Democracy and a Post-Tragic Blues Sensibility
Zak Stein holding up Albert Murray’s The Hero and the Blues
In her post last Friday, Jewel mentioned the Jazz Leadership Project (JLP) workshop that we gave for the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM) organization in Israel. That’s the same organization that a year ago partnered with JLP and the American Sephardi Federation for the two-day broadcast, “Combating Racism and Antisemitism Together: Shaping an Omni-American Future.” What follows is the transcript of a short, brilliant presentation by psychologist and education philosopher Zak Stein from that broadcast.
I asked him to read Albert Murray’s The Hero and the Blues and to thematically connect how Murray’s blues philosophy related to democracy and his own conception of a post-tragic sensibility. I had intuited, after having heard Zak riff on what he called the pre-tragic, tragic, and post-tragic stations of personality development, that there was a deep connection between the post-tragic and the blues. Being familiar with Zak’s work and thought, and having interviewed him, I had no doubt that he could handle the task. That he did so within six minutes was incredible. Let’s see if you’ll agree.
Zak Stein (middle) speaking during the first annual “Shaping an Omni-American Future” brot in October 2021. On the right is the event’s host, and my friend and partner in the initiative, Aryeh Tepper
Host: Now we have with us philosopher, psychologist, and educator, Zak Stein, to speak on the post-tragic blues sensibility. Mr. Stein, welcome, and please take it away.
Dr. Zak Stein: Thank you very much. If Greg spoke about how there's a relationship between democracy and jazz, I think there's a relationship between democracy and the blues as well. I'm going to weave that together by speaking about this notion of what I call post-tragic consciousness.
The basic idea here is that democracy isn't about winning. Democracy is actually about losing; how you handle loss. In a wonderful book by Danielle Allen, Talking To Strangers, she articulates that we have this misunderstanding that democracy is about forming a consensus and getting everyone to believe the same thing. In fact, it's about handling opposition, and creating a situation of cooperative opposition. And what that means is that we need to be able to lose well, and we need to be able to understand that life actually is woven through with loss.
Democracy, unlike other forms of government that strive for a certain kind of perfection, is about a certain inherent open loop in the human condition, a certain tragic structure.
As a psychologist, I think about how we transform from little babies in a crib, to becoming children, to becoming adolescents, to adults, to old age. And there's many ways to think about that.
One way to think about it is in terms of the stations that the personality might go through. I talk often about the pre-tragic personality that believes we can get everyone to agree. The pre-tragic personality is a kind of comedic hero, where you get the girl at the end and everything works out. This is the pre-tragic consciousness.
And then there's a tragic consciousness, when the illusions of childhood are stripped away, and you realize that there's an inherent tragic structure to existence itself. That the very country we live in, the laws that we abide by, were written in blood, et cetera. And so you can get trapped in tragic consciousness and not escape from it. But what the blues musicians teach us, and we can sit as apprentices at the foot of blues musicians on this point, is that there's a way out of the tragic, to the post-tragic.
Albert Murray and his book, The Hero and the Blues, lays out very articulately the nature of that post- tragic consciousness. It is not one that resolves tragedy. The way out of tragedy is not to make it so there isn't tragedy. It's to learn how to live with tragedy. He uses the metaphor of the creation of a sword in the fire. The fire that makes the metal malleable does not destroy it. It eventually hardens its battle edge. So we learn to be, again, in cooperative opposition to the circumstances. The tragic hero—this is what Albert Murray discusses in this book [via] Hemingway and the Greeks, and then also through Thomas Mann.
What you find in the post-tragic hero is not a resolution of tragedy, in fact, but a living with tragedy, a transcending tragedy from within. And so the invitation essentially to democracy at this moment, is to not fall into the trap of demanding consensus and conformity in the time of great complexity, but rather to learn to live in cooperative opposition and to work with a form of post-tragic consciousness that accepts loss, that accepts illness, sickness, death, as an inherent part of the human condition. These are things that the psyche inevitably deals with as it matures.
People without means, people on the short end of the stick, people like the [early] blues musicians understood this well and so that's how we can learn from the blues idiom as an emergent property of American democracy. We can learn from it, to help save democracy, in a time of crisis. In a time when we're regressing back to pre-tragic forms of perfection. We're getting stuck in a kind of postmodern tragic overwhelm and re-traumatization.
So the transcendence through tragedy is what we're seeking and the establishment of a cooperative opposition. And so that's this notion, of the post-tragic consciousness, as a way to learn from the blues and as a way to reconfigure the notion of democracy, not about winning, but democracy [being] about losing. And similarly with life, that we live towards dying instead of pretending to perfect our lives here.
So, I'll end on that note. It's a pleasure to speak with you. I appreciate the time and attention of everyone.
Did Zak’s coinage—cooperative opposition—remind you of a concept we often mention here? Yes: antagonistic cooperation. Thanks to Zak for accepting the mission and rising to the challenge.