XVI. after the flood

on Australian entrepreneurs, success, and community action

I finally cleaned my room. I made my bed listening to Micheal Barbaro delve into the future of industrial ocean mining. The man footing the bill for these deep sea expeditions, an Australian entrepreneur, argues that we are beyond the question of “are you pro-mining or not;” if we are going to free ourselves from fossil fuels we’re going to need an influx of the metals that make up things like electric car batteries and those metals have been found in nodules on the ocean floor. I didn’t listen to the whole episode. It seems like the only way to stem climate destruction on one front is to start in on another.

We close before the flood today. A ten-performance run over two weeks is much better than the four shows we’d get in college, but it doesn’t feel like nearly enough. The show is only getting tighter. I only recently started having fun performing instead of the usual intense focus with short bursts of presence. Opening a show is like being glued to a slingshot. You are constantly snapped forward into the next moment—the big scene in act 2, the cross you don’t quite remember—only to fling backwards again into the current moment where your mouth is moving and hopefully the right words are coming out in the right order. For a moment the slingshot hangs limp and you try to settle into the swing of the present, but then it’s off again; stretching back into that flubbed line a few seconds ago and rocketing forward to the anxiety about your next exit.

me: probably mentally running my next lines while staring lovingly. courtesy of btf director and photographer Nina Goodheart

This week I have escaped the slingshot, which has freed some mental space to think of the play as a whole. The play is very concerned with ethics. I can think of at least three critical scenes where my character says some version of “it isn’t right.” Beyond being good or bad, each character is asked to evaluate their own actions and the actions of others. The play lends some freebies—decisions and attitudes that are wrong in the way the audience immediately recognizes as breaking our social ethical codes. The eldest brother, Shem, is domineering and prone to violent rages. There is no redemption for him. He sees women in a warped, hyper biblically-literal sense: an extension of his own body, created only in relation to him, to be valued insofar as she enhances his own life. At the end of Act 2, he states his primary desire, “I realized what I wanted was not Rebekah, I wanted my wife. A woman to cook for me, and appreciate me and…love me.” This is bad behavior. You can feel the audience condemn him before his final exit. However, the central drama of Act 2 is less clear-cut, even if it appears so on its surface. Noah and his two eldest sons exploit Shem’s “followers” to build the ark. With the free labor of over a hundred people who think they are getting on the boat, the ark is built in seven days as God commanded. When Noah’s daughter, who has been warning people of the flood and urging them to move to the highest point of a mountain, hears what her family has done and enters in a righteous rage Noah asks, “what do you want us to say…I know what we did was wrong but there just wasn’t time to be right.”

I wonder if this is how the Australian entrepreneur felt. If he woke up one morning and he, like Noah preaches in Act 1 said, “the future is not bright it’s the stuff of nightmares and it’s our fault…look at the droughts, fires, plagues. Look at the destruction.” And then he sought the most expedient solution which happens to be metal-rich nodules on the ocean floor—home to species we haven’t even categorized yet, disturbed after millions of years, dredged up from the water to solve a scorched earth we caused. The play asks over and over again: what is right? what will you do to survive? and when those are in conflict which do you choose?

In an effort to be totally on brand, I am reading Ethics by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a 20th century pastor and theologian. Sometimes his ethical framework feels alien to me, rooted as it is in God’s redemption of man through Jesus Christ, but for the most part his writing is so clear and incisive it almost feels like it shouldn’t be revelatory, like a thought I must have already had a thousand times. For example, the successful man:

The world will allow itself to be subdued only by success. It is not ideas or opinions which decide, but deeds. Success alone justifies wrongs done. Success heals the wounds of guilt. There is no sense in reproaching the successful man for his unvirtuous behaviour, for this would be to remain in the past while the successful man strides forward from one deed to the next, conquering the future and securing the irrevocability of what has been done. The successful man presents us with accomplished facts which can never again be reversed. What he destroys cannot be restored. What he contracts will acquire at least a prescriptive right in the next generation. No indictment can make good the guilt which the successful man has left behind him.

I wonder if the Australian will be a successful man. Noah was. Taking the Bible literally, he is the savior not only of his family, but of the entire human race. We all owe our lives to him. In the narrative of the play, how do you tell a man who was divinely commanded and fulfilled that command, saving the family that he loves in the process, that he was wrong? The guilt was drowned, forty feet underwater with all the rest, leaving Noah in his sturdy ark of gopher wood to float above it.

I am not as steadfast about what is right and wrong as the character I play. Yam is braver than I am, more unyielding. I would fold in the face of those I loved; I have before, albeit for lesser stakes. I am someone who retreats into what Bonhoeffer calls private virtuousness.

Such a man does not steal. He does not commit murder. He does not commit adultery. Within the limits of his powers he does good. But in his voluntary renunciation of publicity he knows how to remain punctiliously within the permitted bounds which preserve him from involvement in conflict. He must be blind and deaf to the wrongs which surround him. It is only at the price of self-deception that he can safeguard his private blamelessness against contamination through responsible action in the world.

I would argue this is how many of us live. This is not an indictment; on some level we have to, inundated as we are with not only the wrongs that surround us, but the wrongs happening on every part of the globe past, present, and future. In a secular mindset, I have only my own conscience to rely on—picking through the rubble of different faith systems and philosophies to try to cobble together a personal code that will tell me what to do in a given situation. I do not think I am a bad person, I am just becoming acutely aware of what it takes to think of myself as a good one. You cannot walk down 8th avenue between 32nd and 50th without being blind and deaf to your surroundings, to the abject failure of our social system which has left so many seeking refuge under Times Square scaffolding. Bonhoeffer posits that for the privately virtuous man, “whatever he may do, that which he omits will give him no peace.”

I think the play asks us to become publicly enmeshed in the conflict. To witness together the consequences, to think in community about the solutions. It is a hopeful play. Figuring out the right thing to do is a hopeful endeavor. I have faith in us; I have a sneaking suspicion that on the whole humanity is better than we give it credit for. I imagine, maybe naively that many people would agree with the sentiment, “I like our world too, even if it is far from perfect.”