Tyler Cowen: evaluation

Transcript context

…Well, it’s always hard to know what Shakespeare really thought. You certainly have different characters. You have someone like Macbeth who says, “Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” That doesn’t sound like a particularly Christian worldview. That’s just what Macbeth says; it’s not what Shakespeare says. It’s always very hard to know, or maybe it’s sort of a Christian nihilistic view of the world or something like that. The contrast I always frame is that the way I understand Shakespeare is always in contrast with someone like Karl Marx, where Marx believed that people had battles over differences that mattered. It was the different classes, and they had objectively different interests, and this is what led to the intensity of the struggle. There’s something in Shakespeare that’s sort of proto-Girardian or very mimetic, where people have conflicts when they . . . The conflicts are the most intense when they don’t differ at all. It’s the opening line of Romeo and Juliet. It’s the Capulets versus Montagues, two houses “alike in dignity.” They’re identical, and that’s why they hate each other so much. Or I think it’s at the end of Hamlet, where Hamlet says to be truly great, you must take everything for an eggshell because an average person would fight over things that mattered, but a truly great person would fight over things as ephemerral as honor or an eggshell or something like this. Of course, Hamlet’s problems — he doesn’t really believe all the insane revenge drama he’s supposed to be in. I think there is probably a place where I would say yes, Shakespeare would probably be very distrustful of extreme ideological differences today. That would probably in some ways also be a kind of political atheist. I find the play Julius Caesar very interesting because there’s no katechon. There’s no muddling through, so they sacrifice Caesar. There’s a civil war and a lot more people dying and no end to that in sight. It’s the pessimistic scenario of the Thiel mental universe, I think. There’s a strange way where they’re all going back and thinking they’re reenacting things. The way Brutus gets pulled into the conspiracy in Julius Caesar is that he gets reminded that his ancestor, another person named Brutus, had overthrown Tarquin, the last of the kings of Rome, in 509 BC, so he thinks he’s just reenacting that murder. I think there is some part in the play where Shakespeare has the actor say — I’m going to get this slightly garbled, but it’s something like, “Centuries hence there’ll be people reenacting this on a stage in front of an audience.” This is what motivates Brutus to do it. It’s like the future applause in the Shakespearean theater. Then of course, the crazy literal reenactment of it was John Wilkes Booth shooting Abraham Lincoln in 1865, where Booth was a Shakespearean actor, and then it was “Sic semper tyrannis,” was what he said. He thought he was reenacting the Brutus-Caesar thing. You can look at the 1838 Lincoln speech, the Young Men’s Lyceum address, where Lincoln portrays himself in a somewhat coded way as sort of a proto-Caesar, and he tells the audience there are people in this country who wouldn’t be happy to be . . . Some people are really ambitious, but no one could be like a founder because that was in the past, and the most you can now be is a president. But there are people for whom being president is not enough, and there are some people who, if you didn’t stop them, they would keep going until they enslaved all the white people or freed all the slaves. Lincoln was talking about himself and saying that he has the ambition to be like a Caesar or a Napoleon or something like this. It’s a bit of a roundabout answer. Yes, there are ways we can see it as a cycle, but surely that’s what we want to transcend. It was a bad idea for Brutus to think he was reenacting the Caesar thing, and somehow there was something about the John Wilkes Booth story that’s pretty sad too.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.