The Problem With Being Right

What makes William Shakespeare so great? I remember asking myself this as an undergraduate. Having double-majored in English and Theatre (do you want fries with that?), I took several courses in Shakespeare, theatre literature, and theatre history, and all repeatedly concurred that William Shakespeare was the greatest English-language playwright ever, if not the greatest of all languages, or even the greatest all-around writer.

But somehow, we never talked about why Shakespeare merits these superlatives.

The closest we ever came to discussing what defined Shakespeare’s supposed preëminence, basically consisted of describing his works. We identified the moral contradictions which brought Macbeth to destruction, or how Hamlet’s lingering indecision reflected a collision between Medieval virtues and Renaissance learning. But this only consisted of identifying Shakespeare’s traits from Shakespeare himself. The inherent reasoning was circular.

And we didn’t even consider Shakespeare’s entire body of work. Throughout undergraduate studies, we repeatedly circled onto the Five Great Tragedies, with occasional forays into comedies like Much Ado About Nothing. I didn’t get a mentored walk-through of non-standard plays like Titus Andronicus until graduate school. When I did, I felt ripped-off in my previous education, because it set everything I knew about Shakespeare in an entirely new context.

(Don’t get me started on anti-Stratfordianism. I had a professor who taught that theory as serious critical scholarship. But what he actually showed us existed on about the same level as Sovereign Citizen politics or the “science” of crystal healings: supposed scholars overhyped minor inconsistencies in the historical record, and insisted that, unless mainstream academia was airtight, every counter-hypothesis deserved equal treatment. I rolled my eyes.)

Only after graduate school did I contemplate how much of what I learned followed this pattern. How much of art, philosophy, and social science actually explained anything, and how much did they just describe? How much history looks inevitable, and free from contingency, because we already know how it ended? And how often do we apply “explanations” to important controversies that simply make moral ambiguities go away, without resolving anything?

Obviously this doesn’t apply to every subject. In science and engineering, for instance, when two different explanations exist for why reality behaves in certain ways, we can conduct experiments or build prototypes to determine which explanation really works. Even when we cannot experiment directly, useful heuristics exist to reconcile gaps. Scientists find evolution more persuasive than seven-day creationism, for instance, because it requires fewer leaps of faith.

But most disciplines, and the most exciting fields within those disciplines, aren’t subject to direct experiment or binary heuristics. For instance, in economics, a field often taught as science, much of the debate we embrace, as between capitalism and socialism, reflects not objective reality, but the values each adherent honors. Is justice more important that freedom from limit? May we prevent some people becoming poor, if it also prevents others becoming rich?

We see this unfold in daily life around us. Employers make important decisions about hiring, investment, and organization based on “theories” that merely describe what’s worked in the past, or what appears to work within thought experiments. Young people looking for work continue flocking to New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, not because there’s actual work waiting, but because that’s where everybody goes looking for work. The patterns simply continue.

In politics, Republicans have flourished by making broad appeals to voters’ perceived values, particularly their love of stability and fear of change. Donald Trump’s apparent contradictions go away when you reëvaluate him as simply preserving voters’ illusions about themselves. Democrats, meanwhile, focus on “centrism” and “electability,” phantoms that describe what they think the American median looks like, often without talking to actual Americans.

They all perpetuate the Shakespeare fallacy: we already know Shakespeare is the best, and therefore anybody who challenges Shakespeare’s primacy automatically fails, because Shakespeare is the best. The conclusion is already found in the premise, and can therefore never be disproven. So rather than dispute the premise on its merits, those who’d refute Shakespeare instead cast aspersions on the man himself. Because they, too, accept he’s the best. Whoever he is.

I don’t have a better counter-offer, not yet anyway. At this point, I’ve only identified a problem I haven’t yet resolved. But hopefully, by placing it outside for everyone to see, we can work together to address the ways our cultural myths preserve themselves against scrutiny and challenge. Because, as economics and climate and international tensions threaten to crush ordinary citizens where we stand, somebody should barbecue our sacred cows.