Groupthink

“The world is a very puzzling place. If you're not willing to be puzzled, you just become a replica of someone else’s mind.”  -- Noam Chomsky 

No two people have exactly the same moral compass. Show one hundred people a classic drama and interview them separately, you will get one hundred different interpretations.

But if you ask them as a group what they think, especially if they’ve gone on to read a review of the play, things begin to shift. They organize themselves into camps.

It is also demonstrably the case that if fifty journalists attend a play on one night and another fifty on a separate night, these two groups will organize their responses more in line with those who attended with them than with the other collection of journalists.

Place a bullying billionaire at the center of a stadium and listen to the crowd roar along to a string of patently-obvious lies. Many in that crowd know they’re hearing lies, but they also know those lies will forward their personal interests in any number of contexts. So they cheer along with the lies. I know this is so because some of those people are my family and friends and they tell it to me. 

Bring together a classroom of impressionable and well-intended young people and ask for a response to a morally-complex situation, and the first brave crusader for justice who opens their mouth will instantly shut down any and all  further conversation. The many individuals sitting there with their diverging, complex, and nuanced internal considerations will set them aside in order to be spared the imagined public beating they fear in such an open hearing of opinions. 

Many of us turn to certain news outlets to add fuel to the fire already burning in our hearts. We don’t want to be contradicted or learn anything that can’t be used as ammunition.

I can absolutely testify that my neighbors with whom I vehemently disagree are universally kind and respectful whenever we meet in the street.

Which brings us to Bruce Norris’ new play Downstate. Here we have the spectacle of some pedophiles, some of their actual victims, and a representative of the law, enforcing the legal restrictions on both.

And what we see with full recognition and horror, because we know exactly what this all feels like in one realm or another, whether we’ve belonged to any of these groups or not, is a bunch of people for whom others are not actually real. They are ideas of people who can be objectified, vilified, allied with, judged, or accepted.

Rather than explicating how they do this to one another, I would encourage people to attend the play or to read it or, best of all, both.

But here is also where our human predilections for abjuring nuance and respectful debate, our willed refusal to listen to anyone who doesn’t stand in perfect alignment with us and, as a result, our collective failure to imagine the  lives of anyone not already waving our flag swiftly results in what has now become our country’s refusal to agree about anything, because what we are actually refusing to do is talk to each other.

Let’s set aside, for the moment, who benefits from stoking so much conflict across so many bows.

Mask mandates.

Abortion.

Critical race theory. 

You can supply your own long litany of matters you find yourself incapable of comprehending anyone holding an opposing view about other than the one you hold.

When you’re among your own tribe, you chant your stupefaction and your outrage and belligerence in their regard.

But if you were to find yourself on a flight to Australia in the middle seat between two such creatures, would you be able to ask them thoughtful questions and hear their questions for you?

Downstate suggests that we come into our encounters with the Other with an agenda of what we ourselves need and little or no interest in what the other side might be feeling, thinking, needing, requiring. (Spoiler alert.) People in Downstate die because of this failure to understand. Violence erupts. And no one leaves the scene of these crimes improved or enlightened or kinder or more accepting even of themselves.

Now, Bruce Norris has proven his skill over time with such incendiary forms of satiric rendering while viewing a subject people strongly disagree over.

But in this play he has chosen something few people disagree about. Those who feel that pedophilia is just fine and shouldn’t be worried about are few and far between. And yet... as you’ll see if you are someone still willing to engage with new ideas and think through things already predigested for you that Norris has indeed asked us to unpack a shit ton of things about what our disgust and rage at pedophiles leads us to accept as the cost of our justice system.

Again, let’s not spoil the miracle of being shown something you may not have ever fully weighed and considered in the light of all your other moral strictures in this mess of living we inhabit together. 

Let the play do that. 

But I need to point out that the number of people willing to let art do its job—to  show us aspects of our true selves and the actual world we inhabit—grow fewer and fewer in this fraught moment. 

And the people charged with ensuring that our citizens continue to engage with complex thought and to educate themselves to history and facts and forms of analysis that are known to improve our ability to work and live together are now making a spectacular display of their willingness to stand up for absolutely nothing except their own pale, unsightly backsides. 

I’m talking about university administrators. I’m talking about local politicians. I’m talking about journalists. I’m talking about artistic directors of not-for-profit theaters. 

I’m talking about us. 

What a sad display we are making of ourselves right now. 

A play is an opportunity to see something we would otherwise not be willing to entertain. 

We willingly agree to suspend our disbelief in order to entertain something we could not if we weren’t sitting anonymously in the dark, putting ourselves in the hands of an artist. 

It is an exception to life. It is a rare opportunity to imagine others.

But if you decide, without even reading a play, basing your position on second hand information, that that play should not be produced, that no one should have to act in it or see or even be able to find a copy of it in your local library, then you are admitting openly that you do not want to know about things that matter to someone else. 

Downstate suggests that we should not be surprised by this state of affairs. This very, very down state. 

And a culture that censors and erases and denies, no matter which side of the political divide is motivating it, is setting itself up for a spectacularly fragile citizenry incapable of contending with anything difficult. 

History teaches that certain evils will return to us, time and time again. But if you won’t read history that troubles you or tells you things you don’t already know, or if you won’t go to see plays that show you your nation’s history, and if you can’t find that play in a library, then, well, what you are is fucked. 

And if the Deans at Yale and Harvard and Princeton can’t see this or say it out loud, then it falls to the rest of us to do it. 

And if the important journals are going to hire young writers who know nothing about the rich and complex history of an artform, then we are going to have to ask them to do better, please. 

And if the artistic directors are going to cancel important writers who have shown over decades how important it is to tease apart noxious ideas from braver ones, then we are going to have to ask that they step aside in favor of people with a spine and some vision. 

Because, indeed, in all the ways fully dramatized by Bruce Norris in his blazingly fierce and deep new play, we are currently hobbled by many forms of groupthink.

And groupthink, when looked at squarely, is the willful removal of our own brains, hearts, eyes, and agency. 

And that is no more or less than a living death.  

Craig Lucas’s selected works: An American in Paris, Blue Window, The Dying Gaul, I Was Most Alive With You, The Light in the Piazza, Longtime Companion, Ode To Joy, Prelude to a Kiss, Prayer For My Enemy, Reckless, Small Tragedy, The Singing Forest, Two Boys, 3 Postcards, The Secret Lives of Dentists.