History Used to Be a Poem. Now It's Reality TV
UPD: Streaming software failed, but you can still join Zoom.
I’m going to talk to
, a friend and one of the most lucid writers I know on Substack, about the news today.This is the third Psychopolitica live stream. You can watch it on Youtube or join the conversation on Zoom.
We’ll start at 8am Pacific, which is 11am Eastern, or 5pm in Málaga where I am, or 10pm in Bishkek where Sam is.
YOUTUBE LINK (to watch)
ZOOM LINK (to call in)
On the previous stream, which happened last Thursday, my guest was Boris Shoshitaishvili of the Berggruen Institute, co-author of the piece on Steve Bannon’s Noosphere Warfare that I recently published here in PsyPol.
One of the interesting things he said was a kind of a McLuhanesque (now that I think about it) take on the Iliad and the Odyssey. We normally think of the epic poem as a product of the Ancient Greek culture; but we could also turn this around and see the culture as the product of the poem.
Here’s a little excerpt from our exchange:
So the epic poem, you’re saying, can be seen as a force that shaped the civilization, that allowed it to evolve the way that it did?
Yeah… My reading of the Iliad in particular and maybe the Odyssey to a lesser extent is they’re an expression of a desire to construct a coherent world through exploring every possible way in which a conflict or a clash can structure thought, politics, and metaphysics.
The Iliad is an incredibly conflict-oriented poem: in the most obvious sense, it’s a war poem; but what you get out of the war between the Trojans and the Greeks is a bunch of subsidiary conflicts: the Greeks have conflicts inside of their ranks, the Trojan inside of theirs, gods are coming into battle and occasionally even facing off against humans, you have human beings described as animals that are in conflict with each other…
So you end up with a very powerful cultural object that gives you all sorts of ways to see how — “a conflict” is almost the wrong word — a meeting between two sides can help structure the entire, to use the most general term possible, situation, from the cosmic to the political.
You see the role of conflict in Ancient Greek and Classical Greek society in how they staged tragedies; in the democratic assembly in Athens; in gymnastics and Greek athletics (and we still carry this over in our Olympics).
One description, which I think Hanna Arendt gave, is that basically the Greeks came back from this massive, cosmic conflict and then tried to domesticate this force of conflict that was unleashed on all levels in Troy.
To some extent, they domesticated it poetically in texts like the Iliad, but then they tried to do it further in the Ancient Greek polis and all of its institutions.
Let me just repeat what you’re saying to make sure I understand.
The way we get the polis is first they had a war, and then a lot of reflection on the nature of conflict, and attempts to, as you say, domesticate it; and that’s what the democracy of a polis is. We’re trying to take all the different conflicts in our society and channel them into a productive way of doing things.
Yeah, with democracy being one key example, but also, for example, competitions between tragedians. Even Socrates and philosophy can be seen as a kind of a structured conflict: Socrates is always challenging his interlocutors, saying, to get to the truth, we need to stage these [conflicts] — you know, he uses all of these metaphors of wrestling, he’s wrestling with his interlocutors…
Later in the discussion, I asked Boria if there’s a genre of creative expression that he sees as our society’s epic poem; and I offered reality TV and what we could broadly call reality media — that is, all the different genres of performing as self on the screen and in audio, from professional wrestling to the US presidential debates to podcasting to TikTok dances — as a possible answer.
Today, as I’m thinking about “the news” in preparation for my conversation with Sam, I think of the news as reality TV.
I remember talking about America as a reality show with my European friends: “Every few months, you feel like it’s gotten much too over-the-top and repetitive, and you’re about to give up on it, but then they hook you again with another cliff-hanger — THE PRESIDENT JUST GOT SHOT — and you can’t help but keep watching.”
Yesterday, over breakfast, I told my wife, “Oh wow, the Syrian rebels just took Damascus. Assad either fled or was killed.”
Over the course of the day, I tried to get the most basic understanding of what’s happening there: so here are the different groups, and here’s how Turkey, Russia, and the US factor in, and what is this now — Israel’s bombing Damascus as well?..
When Assad and his family landed in Moscow, my wife read the news to me in an excited tone — another plot twist! — which immediately shifted towards disgust, “What an absurdity, look at us following all these psychotic characters and the death and destruction they sow as if it’s a show…”
We got back to watching From on HBO Max, a mystery horror about people trapped in a small town, where all exiting roads somehow lead back to it.
I thought of doing an ostensibly newsy stream today before I learned about Syria. I almost chickened out because I know so little about that situation. But then, as I wrote in an email to Sam,
…that only makes the experiment more pronounced.
This is the reality of my, and of many people's relationship to the news: we're not really informed, we get the rundown on the latest crisis in the days after it happens, pretty quickly develop a generally respectable opinion to hold (or pick a readymade one), and then pretend like we know what's going on...
I know you're on firmer ground than me in this regard, but I also know that a lot of people are on even shakier foundations than mine.
I’ve been wanting to experiment with the genre for a long time. If this first improvised foray is successful, I’ll try to start building towards a format (I even have theme music picked out).
The feeling I’m after is not that of a “serious news show” — I don’t want to pretend to be more informed or have better insight than I actually do, and I don’t want to change my whole life around in order to continuously get up to speed with all the insanity that surrounds us — the feeling I’m after is that of having breakfast and coffee with friends at a diner, with a TV set mumbling in the background, and with a couple of people sharing pages of a newspaper, occasionally saying “hey listen to this.”
It so happened that we were born into history, and it keeps fucking happening, sometimes to us directly, and sometimes on the screens of our phones, as the backdrop to the more intimate histories of our individual lives; and I am looking for ways to relate to it all through conversation with people I like.
So that’s what I’m doing later today, with the writer & journalist Sam Kahn.
I invite you to join, on Youtube or Zoom, at 11am ET, by clicking the links below:
YOUTUBE LINK (to watch)
ZOOM LINK (to call in)
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Jeremy N. Smith is a very accomplished coach, creative consultant, and writer acclaimed by CNN, the New York Times, Bill Gates, and Jane Goodall, among others.
He offers a complimentary coaching session to any PsyPol subscriber.
