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A thought on the Bad Faith discourse this AM: one of the more troubling implications of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and (especially) Coriolanus is that bad faith is an inherent part of discourse in a republic, and becomes more central to your speech the more power you have.
In Coriolanus, the Senate deals with the Plebians in bad faith from the beginning. They start w/ folksy bullshit. When that fails, they give the Plebians the corn dole and a voice in government (in the form of the Tribunes) but start planning to claw it back pretty fast.
The Plebians frequently make the mistake of assuming the Patricians are dealing with them in good faith. Sure, Coriolanus said he hated all of us and wanted us to starve to death, but he’s engaging in the rituals of the political process so this must mean he’s an ok guy.
Coriolanus meanwhile causes a mini-crisis for the Patricians because he is honest to an extreme fault, and keeps saying the quiet part loud to the People’s faces.
What happens, though,is that the Tribunes—not the people in general, but specifically *the people with political power representing them*—begin to use the tools of Bad Faith against Coriolanus, because they know if he comes to power, they and the people they represent, will lose.
There is a reading of the play—one that I don’t agree with— that the Tribunes actions prove that Coriolanus was onto something in his many speeches about how giving the People power is a mistake that will, among other things, push Roman government away from reason. For ex:
For my money, what’s actually happening here is an extremely accurate portrait of how powerful people behave and think when powerless people gain a bit of power and begin using it effectively to pursue their interests.
And a key part of that portrayal is that, right up until the existence of the Tribunes, the Patricians believed that pursuing their own self-interest and the interest of the Roman state (and its people!) was the same. That’s one of the points of the Belly speech:
Once the Plebians have a voice in the political process via the Tribunes they’re able to say, “uh, acutally, wait a second, we have our own interests. They aren’t the same as yours, and we are willing to use *your means* to pursue them.” That is then treated as a huge crisis.
Bad Faith only becomes visible to the Patricians when they are confronted with their oppponents using it. Their context, their framework, has entirely changed because of a shift in how power is distributed in their society. But it was there fron the start.
Again, what’s troubling about the play is that it dramatizes the inevitability of that. There is no prelapsarian world where discourse is reasonable and solely focused on the collective good, in part because in Shakespeare, all reason is motivated.
And *that* troubling idea—that there is no way to truly think beyond your own position, so a system founded on the ideals of a rational citizenry has some baked in problems—is one of the key ideas of Julius Caesar.
That’s basically the end, but just to drive this point home about political power and bad faith: The Tribunes use bad faith against the Patricians, but they ALSO use it against the Plebians, in order to convince them to go along with their plans to get rid of Coriolanus.
In other words, the play even shows how Bad Faith can be a part of manipulating your own constituency to pursue their best interests! That’s how ingrained it is in a Republic! Oy vey!
