Poetic Justice?

YOU HAVE TO feel for Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway, who probably gets tired of hearing about his own death.

Kamen, still very much alive, introduced the self-balancing vehicle in 2001. But since 2010, when new Segway Inc. owner Jimi Heselden accidentally drove a Segway off a cliff to his death, popular memory has conflated the tragedy with its creator.

There are any number of plausible reasons for this case of false identification, but one of the most persistent deals with moral comeuppance: A person invents an obnoxious, silly vehicle; a person dies from the frivolous invention. It isn’t kind, but that sort of morality tale is enduringly satisfying. When we despair for humanity, our inner cynic appreciates when humanity gets what’s coming.

Kamen isn’t the first victim of misapplied poetic justice—fascination with the archetype of the doomed inventor stretches back to Greek myth, punctuated by names from Hamlet (whose snide “’tis the sport to have the engineer / hoist with his own petard” unwittingly championed his impending demise) to Alfred Nobel, who, despite popular myth, did not actually have many regrets about inventing dynamite.

John Sylvan, inventor of the Keurig single-cup coffee dispenser, is a recent case of the regretful kind—he publicly laments having introduced the waste-belching quick-fix to bulk coffee, and later designed a fully recyclable prototype that would remedy the environmental concern. But most of us only know (or care?) about that first part.

There’s something viscerally satisfying in the demise of a technological Icarus. Such falls let us root for our own inertia—a triumph against the hubris of building something nonessential, and the idealism of thinking it could change the world. To stop at a moral tale of disaster is to keep the focus on poetic justice and our own wisdom. It also, conveniently, keeps us from having to face the complexity of, “What do we do about it now?”

THIS IS INTERESTING—and unsettling—when you consider our country’s relationship with democracy this year. Democracy is a radical invention, and our desire for poetic justice is at a historic high: Not since John Quincy Adams has a sitting president so persistently inveighed against a presidential nominee; never has a party convention staged a public trial for another nominee’s alleged crimes.

Lurking behind the breathless fascination with this election season seems to be a visceral desire to see Donald Trump, especially, “get his” in sensational fashion (almost regardless of what that sensational ending is—humiliating failure or crowning success). The fact of a former reality star securing a viable candidacy for president while largely ignoring the assumed rules of politics can be seen as poetic justice for people’s assumptions that our invented political system was too big to fail. What will happen as this election’s increasingly sensational rhetoric soars too close to the sun? Did we as a nation create the conditions for hubris to thrive in our politics, and do we deserve the result? Have we all “had it coming?”

Reading an election through an Icarus lens can be dangerous—not the least for how it generates a fatalistic disregard for the real policies and platforms that affect real members of our society. “Every fiction is an illusion,” writes Michael Solana of our increasing appetite for dystopian narrative. “[But] the very real danger here is [humanity’s] tendency to look to [one’s] illusion for inspiration, which is the foundation on which we build society.”

But one piece of the Icarus story is helpful to remember. In flying too high, he ended up alone—against his father’s counsel, without the support, ingenuity, or course-correction of others. And this, at least for now, is the antithesis of our political system.

Democracy was an innovation by Greek aristocrats at a time when economic inequality and rule by force had gone sour. “Rule by the people, for the people” told a story of citizenship, community, and a voice. The system was motivated toward participation. And the practice of democracy has been a steadily evolving exercise in communal moral imagination ever since.

As Solana reminds us, “The stories we tell ourselves can save us,” too. Poetic or not, justice requires participation. It is often the routine work of resisting the Icarus narrative—not because an attempt to soar is daring, or even because it is dangerous, but because it is lonely.

SYLVAN DOES REGRET inventing the Keurig, and it’s easy to shame him for his wasteful invention. But then he designed an eco-friendly solution—and the corporate owners ignored it. Then they started trying sustainable solutions, too—they’re not that great yet. But they’re working on it.

That’s the narrative we’ve got right now for our country, and it’s not a pretty one, but it’s a perfectly decent moral to the story: We’re working on it.