Shakespeare's Proud Loner and The Wisdom Of Crowds

Coriolanus is not my favourite Shakespeare play, nor is the main character a natural

politician or even a sympathetic character. From the moment he walks onto the stage,

the the Roman elitist flaunts his contempt for the lower orders of society:

“What's the matter, you dissentious rogues,

That, rubbing the poor itch of your opinion,

Make yourselves scabs?

His refusal to schmooze the electorate leads not only to his forfeiting their support

but to his exile and ultimately his death. The lesson for modern politicians and

opinion makers in this is to beware the "wisdom of the crowd." Coriolanus seems to

be a vehicle for Shakespeare's own view of the 'many-headed multitude' and I have to

say, The Bard's opinion of the sheeple is not far removed from my own.

Though the plays tell us little of Shakespeare's politics (wise of him as, the

Elizabethan and Stuart era having an opinion could result in losing one's head) he

certainly held the mob in contempt. We might claim him as a radical or a

conservative, a nationalist or an internationalist, a Catholic, a Protestant, an atheist.

All these cases have been argued persuasively. And yet we still know little of the

man.

As GK Chesterton put it, the most anyone can hope for is to be wrong about

Shakespeare in a new way. One thing is certain however. Shakespeare loathed the

rabble. His crowds are almost invariably crass, bellicose, fickle, greedy and gullible.

Think of those episodes in The Simpsons where the townspeople form themselves

into a drooling mob and you you have a shadow of the ignorance, stupidity and

unthinking irrationality of a Shakespearean mob. The witch hunt scene in Monty

Python and the Holy Grail captures the atmosphere well.

Despising the mob is not quite the same as despising the electorate in the way

politicians like Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and lately Barack

Obama have shown is their attitude A mob can take on a collective identity, in which

individual qualities of those who join it are temporarily lost. It becomes a rampaging

beast, all logic and reason, empathy and values discarded. No wonder the greatest

creative mind the British nations have ever spawned had the attitude of a tyrant or

worse an international bureaucrat to "the wisdom of crowds".

Shakespeare was not a politician, for him to portray the mob as slack jawed idiots in

an adrenaline fuelled frenzy of anger, fear and panic was fine. Nobody in the

audience would recognize themselves as a member of such a rabble, most people who

are sucked up in the madness think they are behaving perfectly reasonably. It is

different for politicians however. When Blair, Brown and Obama talked of voters

being too stupid to understand their policies it was not in reference to a gang of

rioters or a protest that ran out of control. They spoke of a majority of the electorate.

Barack Obama and British Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown all

described people sceptical of the Anthopogenic Global Warming scare as being

insane and said they were prepared to consider making "climate change denial" a

crime similar to holocaust denial.

Now denying the Nazi holocaust, the slaughter of European Jews in World War 2 is

stupid but since when was stupidity a crime? If it was we would have to bang up

anyone who voted for a left wing candidate. Climate Change sceptics however were

right to be sceptical.(very few people ever denied the climate was changing - some

said any changes were the will of God and we ought not to meddle but that is quite

different to what the "deniers" were accused of) The mathematical models on which

climate scientists warnings of impending doom turned out to be at best designed by

incompetents, at worst fraudulent. According to latest reports from NASA and

NOAA, the two leading climate monitoring agencies, the earth's atmosphere his

warmed very slightly in the last hundred years and in the most recent two decades has

actually shown signs of cooling.

Still the politicians and their advisers have a different agenda to drive forward. They

are working towards a global government controlled by a bureaucratic, academic and

financial elite, an unelected oligarchy. Which brings us back to Coriolanus. In both

pre and post imperial Rome there were two classes, the Patricians and Plebians (aka

Plebs), the masses. The patricians (oligrachs) ruled as paternalistically as the

collective name they gave themselves suggests.

Ralph Fiennes' recently released film adaptation placed in a modern setting, a world

trouble spot, the Balkans or the Middle East for example, plays out the intrigues and

power plays of the ruling elite against a background of street demonstrations, rolling

news and political debates, we get a remarkably fresh view of the 'too absolute'

Coriolanus. He represents a rare, possibly endangered species in the technological

age, the politician who can honestly say 'I am exactly what it says on the box'.

