schools, and brotherhoods in cities,
Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,
The primogeniture and due of birth,
Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres laurels,
But by degree stand in authentic place?
The American Interest
Appeared in:Â Volume 13, Number 1Â | Published on: June 20, 2017
This view was common in Elizabethan world: an order based on natural harmony, sometimes compared to the cosmic order, was necessary for all social organization. Reciprocal obligation binds people together as cosmic forces bind the planets. It is this social hierarchy that keeps the peace:
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And hark what discord follows each thing meets
In mere oppugnancy; . . .
Social order in turn provides political order. In Asia this creed is called Confucianism: Order through a system of mutual obligations, reinforced by ceremony. Without the social order conflict would be universal: “Each thing meets in mere oppugnancy.” This, taken to extremes, ends in the war of all against all”
how does this help us in 2022: In short:
We need the Civil Service to supply the needs of a populace. We need that Civil service to be educated. But education is only as good the people driving the scientific advances with Commerce and recruitment.
Here in America we need oppositional training wheels to understand that the system is finely tuned. There is no ‘Right Way’. We would be better served to engage in debate instead of destructive ad-hominems:
Fallacious attacks on our opponents that degrade the quality of engagement.
And for that folks. Think before you vote. And: Vote early. And Vote Often.
Watch out for douches with pitchforks. Its crazy out there.
