Here's a summary from ChatGPT-5 of ideas from Kenneth Burke's Attitudes Towards History: > Burke clearly favored the **comic frame** as a healthier orientation for democratic societies. He argued that treating others (and ourselves) as fallible rather than irredeemably evil makes space for dialogue, prevents scapegoating, and fosters what he called “charitable irony.” This doesn’t mean comedy trivializes problems, but that it works to “correct without exterminating.” I first heard about Kenneth Burke's ideas from the book [[Gather Together]]. The following is an excerpt: *There are many ways to use symbolic action when we gather. In this book we are primarily concerned with dialogue, conversation, and storytelling, but groups can usefully employ activities such as dance, drawing, sculpture, drama, poetry, and spoken word to support the creative process. However in my experience people just really like to talk and to listen and to tell stories. This brings us to the question: what genre of story do we as a group want to create together? Burke has some clear and thought-provoking ideas on this subject.* *His key insight was that all narratives seek resolution. They are fundamentally cyclical in nature. He called this pattern of transgression and redemption the Rebirth Cycle. This is pretty much every story ever told. Someone has been wronged and they (or someone else) is trying to put things right and restore balance and order to the universe. Burke’s insight was that we have two options for how we approach this process in narrative terms: the tragic and the comedic.* ***Tragic Redemption*** *Burke developed a useful summary of the challenge that we face when we try to put the world to rights. He believed that in modern secular societies, guilt functions in much the same way as original sin in religious societies. We may not yet be quite as secular as Burke assumed, but I think he is right to connect our current predicament with our previous one. According to this genre we are all – even a newborn baby – fallen, sinful, or inherently flawed. Burke chose to explore this situation in his typically creative and playful way. The following poem speaks both at the level of metaphor and a more difficult and literal truth:* *Here are the steps* *In the Iron Law of history* *That welds Order and Sacrifice:* *Order leads to Guilt* *(For who can keep commandments!)* *Guilt needs Redemption* *(for who would not be cleansed!)* *Redemption needs Redeemer* *(which is to say, a Victim!)* *Order.* *Through Guilt.* *To Victimage.* *(hence: Cult of the Kill).* *​— ​Kenneth Burke (1961)* *Burke’s short poem describes the first and most common of two options that people have for putting things right and seeking redemption. It’s based on finding the perpetrator (either ourselves or someone else) and confronting them/us with their/our guilt (a process called ‘victimage’). Burke called this approach “tragic redemption”, and in addition to an ocean of fiction and fantasy, human history is full of examples of this approach to resolving the tension of transgression and seeking redemption.* *Burke points out the understandable human desire for more order and less chaos. This leads us to make rules and create hierarchies. We inevitably end up transgressing these rules and hierarchies because the world is chaotic, not orderly. But the rules must be enforced. They can be enforced either internally (judging ourselves) or externally (judgement by others); either way, the solution is guilt.* *The only way a group can resolve this painful situation is to apportion blame. Either I did it and I am sorry, or you did it and you should be sorry. To complete the cycle we need a symbolic act of redemption. Depending on the severity of the transgression, this could be anything from a private apology to a public execution.* *For Burke, guilt and sin were not the fault of individual actors. These ideas are socially constructed. Once we’ve collectively decided that, for example, breaking wind in public is rude and offensive and therefore wrong, the next person who breaks wind is automatically guilty. Burke believed that this practice is based on the fantasy of perfection. The world was perfect before people started farting. We just need to get back to that state of purity. The way to do it is to make a rule and punish anyone who breaks it; then the world will be perfect once again. Or at least we get to feel righteous, and we get to punish other people for their sins.* ***The Comic Corrective*** *Burke called the second, alternative genre ‘comedic redemption’. It is far more interesting and challenging. In comedy, both/and replaces the either/or of innocence and guilt. While tragedy leads to punishment, the comic leads to a dialectic, or an exchange of ideas, in other words to relationship. The comedic corrective is another way of making sense of the world entirely, based not on blame but on dialogue.* *Comedy tends to be confronting as well as entertaining. We usually end up laughing at ourselves. It forces us to remember that villains are people too, and they are usually a hapless fool rather than an evil genius. Comedy often juxtaposes the purity of our ideals with the gritty reality of our lives, and points out the ridiculousness of trying to reconcile them. Somehow, in the process of laughing, comedy magically does help us reconcile them. The facade collapses and we can all relax. For Burke the ‘satirical’ is a vital part of the ‘comedic’.* *Let’s be careful here. Burke is not talking about laughing at victims, or letting perpetrators of abuse and violence walk free. What Burke is saying is that in a modern, progressive society, collective responsibility is the only real alternative to the dominant narrative of individual guilt and the scapegoating processes of blame, shame, and punishment that follows. This is a far more difficult path for a group of people to take, but it’s the only logical way to break the cycle of violence, retribution, crime and punishment, and intergenerational trauma that the tragic worldview requires and perpetuates.* *The naive fantasy of tragic redemption is that we can magically return to a state of perfection by punishing the perpetrator. It frees us from considering causes, effects, making any reparation, or taking any responsibility ourselves. Once we murder the murderer, our obligation is over. Closure for all, happily ever after. Until next time.* *The comedic corrective means getting into a relationship with the problem and the victim and the perpetrator and the transgression. We need to become intimate with actions and situations and energies we don’t like, and with identities that are not ‘us’.* *A simple summary of Kenneth Burke’s enormous contribution to our understanding of language and symbolic action is as a praxis (a theory in action) in three parts:* - *The attitude is comic* - *The method is logogoly (words about words)* - *The aim is ecological balance.* *This leaves us with the difficult proposition of comedy as social action. Recall briefly the six foundations of social process, and in particular the sixth foundation which is based on Burke’s notion of ‘attitude’. If you want to better understand the implications of that foundation, then I invite you to reflect on your approach to convening, facilitating, and participating in group work. Is your attitude tragic or comedic?* *Can we imagine being this responsible for our perception and the stories we tell and the lives we live? Comedic redemption is not about being happy or funny all the time. Laughing and crying are not that far apart. The challenge for any group participating in a transformational conversation is to imagine a narrative of the future that is distinct from the past. We cannot do that if we are unconsciously recycling the same old tragic stories of perfection and corruption, good and evil, crime and punishment.* *Burke’s advice is to keep a light heart and understand that we are all responsible for everything. We need to talk to each other, and talk about the words we use to talk to each other, and make new and better words, and find new and better ways of using the words we have.*