text: Econo-blogger Tyler Cowen is a truly odd duck, and as such he says some intriguing things almost as often as he says deeply strange things. His weirdly contrarian TED anti-talk about his suspicion of storytelling is a great example. (Transcript here.) A fair amount of it strikes me as rhetorical water-treading around a very basic idea with big implications—essentially, that narrative is a false comfort we can ill afford in a complex world—but this quote jumped out at me:
  As a general rule, we're too inclined to tell the good vs. evil story. As a simple rule of thumb, just imagine every time you're telling a good vs. evil story, you're basically lowering your IQ by ten points or more. If you just adopt that as a kind of inner mental habit, it's, in my view, one way to get a lot smarter pretty quickly. You don't have to read any books. Just imagine yourself pressing a button every time you tell the good vs. evil story, and by pressing that button you're lowering your IQ by ten points or more.
  He's talking about Occupy Wall Street as much as he is, say, Tolkien. What's interesting to me is about the time I read this, I was making my way, at long last, through R. Crumb's amazing Book of Genesis comic (light holiday reading, you know). And though I don't want to put too fine a point on this realization or make any special claims about scripture, I was struck by how knotted and complicated the moral scheme of the Hebrew and Christian Bible really is, if you take it straight and take it (more or less) seriously. Sure, there's plenty of talk about good and evil, about faithful followers of God and covenants and those who are unlucky enough to be outside that favor, but these are outweighed by the sheer mass of story after story of complicated misalliances, misunderstandings, and half-measures.
  The story of the Fall in Eden, in other words, feels much less like the Biblical template than the one that follows it immediately: that of Cain slaying Abel, then getting a more-or-less free pass to set up his family and lineage. Yes, I know, the writers take pains to show how Adam and Eve's next son, Seth, replaced Abel and sired the "good" line that would survive the Flood etc. But Cain, the repentant murderer, feels a lot more like the spiritual ancestor to the likes of Jacob, Joseph, Saul, David, and Solomon.
  Reading this stuff with clear eyes, as David Plotz memorably did, might be many things—frustrating, maddening, sobering, revelatory, fascinating—but it seems to me very far from reductive or Manichean.
  Can't explain why, but this Flanders and Swann's riff on Mozart's fourth horn concerto sounds like Christmas to me. And with that I sign off the Wicked Stage for a spell, until something stirs or strikes me.
  These things aren't supposed to mean anything, but that Christopher Hitchens' thoroughly examined life ended on the same day as the misbegotten Iraq war for which he was the most vociferous—and, speaking for myself, most persuasive—advocate seems cruelly poetic. For it was he, more than Kenneth Pollack or Tom Friedman or Paul Berman or George Packer, who convinced me for longer than I care to admit that invading Iraq was, if never quite a wise idea, then a morally defensible one. (My shame-faced feelings about the war since have mostly closely tracked Packer's.)
  It is an odd fate for Hitchens, whose overarching cause was anti-theism, to be linked forever with a disastrous invasion that has vanishingly little to do with the religious/secular battle he felt awakened to (with his famous "feeling of exhilaration") by 9/11. The best I can say in retrospect about the folly of this otherwise fiercely bright, clear-eyed man's case for war was that I, for one, never saw it as cynical or career-minded. Like his disgusting Clinton/Blumenthal betrayal years before, it was yet another sign of his thoroughgoing intellectual mischievousness and unreliability. That which made him a compelling figure also, on regular occasions, made him repulsive. As with his longtime colleague and compatriot Andrew Sullivan, you could neither really trust the man nor entirely dismiss him.
  He was ultimately a kind of dead-serious literary/political entertainer, and even as I gladly wash my hands of much of what he stood for, I find myself still dazzled by his vigor and volubility. And I cherish this entirely typical quote, from the closing remarks of one of his jillion God-vs.-no-God debates, addressed in particular to young evangelicals:
  For me, the offer of certainty, the offer of complete security, the offer of an impermeable faith that can't give way, is an offer of something not worth having. I want to live my life taking the risk all the time that I don't know anything like enough yet. That I haven't understood enough, that I can't know enough, that I'm always hungrily operating on the margins of a potentially great harvest of future knowledge and wisdom. I wouldn't have it any other way. And I urge you to look at those of you that tell you (at your age) that that you are dead until you believe as they do. (What a terrible thing to be telling to children.) And that you can only live by accepting an absolute authority. Don't think of that as a gift, think of it as a poison chalice. Push it aside no matter how tempting it is. Take the risk of thinking for yourself. Much more happiness, truth, beauty and wisdom will come to you that way.
  An extraordinary post by Ta-Nehisi Coates, urging us to take account of our own ordinariness when contemplating moral quandaries, happens to include a resonant illustration from my area of consideration:
  Some weeks ago I met a student who was specializing in economy and theater. She said that what she loved about both fields was that she had to presume a kind of rationality in studying her actors. She had to surrender herself--her sense of what she would like to think she would do--and think more of what she might actually do given all the perils of the character's environs. It would not be enough to consider slavery, for instance, when claiming "If I was a slave I'd rebel." One would have to consider, for instance, family left behind to bear the wrath of those one would seek to rebel against. In other words, one would have to assume that for the vast majority of slaves rebellion made no sense. And then instead of declaration ("I would do..."), one would be forced into a question ("Why wouldn't I?").
  That, in a nutshell, strikes me as both a description of, and a mission statement for, an ideal social theater--one which confronts us with our humanity even, or especially, in extremity, and asks us, without the promise of easy comfort or catharsis, not only what we would do in a given situation but why we wouldn't do otherwise, or why we think we'd do much better than the characters we're invested in. That's the moral force behind the best Brecht productions I've seen, for one, but it's also not very far from the surface of any play that's moved me or gotten under my skin, from Shakespeare to Sondheim, from Albee to Nottage.
  A favorite I couldn't include in my piece on Maple and Vine, from playwright Jordan Harrison in answer to the question of when he fell in love with theater:
  In third grade, I was in this musicalizaton of Johnny Apleseed—very avant-garde, I’m sure. My role was the class nerd, and I was the class nerd—but when I played the class nerd onstage, everyone who ragged on me in life was slapping me on the shoulder, as if there was something heroic about doing the same thing onstage that I did in everyday life. That was a kind of 'Huh' moment for me. That’s the beginning.
  Apropos my thoughts on Stick Fly, I recalled this (unused) quote from Lynn Nottage, from when I talked to her about By the Way, Meet Vera Stark: