Dabo hovala commented on "Low Taste" – tested by ridicule

Uncivil Mirth: Ridicule in Enlightenment Britain, by Ross Carroll, Princeton, April 2021, 255pp

In a world where basically everyone is illiterate, laughter is something that is done with others. Early theorists in the field of humor believed that humor was a form of speech rather than writing. And speech can be highly dangerous, as the Bible warns: "Life and death are under the power of the tongue" (Proverbs); "The tongue is fire,...... it's an unjust world" (James). Elsewhere in scripture, the tongue is also likened to a sharp blade, a sword, a bow, an arrow—words are deadly weapons. The Bible does not justify laughter. For example, the apostle Paul reminded the Ephesians not to indulge in "stupid talk or jokes." Only the example of Elijah mocking the false prophets who spoke on behalf of God Baal seems to suggest that "comical wit" is sometimes the best response to "despicable" things, as the seventeenth-century theologian Isaac Barrow wrote, "When blunt statements fail to enlighten people ... When the blunt argument is unable to penetrate, reason gives up its position to the wit, leaving it to take on the work of correction and blame."

But how to be entertained without offending others? Giovanni della Casa, the florentine authority on etiquette, once explained in 1558 that "there are two kinds of jokes", "one is sharp and harsh; the other is harmless and innocent". Jokes should "bite like a lamb, not nibble like a dog", or they will become "some kind of offense". Like his contemporaries, Dela Casa considered laughter primarily an expression of contempt —"mocking someone is a greater contempt than inflicting any real harm on him". As the Elizabethan humanist Thomas Wilson wrote, "The scenes that make people laugh and the ways we make us happy are the funny, the dirty, the deformed, and all those evil deeds that we see in others." In The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Robert Burton made the same point from the point of view of the victim: "A bitter joke, a slander, a slander, can stab a person more deeply than any loss of property, a dangerous experience, or physical pain and injury." ”

In seventeenth-century Britain, people of all social strata opposed this verbal frivolity in order to preserve their reputations. The taunts sparked frequent violent battles and endless defamation lawsuits. In 1638, Thomas Hobbes advised his aristocratic protégé Charles Cavendish: "Avoid all offensive remarks, not only public insults, but also such ironic gossip." Aristocratic young people often put such words on their lips, and this will create an incentive for "many lose-lose duels." He warned that mocking others was a sign of arrogant narcissism. But as a political theorist, Hobbes saw social life as some sort of competition, and he valued laughter for the same reason: it was a terrible index of contempt. He wrote in On the Citizen (1642) that all "pleasure and joy of the heart" was contained in a sense of superiority over others, so that "men have no other way but to express certain contempt and contempt for each other through laughter, language, or gestures."

Decades later, John Locke also "explicitly disagreed with laughter." "If it is not properly managed", it can have "dangerous consequences", and he urged young people to stop laughing. He is famous for imitating others and proud of his wit, but he thinks jokes are risky because they can easily provoke offense: "In the face of a situation where a small mistake can destroy everything, proper management of such a beautiful and tricky affair is not everyone's talent." 」 Equally egregious are the "frivolous discourse" and "inappropriate gimmicks" on religious issues. In the 1670s and 1880s, Locke oversaw the education of Anthony Ashley Cooper, who later became the third Earl of Shaftesbury, and Locke's ideas seemed to impress his students. Schaffsbury studied the Stoic School during his self-exile in the Netherlands in 1698 and tried to suppress his desire to laugh. He wrote in a notebook that "nothing is more insecure and more difficult to manage than this"; instead, people should be "alone" when laughing, and only laugh "when they are serious". Like Hobbes and Locke, he saw laughter as a dangerous antisocial force and denounced "gossiping on religious issues" and taunting piety.

Less than a decade later, however, Shaftesbury himself developed a highly influential theory of ridicule, giving it a more recognizable status. He argues that religious fanaticism is dangerous, but that ridicule is a better response than persecuting it. It is important to be tolerant, at least to fellow Protestants, but this does not mean that crazy ideas must be respected or allowed to develop without question; on the contrary, they should be attacked. This can be through well-founded arguments, or through ridicule – and this is the best way to attract a wide audience. Whether it can withstand the "test of ridicule" will determine whether a theory is worthy of respect: because people have an innate intuition for truth, and insight is not tarnished by mockery. In his 1709 book Common Sense: A Treatise on the Freedom of Wit and Humor, he wrote that "only distortion is ridiculous."

