For a Ph.D. in politics, read Shakespeare

 Stephen B. Young, The Daily Record Newswire

We have just celebrated the 450th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s birth, an event that reminded me that reading Shakespeare is more important for success in politics than an M.A. in public policy or a Ph.D. in political science.

Shakespeare educates us fully and memorably about the human condition. Politics turns on the human condition, not on laws and regulations, or treasure troves of “Big Data,” or clever tweets and energized “war rooms.”

The human condition has not changed much over the last 3,000 years, and I for one don’t expect it to change much in the next 3,000 years. By “human condition” I do not mean our physical and material circumstances — airplanes, flush toilets, smart phones, meals ready to eat — but rather the dynamics of our psycho-social energies and the state of our souls.

Jonathan Haidt, in his well-received book, “The Righteous Mind,” argues that much of our personal political disposition reflects ancient patterns of evolution in the way our minds are wired. Evolution has set us in certain rather inelastic ways.

Shakespeare saw deeply into people but, more remarkably, found words with which to carry us along with him inside the enlightenment of his insights.

Today so many feel marginalized, not fully appreciated, fearful and angry over their felt vulnerabilities. Here is how Shakespeare expressed such a state of mind and heart:

“When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,

I all alone beweep my outcast state,

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,

And look upon myself and curse my fate,

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,

Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,

Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope …”

Has anyone ever put it better in English?

Consider this saddening insight into why our national elite has presided over growing mediocrity and gridlock in our politics:

According to Elizabeth Warren, Larry Summers once advised her that, “You have a choice: you can be an insider or you can be an outsider.

“Outsiders can say whatever they want. But people on the inside don’t listen to them. Insiders, however, get lots of access and a chance to push their ideas. People — powerful people — listen to what they have to say. But insiders also understand one unbreakable rule: They don’t criticize other insiders.”

Three hundred and fifty years before Summers, Adam Smith wrote of that same fixation on flattery by insiders: “In the courts of princes, in the drawing-rooms of the great, where success and preferment depend, not upon the esteem of intelligence and well-informed equals, but upon the fanciful and foolish favor of ignorant and proud superiors; flattery and falsehood too often prevail over merit and abilities. In such societies, the abilities to please are more regarded than the ability to serve.”

Now, what better education on the follies and tragedies that follow upon unctuous flattery and toadying is there than King Lear?

Lear is the deluded leader, unable to see beyond his own conceits. When his daughter Cordelia speaks truth to power, she is banished.

Lear asks his daughters to tell him who loves him most as a test of who most deserves his estate. When asked what she has to say to best her two older sisters, Cordelia asks why her sisters ever married if they said they loved their father all. Lear asks, “So young and so untender?” Cordelia steadfastly replies, “So young, my lord, and true.” Lear disinherits her and his life, as a result, spins down to misery and madness.

Shakespeare then has a character comment: “World, World, O World! But that thy strange mutations make us hate thee, life would not yield to age.”

I can hear many in Syria and Iraq today and many in the bottom billions in poverty around the world echo that insight.

In Lear, the King’s court jester becomes the only link between the really foolish King and the reality outside his illusions. Shakespeare’s characters affirm that:

“As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport.”

“Plate sin with gold and the strong lance of justice breaks; arm it in rags, a pygmy’s straw does pierce it.”

We read Shakespeare and we learn about life. Politics is no more than life concentrated and congealed.

For another example of the insider who can’t see reality, consider the play Julius Caesar. When warned by his wife not to attend the Senate on the Ides of March, Caesar is quickly distracted by the flattery of Decius Brutus and puts on his robe to leave home for his rendezvous with destiny — or was his destiny already soaked in his character, which was so easily swayed by a flatterer?

Or consider the case of Othello, who is easily turned murderously against his beautiful, loyal wife by the scheming Iago. In Minnesota Republican Politics, I have come across many Iagos — subtle and effective in their seductions, and undetected in their malevolence.

And in Julius Caesar, Shakespeare gives us bitter lessons in persuasion: Cassius turning Brutus into a righteous-minded assassin and Marc Antony stirringly turning the people against Cassius and Brutus.

Antony, the hard-handed loyalist, does “cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war.” And Rome falls to first anarchy, then civil strife and finally to tyranny.

And yet, knowing reality does not a decisive leader make. Consider Hamlet. Shakespeare gives us one who knows what is wrong but is immobilized by his insights: “The time is out of joint. O cursèd spite that ever I was born to set it right!”; “there are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy”; “Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them?”

Brutus, like many smart politicians and office holders, misreads events. He rightly speaks of the favors of chance and fortune — “there is a tide in the affairs of men …” — but then misreads the signs of his times and demands heading into battle with Antony and Octavian only to lose it and commit suicide.

And what of the illusions of greatness that Macbeth and his wife permit their minds to trust when communicated by the witches? Here ambition is fueled by delusion. Ambition then drives Macbeth and Lady Macbeth to murder and tyranny. Ambition and its evil offspring are frequently the raw stuff of politics.

Brutus remarks wisely that “th’ abuse of greatness is when it disjoins remorse from power.” As for Caesar’s ambition and danger to the Roman Republic, Brutus goes on to reason: “And therefore think him as a serpent’s egg, which, hatched, would as his kind grow mischievous, and kill him in the shell.”

Macbeth asks “What if we fail?” giving voice to the risk aversion so powerful but so debilitating in so many officials and candidates.

His wife, in cold command of her emotions, replies: “We fail.”

For a lesson in strategic leadership consider King Henry V: “once more into the breach dear friends, once more.” And, majestically: “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother; … and gentlemen in England now abed shall think themselves accursed they were not here, and hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks that fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s Day.”

There is far more to learn in Shakespeare about people and life than these few, well-known well-turned phrases. Much more. He has bequeathed us a treasure-trove of wisdom and insight. Would that our politicians would take pleasure in reading him more often.