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Sunday, October 8, 2023

In partial defense of Sam Bankman-Fried on Shakespeare [there IS a serious issue here]

This passage, which, I gather, is from Michael Lewis’s biography of Sam Bankman-Fried, has been burning up the Twittersphere (Xosphere?) in past couple of days:

It is offered as an example and evidence of his, well, of some sort of deep deficiency.

I’m willing to believe that SBF is deeply flawed, but at the core of that passage is a serious issue.

Setting aside SBF's Bayesian framing, just what is going on that we – whoever WE are – have declared this 16th-17th century playwright to be the world’s greatest writer? Is it really possible that, with so many people having been born (and died) since Shakespeare, that none is as good a writer? Well, sure, in the spirit of anydamnthing is possible, it’s possible. But how likely? Is Shakespeare really better than, say, Rabindranath Tagore, George Eliot, Alexander Pushkin, Honoré de Balzac, Miguel de Cervantes, Dante Alighieri, Murasaki Shikibu, Sophocles, and so forth through a long list – and we haven’t even gotten to the Klingon masters? What’s the standard of judgment?

Anyone who approaches Shakespeare does so knowing that he is the best. Anyone who reads about his work, who studies it, can rattle off reason after reason why he is so good. In all this we are just replaying judgements and assertions that have been set in place by others over past centuries. We do not bring naïve sensibilities to Shakespeare. We do not and cannot approach him, or any other canonical writer, innocently. Our judgements are borrowed from others as much if not more than they are our own.

That’s how culture works and Bankman-Fried is right to question it, if however clumsily.

Having said all that, let’s continue on by considering Harold Bloom on Shakespeare's greatness. In a post with that title I quote Bloom as saying:

The principal insight that I’ve had in teaching and writing about Shakespeare is that there isn’t anyone before Shakespeare who actually gives you a representation of characters or human figures speaking out loud, whether to themselves or to others or both, and then brooding out loud, whether to themselves or to others or both, on what they themselves have said. And then, in the course of pondering, undergoing a serious or vital change, they become a different kind of character or personality and even a different kind of mind. We take that utterly for granted in representation. But it doesn’t exist before Shakespeare.

I’m in no position to contradict Bloom’s judgment on that. It seems credible to me. That’s sufficient to ensure Shakespeare a place in the canon. Shakespeare is a great writer, irreducibly a genius.

A genius, a place in the canon? That’s one thing. But the best ever? I know what the words mean, but I don’t believe that conjunction of them means much of anything. Or, rather, what it means is some expression of cultural faith, some display of cultural affinity. It’s not a matter of objective judgment. Literary achievement is too complex, too multidimensional, to admit of the kind of one-dimensional scalar ranking that puts one individual at the top.

Here's a post in which I explore that issue: The Hunt for Genius, Part 2: Crackpots, athletes, 4 kinds of judgment, training, and Cultural Context. I begin by observing that it is easy to determine just who is the fastest sprinter in the world. That’s something we know how to measure. What about the best gymnast? That’s more complicated. The best athlete? Still more complicated. Judging artistic accomplishment is, if anything, even more complex. I’m inclined to think we can rank artists in levels, where the artists in a given level are said to produce work of the same quality, but that it makes no sense to declare any particular artist to be the unique best.

Then we have to consider the fact that Shakespeare was writing at time when the world was changing. That puts him in a position to benefit from what evolutionary biologists call the founder effect. Oleg Sobchuk explains it [pp. 93-94]:

Imagine a group of monkeys living in an imaginary Unhappy valley. The valley is called Unhappy, because there are too many monkeys and too little food. In the search for more bananas and oranges, a group of four monkeys (who happen to be shorter than the rest of their group – just by chance) takes a risky trip to an unknown land, possibly full of predators. However, they get lucky: they find another valley with lots of bananas and no monkey competitors. So, these four settle in the Happy valley. They give birth to many children, all of which share the genes of this initial small group. As a result, most of the monkeys in the new colony are short – like their four ancestors. And – it is important to stress – they are short not because this trait is adaptive (i.e., it was not selected for), but simply due to chance. It just happened that the founders were short – by chance.

He then points out [p. 96]:

The contemporary literary field – Modern European literature – began to take shape in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The main reason for this was the invention of the modern nation state: a radically new way to organize societies (Hobsbawm 1992). And at the avant-garde of nationalism were Germans. They did not have a united state, and they felt the need to obtain it more than anyone else. A state united by a single nation, a single language, and... a single literature. German intellectuals started thinking about their literary canon earlier than the intellectuals in other countries. They started inventing the canon.

And they centered this canon on Shakespeare because he suited their Romantic sensibilities. They constructed his greatness, not from nothing, but from the conjunction of his texts and their needs – I say a bit more about this here, where I originally quoted Sobchuk.

If we really wish to understand Shakespeare’s greatness, then, we must consider two things: 1) his texts, and 2) what we have made of his texts, and why? We now have the intellectual tools to state the issue. As for actually dealing with it, I believe that’s a long-term project.

Two other posts that are relevant:

The 2011 post is the first time I looked at the issue. The 2018 post looks at data on literary prestige gathered at the Stanford Literary Lab. 

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 OTOH, this guy is just an idiot, you know, all sound and fury:


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