Theatre and the genesis of social order

The decision to participate in theatre is the decision to elevate a social design to actuality, usually based on an abstract assessment of its merit. Theatre is thus the means by which societies overcome their acquired ways in times that seems proper to them. There is however a wealth of different situations in which this occurs, and I will give an overview over them.

The first dialectical (in the Platonic sense) distinction that we make concerns the societies in question. There are three different understandings of what is right, namely

• what is just, the righteous view,
  
• what is the law, the legalistic view, and
• what a man's power allows him to do, the vitalistic view.
  

Societies in which there is a lack of the legalistic view (semitic societies in my categorisation, their focus on the legal aspect of religion is a compensation) don't ever assume a social order worth speaking of, and hence theatre has no place in them. Societies in which there is a lack of the righteous or vitalistic view on the other hand, tibeto-japanese or indo-european societies in my categorisation respectively,  do assume social orders, the difference being that the righteous view strives to deliberately perfect them (again, the unchangeability of semitic religions is a compensation) and hence tibeto-japanese societies accept their acquired ways in general whereas indo-european societes do not. [This whole presentation is simplistic and only applicable for the age of works. A generalisation for other ages would however stumble over a number of unrelated factors, so that there is no particular harm in being simplistic here. The best that can be done in that regard is to study theatre in ancient empires. Without thinking much about the subject I'd conclude that theatre played a smaller role in the age of watch, i.e. simply backing the ruling dynasty.]

Hence in tibeto-japanese societies theatre is played for the purpose of the suspension of the acquired ways, whereas in indo-european societies it is played for the purpose of their replacement. There are two cases of suspension, namely

• dealing with an extraordinary situation, catastrophes,
  
• dealing with the accumulated failings of the ordinary situation, rectifications.
  

For the rest of this post we shall concern us with indo-european societies. It should first be noted that if there is a desire to perfect the social order in a society, it is not necessary to do so by overcoming the acquired ways in a theatrical fashion, replacing the old in one sweep with a new design. There is a choice between a hierarchical perfection that relies on theatre and an organic one that arises out of interested interplay. It must be understood that the Catholic Church is the hierarchical perfection in the sense that the Catholic Church has used theatre in every single case it has replaced the acquired ways and that no other European entity has ever overcome the acquired ways by theatre and that protestantism is likewise the organic perfection.

There is a group of protestants who hold the view that there can be no unity out of individual notions of what is right. That may or may not be so, but if it is so, then social orders must be hierarchically perfected and the individual has to consider his Christianity as a role in a play written by the religious authorities. And that is not protestantism. The Catholic Church knows this of course and scoffs with good reason at the idea that the Bible would have the magical power to make any reader understand it independent of what that reader considers to be right, and how much more insane could you get? There is abundant proof that readers only 200 years after Christ's crucifixion didn't understand it at all, yet 2000 years after it everybody does? The only hope to establish that the Bible can be understood by anyone lies in asserting that anyone has a connection to God via the logos (notion) of the holy and can thus in a quasi Platonic sense recognise the holy ideas expressed in the teaching and the life of Jesus Christ, in which the full notion of the holy has become flesh. But it requires a serious effort, and hence it may also not succeed.

Continuing with the subject at hand, there are two ways in which theatre can be orchestrated, namely indirectly and directly. The Catholic Church started out with orchestrating it indirectly, telling promising noblemen to become kings and make their own social designs. If the Catholic Church approved, it let them be, otherwise it would position other noblemen against them. So in these times theatre was the fancy of kings, yet the Catholic Church controlled it, for

1. only noblemen could usurp power and
2. the approval of the Catholic Church was the only way to have any safety in the regal position.
   

The problem with Haiti is that the population has accepted theatre as the fancy of potentates who are not controlled. So what Haiti needs is a bishop who looks at the strongest, most handsome Haitians and declares them noblemen, admonishing everybody else how he may dare to lift his hand against these miracles of human perfection, then take the noblemen aside and point out to them that their new position is an immense gift that far outweighs any disagreements that they may have amongst themselves and that they must therefore first and foremost defend the institution. And if they do that, they have the right to challenge any king that seems unworthy to them, only in such a way that the nobility of his family isn't questioned.

But just as Haitians accept the fancy of uncontrolled potentates, there are other folks who don't even accept the fancy of controlled ones, the Saxons probably being the foremost example. So, at some point they told the king that his fancy henceforth would be what they decided and Queen Elizabeth still abides by that.

This in turn forced the Catholic Church to give up the indirect orchestration and orchestrate the theatre directly every time a new social order had to be established, starting with the French Revolution and Napoléon. It is of course so that hierarchical and organic perfection of the social order cannot coexist since

• theatre disrupts the interested interplay and
• the interested interplay leads to situations that are too convoluted to serve as the foundation for human designs,
  

hence the undeclared war since 1763, with its spikes so far in 1813 and 1913, and say what you will, life has by now surely become a lot more theatrical than it was in 2012.