19. Recovering Oedipus
Shame, pity and guilt in public policy
If we are to think differently about the response to human suffering, as much of this conversation suggests, do we need also to think differently about what we are trying to achieve?
Had he lived today Oedipus would no doubt hear a professional voice suggesting post-traumatic stress disorder.
Let’s go back to Oedipus. He killed his father and his mother committed suicide, both irrevocable. He was blind. No coming back there either. He carried for the rest of his life the shame of having slept with his mother. In today’s world we might demand an outcome, or at least an output. But what outcomes would we seek for Oedipus?
Had he lived today Oedipus would no doubt hear a professional voice suggesting post-traumatic stress disorder. There would be a lot of interest in his ‘self-harming’ behaviours. And then somebody would go about fixing the problems, and measuring their success in doing do.
Would progress on either or both of these fronts alter Oedipus’s fundamental condition? I suspect not.
How would Oedipus reflect on his future, on his outcomes? One starting point might be the series of states he had experienced over his life; the extremes — a child abandoned by his parents, the patricidal, incestuous man- and the humdrum of ordinary life with its own vicissitudes, a period underachieving in school maybe, a time when he was drinking a little too much perhaps.
Armed with this knowledge, Oedipus might think less in terms of being unwell, and how to get better, and more in terms of a life of continuously changing, co-existing health and ill-health. Just as he might not think of himself as good or bad, considering instead his goodness and badness. Like all of us he would be subject to the constant internal tussle of the passions to be more good and less bad.
His condition puts me in mind also of others who have fallen spectacularly from social grace, the UK politician John Profumo, for instance, who accepted his ‘badness’, sharing his bed with women who also slept with Russian spies, and pursued a life of doing good, seeking the virtues of integrity, honesty and dignity.
One of my studies (with Beca Sandu and Beth Truesdale) focused on people whose lives had been transformed by a relationship in the way that Hilary Cottam alludes. These were people whose outcomes, in the conventional sense, were at best variable. Like us they lapsed, and recovered, then lapsed, before recovering, again and again. Like Oedipus their condition had been fundamentally altered by mind boggling circumstances. Like Profumo they sought virtue, and peace, not the things that matter to public systems like school, work and health.
As I write I think back to one of them J., once a coke sniffing, alcohol fuelled, gun toting sorter out of drug dealers’ problems, now a volunteer in the project that, as he put it, saved his life. A man who meditates two hours a day, living a few blocks away from his family so that when he is at home he can be everything to them that he wants to be. I never did get the measure of him.
Michael Little has been curating The R Word. The book he refers to is Bringing Everything I Am Into One Place, available here.
