Far from the Madding Crowd
Dunkirk NY – Do I want to jump into the diversity fray? I do not. Why not? Because the debate itself is another manifestation of the worsening entropic nature of theatre itself at this point in time. According to social entropy theory, much of any organization’s energy and time is spent preventing an organization from descending into a state of chaos. As an organism or organization corrodes or decays, more and more time and energy is needed to maintain the status quo, and less and less energy is actually spent producing anything of use or value. Ultimately, the decaying state of the organization is simply too far gone for any corrective action to be worthwhile or effective, and the organization goes into a state of chaos, or death.
I am going to quote a large section of a very interesting post on the social entropy of ideas written by Robert L. Payton, Professor Emeritus of Philanthropic Studies at Indiana University and Senior Research Fellow of the Center on Philanthropy. All you need do is think of the rise of regional theatre from the early 1950s until now to see the parallel.
The key notion is what I think of as the social entropy of ideas. Untutored as I am in physics, I still rashly use my sense of the word entropy to identify a common social problem: the way new ideas and visions lose their excitement and energy over time. Let me use a favorite example:
Daniel Bell’s history of the idea of general education tells of a phenomenon that I not only observed but participated in. For a few decades there was a general education movement that changed the face of undergraduate education nationwide. The educated person should also be able to think effectively about contemporary civilization. Some highly respected intellectuals at places like Columbia and Chicago led the way; the bible of the movement was Harvard’s General Education in a Free Society, published in 1945. Sections of the chapter on the theory of general education in that book reveal its ambitions: Areas of Knowledge, Traits of Mind, and the Good Man [sic] and the Citizen.
The core principle was that education should be comprehensive and balanced: the educated person should know something about science, something about literature, something about math, something about history. Over time those became “distribution requirements,” and a student’s course load would typically show math, English, history, physics, and biology, with some other subjects deemed essential, over the first two years of study, after which the assumption was that the student would specialize or major in something. As the requirements became increasingly rigid they also reflected a change in the culture. Those who taught general education courses were soon a successor generation to those who had dreamed up the idea in the first place. The successor generation had not for the most part engaged directly in the exhilarating discussions and debates of the first generation. The focus had shifted from philosophy to practice, from innovation to administration.
By the 1960s the lack of intellectual engagement in the core ideas made the philosophy of general education vulnerable to criticism from students, especially those bright students who resented the one-size-fits-all approach. “Citizenship” was out of favor with the young and they were ripe for protest on the spectrum of issues that mark the era – civil rights, Vietnam, feminism. Discussions of the curriculum were political protest meetings. As a college president in those days I presided over some unforgettable moments: for example, when the chair of modern languages appealed to his colleagues not to drop the language requirement because “We will lose our jobs!” and when the stereotypical radical student (dressed in the Army fatigues that were the fashion of the time) made a speech of Ciceronian eloquence to protest the speech requirement that prevented him from taking a philosophy course.
In the process we may have lost the vision of civil rights as we seem to have lost the vision of general education.
I thought back to The Purposes of Higher Education that Huston Smith wrote in behalf of a distinguished faculty committee at Washington University in the 1950s. The earlier sense of general and liberal education was dead –a cluster of ideas as unappealing as a bouquet of wilted flowers.
We haven’t ever recovered from that collapse, and instead have turned undergraduate education into vocational training. The liberal arts are largely service courses for students who want to learn how to do marketing in order to get a job. The capture of the intellectual life of the campus by marketplace values is complete. As a voice for the liberal arts I feel like a quixotic subversive – subversive because I criticize the dominant culture as shallow and exploitative, and quixotic because not many people care about it. The social entropy or perhaps the half-life of the idea of general education was less than a generation.
Let me offer a second example: civil rights. My simplistic summary will at least be briefer.
The high points of the civil rights movement would include a number of memorable moments, from Rosa Parks on the bus to the small group at the lunch counter, from “the letter from a Birmingham jail” to Federal troops in Little Rock. For those of us who lived through it, watched it, and in various less dramatic and inspiring ways took part in it, the civil rights movement has to be a period of enormous social energy and excitement. This was no academic exercise; this affected where academics went to dinner, which students sat in their classes, what words they would use in polite conversation. The claims of civil rights activists also affected the banks and the military and the churches and the veterans social clubs and residential real estate values.
Fast-forward if you will to the recent attack on affirmative active in higher education. The contrast in the spirit of the 1990s and the spirit of the 1960s could not be greater. The successor generation gradually assumed its place. In those decades the spirit of the civil rights movement gave way to the implementation of civil rights legislation and administration. The spirit of civil rights and the task of making the ideas of racial equality work on a day-to-day basis seemed no longer connected. Advocates of civil rights were now ideologues, and ideologues rose to oppose them. Political correctness – better described as groupthink – prevailed on both sides.
In the process we may have lost the vision of civil rights as we seem to have lost the vision of general education.
And so it is in this discussion of diversity in the theatre, as well as discussions of theatre at large; we may have already lost the vision of theatre itself. Pick any issue you want to discuss pertaining to today’s theatre, and the first think you will note is that it almost immediately becomes a discussion about how to fix, repair, or otherwise rehabilitate a crumbing institution and infrastructure. There comes a time in the life of every person, every organism, every institution, where you have to make the call as to whether what you have is a fixer-upper, a handyman’s special, or a structure no longer worth salvaging. That’s what entropy does, and it is as natural a process as breathing.
What continues to baffle me these days is the fact that so many of the playwright bloggers out there still actually want into this decaying shack. They want a piece of this action. They seem to see a future in it somehow. One of the most noticeable absences of the younger generation as I perceive it is the apparent lack of any counter-cultural movement proclaiming the corruption of the current system and any related action aimed at its destruction. I have been trying to figure that one out now for 15 years. Still no answer. They just continue to knock at the same old rickety doors, asking to be let in by any means (degree, ethnic background, gender, race – even talent!) possible.
It is during times and discussions like these that I am glad I never did try to make a living strictly in the professional theatre. Sometimes, it’s just far, far better to live far from the madding crowd. -twl
PS – Happy holidays!