Of all Shakespeare's plays, Coriolanus is one that most easily and effectively

transposes to a modern setting in one of the developed nations. A seventeenth-century

theatre-goer, seeing the curtain go up on a Roman scene, would immediately grasp

that the ethical context had been changed. 'These ancients don't have the same values

as us,' he would think, 'because they are living without Christ's truth'.

Very few modern theatre-goers relate to togas and sandals this way, so producers

must get across the idea of a society based on pride and honour in a way that is

instantly understood. Coriolanus is more a politician of our times than Shakespeare's,

a man who relies on trust and who must therefore be seen to be honourable but must

at the same time be adept at deception and and manipulation, the skills required to

sway the voters.

The scene where Coriolanus is exiled by his ingrate countrymen is played as a

television debate, with the angry plebeians as the studio audience. How apt. The

general's response to the sentence is as fine a quip as any modern Prime Minister or

President departing an office which he (or she, recalling Mrs. Thatcher's bitter

farewell speech) while still believing they are the only person capable of doing the

job, the only person who truly understands what has to be done could ever hope to

direct at the rabid, unthinking rabble:

“You common cry of curs! whose breath I hate

As reek o' the rotten fens, whose loves I prize

As the dead carcasses of unburied men

That do corrupt my air – I banish.”

When people like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt,

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and others who have grown rich on the internet

speak of "The Wisdom Of Crowds" they know there is no such thing. (Dirty Little

Secret About The Wisdom Of Crowds) The internet crowd they refer to are a

Shakespearean rabble rather than a carefully selected cross section of society. And the

mob has no wisdom.

It's true that the individuals who make up the rabble all have their individual intellects

but the interesting thing about such crowds is the more people are involved the less

intelligent the beast becomes. It's a case of the whole being less than the sum of the

parts. Successful internet ventures rely on this and of course on the knowledge that

rabble are inflamed by a few powerful voices. Once a movement starts to gather

momentum a lot of people will want to be part of it and just go along with what the

rest are doing. All the manipulators of the mob need to do is make sure they, through

their advertising campaigns, are orchestrating the powerful voices that lead the

crowd. Mass hysteria follows close behind.

It really is a case not so much of The Wisdom Of The Crowd as The Emperor's New

Clothes. In the children's story everyone can see The Emperor is naked but because

they have been told the new clothes are magic any only wise people can see them

nobody is wiling to put up their hand and say, "There are no new clothes". While

everybody else is praising the clothes each individual is afraid to risk looking foolish.

Hans Christian Andersen taught us a valuable lesson there. Modern public relations

techniques it seems have persuaded us to forget it.

An often cited example of the wisdom of the crowd producing a better result than

could be achieved by a small group of skilled and experienced people is Wikipedia.

But the idea that Wikipedia is generated by "the crowd" is just not true. For one thing,

Wikipedia isn't written and edited by the "crowd" at all. In fact, 1% of Wikipedia

users are responsible for half of the site's edits. Even Wikipedia's founder, Jimmy

Wales, has been quoted as saying that the site is really written by a community, "a

dedicated group of a few hundred volunteers."

The same happened with the IBM PC when better and cheaper machines with better

operating systems were available, it happened with Google when more discriminating

search engines were available but the web chatterati were impressed by the fact that

Google would find them a million results though nobody was ever likely to look

further than the top 50, it happened with Apple gadgets although Steve Jobs only

talent, if it could be called that, was for the syllogistic rebranding of pre - existing

products.<P>

And in other areas it happened with the climate change scare, with both Tony Blair's

and Barak Obama's election campaigns that carried them to power. Both relied on

spin and slick presentation to mask a lack of policies with hyperbolic advertising.

To refer to another fiction set in the Roman era, Monty Python's Life of Brian, a lot of

people need Brian to remind them "You are all individuals." Think for yourselves,

don't be part of the crowd. (Warning, nudity in the linked clip)

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