The Joys of Collective Failure

Failure by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Pix4free

The failure of an individual is a tragedy. Even in ancient times, ordinary in their own way, it was recognized that revisiting such human failures could be morally edifying. A window into the human condition, into ourselves, and a warning to the wayward. 

Oedipus.

Antigone.

Faustus.

King Lear.

Hamlet.

Macbeth.

Othello.

Julius Caesar; though, to be fair, he gets knifed early on and the real tragic hero of the play is Brutus, and Brutus is an honorable man.

Not Romeo and Juliet, however, as the first half of the play is a raunchy sex comedy, sometimes unintentionally funny as those who’ve seen John Leguizamo’s attempt at Tibalt are well aware. I’d argue the best tragedy of the period involving romance is Fletcher’s The Duchess of Malfi. Fans of the genre unfamiliar with the work are encouraged by this writer to check it out.

But I digress.

An individual failure can be made into art of the highest order, but there is another class of failure that is inherently much more spectacular, that of many individuals failing both in their own discrete roles but also as a group seeking to achieve some task, outcome or product.

Recently, Dr. Kit Chapman, a lecturer in journalism and creative writing at Falmouth University – which appears to be a real university in Cornwall, despite having the initials FU – posted a twitter thread and a series of polls featuring comically bad stock photos of science.

The photos aren’t here due to copyright issues, but links will be provided.

A woman holding a soldering iron by the heating element.

Five lab-coated scientists studying a chicken like it was the first representative of an alien civilization to arrive on Earth.

A lingerie-clad woman who is both sciencing and trying to seduce a filtering flask.

A scientist leaning in to – so help me, I’m not making this up – lick the earlobe of a colleague.

A scientist who studies inaccurate models of DNA.

My favorite of all is a shot of Michael Siegel in his natural habitat, wearing a lab coat and pointing up at the sky standing next to a telescope. Gotta wear that lab coat, don’t want to get any dark matter on your shirt. The scientist has clearly been green-screened into an impossible position in the woods at night and what is probably supposed to be the Milky Way but shaped like a rainbow.

It’s beautiful.

But what makes it spectacular is that for each picture there were many hands at work, dozens of opportunities for someone, anyone, to say, “Wait, this doesn’t make a damn bit of sense.”

But none of them did.

Chesterton famously quipped that the cities of the world have no statues of committees – the exception that proves the rule being Rodin’s The Burghers of Calais, I suppose, though it turned out well, to the surprise of the burghers involved.

In fairness, not all collective failures are like the stock photos above, however.

Sometimes there are systems involved that encourage collective failure. An autocratic system, for example, wherein the people lower on the metaphorical food chain are encouraged to lie to their superiors, thus isolating the autarch in a delusion of capability.

Not sure that would happen in real life, to be honest.

Sometimes a group fails at its objective through a combination of relative inability and the conspiracy of circumstances.

But when it all comes together, when a dozen or so people fail to recognize that proposing, shooting, editing, approving and publishing a picture of a scientist using a stethoscope on a flask of what appears to be growing chives, the failure is sublimely beautiful.

Vita brevis, ars lunga, as they say.