In my early morning internet meanderings, an article occasionally snatches me up and wipes the sleep from my mind.

“Everything Is Melodrama Now: How We Lost the Tragic Thread,” by Jamie K. Wilson recently provided that cup of word coffee. Wilson explains the considerable gulf between tragedy as depicted by playwrights like Sophocles and Shakespeare, and the political and cultural melodrama that today has taken its place, both on the national stage and in the little theaters of our own lives. One important distinction between the two is that melodrama needs crystal-clear heroes and villains, whereas: “Tragedy turns on the gap between human perception and reality. Disaster occurs not because someone is wicked but because someone is human.”

Wilson briefly dissects the connective tissues linking melodrama to ideology and idealism. Unlike tragedy, ideologies such as communism and fascism claim “to explain reality.” And again unlike tragedy, idealism is “elevated” and cannot be “fully embodied.”

In the last 100 years, for instance, Marxists persuaded millions that by wiping out the ideas and practices of capitalism, family life, gender differences, and more, civilization would evolve into a utopia. Never mind that this same ideology condemned tens of millions to an early grave. Today ideology in the United States reigns supreme, throwing Americans into different political and cultural camps, creating hatred and fear.

Idealism is the mother of ideology. At its best and its worst, idealism is “moral purity … untouched by conflict, error, or compromise,” Wilson says. Here a song “The Impossible Dream” from the 1965 musical “Man of La Mancha” comes to mind. The music and lyrics are beautiful, but its idealism is destructive, doomed like its ideological offspring to everlasting frustration and failure. “To fight the unbeatable foe,” “to right the unrightable wrong,” “to reach the unreachable star” – these seem noble aspirations, but their explicit contradictions mark them as unattainable.

By contrast, “Classical tragedy never promised salvation,” Wilson writes. “It promised only truth: that human beings are limited, that good intentions collide, and that loss is sometimes the price of living in an ordered but unforgiving world.”

And unlike idealism or ideology, this tragic vision of life and the human condition has a proven track record as a philosophy for living and might personally benefit each of us.

The tragic vision promotes charity and leniency toward others. Instead of condemning friends or relatives because of the election ballots they cast, we might instead regard this as a flaw in their thinking, a blind spot among their strengths and virtues. Instead of turning our backs on a sibling or a parent for some wrong or slight, we might consider this act an anomaly in an otherwise decent person. Instead of expecting or granting consideration because of what others regard as victimhood, we might recognize that we are living in “an ordered but unforgiving world.”

Perhaps most important of all, such a perspective recognizes individuality and freedom while demanding personal responsibility. In Greek tragedy, torn between honoring the laws of men and the laws of the gods, a grieving Antigone chooses to conduct the rites of burial for her dead brother, an act expressly forbidden by the king, and suffers death. Shakespeare’s Macbeth is a proud and honorable warrior who commits regicide and so falls prey to his own ambition. The Greeks called this fall from grace hamartia, a fatal flaw, but as Wilson explains, that term can also mean error, mismanagement of the self, “missing the mark.”

Some of us have publicly suffered hamartia and its consequent devastation, others live with it as a secret locked inside their hearts. Yet however rough the collapse of our reputation or fortunes – the failure of some enterprise, the harm we inflict on a loved one – the scar of this self-inflicted wound brings not only shame, but can induce in us a profound humility, a deeper understanding of the suffering of others.

On the other hand, the actor in a melodramatic culture like our own, spawned by idealism and ideology, “divides the world into innocents and perpetrators, victims and villains,” Wilson says. “Suffering must always be unjust and therefore caused by someone.” The player in a melodrama “expects purity and reacts with shock and fury when reality refuses to comply.” These dramas occur daily in our news and are often acted out by those around us.

Real adults know better. They’re the ones who recognize that absolute purity in any human being or enterprise is an illusion. They’re the ones who see behind the curtains of an ideology and recognize it as an attempt at manipulation and control. They’re the men and women who, when trouble and hardship knock at the door, refuse the label of victim, and so retain their humanity.

This article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal, a project of 1819 News.