Schaftsbury's view of sarcasm is otherwise novel. Laughter, he argues, comes primarily from a shared appreciation of dysfunctional things, or a shared disdain for evil and unnatural things, rather than from personal disdain. This is not an antisocial approach, but a practice that encourages discussion and makes people feel "able to agree with each other". He believes that learning to laugh at and be ridiculed at each other is an important part of the dialogue between collective reason and civilization. He, like many philosophers of the Later Enlightenment, held that human beings were naturally social rather than selfish; that the progress of civilization was achieved through the perfection of collective etiquette; and that teaching people how to converse politely was essential to the moral progress of society.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the state of public debate was a matter of particular concern. The religious tolerance of Protestant dissidents established in 1689 fueled the attack on the religious sphere, while the collapse of pre-publication censorship in England six years later and the deregulation of the printing industry led to a boom in satirical writing and political attacks. The emergence of party politics, the introduction of a triennial electoral system in 1694, and the growing appeal of the post-1688 theory of sovereignty in the people all made public opinion an important force, but at the same time sharpened concerns about the fickleness and fickleness of the public. In the days of Defoe, Manley, Swift, and Pope, schafsbury was one of the first writers to think about it, whether the tide of ridicule should be seen as a positive or negative effect of uncensored media.

On this issue, Shaftesbury has a large following. Francis Hutcheson adopted his discourse on civil decorum and public discourse, as well as his views that ridicule helps socialize; so did Hedgeson's student Adam Smith. David Hume, though skeptical of the effectiveness of using ridicule to solve controversial problems, often used ridicule to undermine hypocrisy or superstition, arguing that ridicule might reveal the truth but could distort the facts to the same extent. Some of Hume's philosophical opponents, such as Thomas Reed and James Beatty, saw ridicule as a natural reaction to any offense to "common sense"—such as Hume's own absurd doctrine. Lord Kames, a learned man from Edinburgh, took a different view: he wrote in 1762 that ridicule was "too crude entertainment" "for those who were glamorous and courteous", and predicted that it would gradually die out in a polite commercial society. It is "shrinking every day in Britain" and has been "expelled" in France.

This ignores the fact that Montesquieu had just achieved great results in the use of irony at that time. In On the Spirit of the Law (1748), he ridiculed the arguments commonly used to justify slavery in the New World: "After the extermination of the American (native) peoples, Europeans had no choice but to make Africans slaves. Moreover, "sugar would have been too expensive" without slave laborers—and "negroes" had "noses so big that they hardly deserved sympathy." Inspired by Montesquieu, Scottish abolitionists also created their own satirical texts, so much so that when the radical Catholic satirist Alexander Geddes's Six Powerful Arguments against the Immediate Abolition of the Slave Trade was published in 1792, some readers considered it a sincere defense. In subsequent editions, the word "satire" was added to the title.

As Ross Carroll, author of Uncivil Mirth, points out, even writers who share the value of ridicule as Shaftesbury face a clear problem. Irony can be enlightening, but it can also quickly make public discourse vulgar, especially when it fails to land. What followed was an awkward balance. Mary Wollstonecraft, for example, mocked her opponents herself while denouncing her opponents for their remarks and words containing contempt. In Defending Human Rights (1790), she attacked Edmund Burke's meanness, while also making fun of his "childish sensitivity" and fragile "nervous system." Wollstonecraft believed that it was wrong to despise those inferior to himself, but that "dignified" mockery could unmask the disguises of the upper class.

Within a few years of Schafzbury's death in 1713, Bernard Mandeville, believing that the "proper object of ridicule" was not the evil itself, but a moral claim about the evil, attacked Shaftesbury as a hypocrite, arguing that Shaftesbury's fantasies of natural sociality "only breed parasites" and "make a man stupid enough to think that monastic life is also enjoyed." Adam Smith asserts that in Common Sense, "there is no passage that makes us laugh." Wollstonecraft admired Shaftesbury's ideas, but could not tolerate "his contrived bloating period" and "ostentatious writing". She suspects that Shaftesbury "has no waves in his heart when he weaves those rhapsodies in his head." By 1800, Schaffsbury's theory of ridicule had gone unheard.

Low Fun contains a lot of interesting observations and thoughtful explanations, but it is not half a joke. Carroll was wary of connecting the eighteenth century with the present, but the dilemmas faced by Shaftesbury, Hume and Wollstonecraft bear a clear resemblance to our era of new media, speech attacks, and politics that became commercial entertainment. Most nineteenth-century observers believed that democracies were less enjoyable than other forms of government. In aristocratic societies, Tocqueville writes, "men are free to allow themselves to erupt in the midst of noisy pleasures." Even under authoritarian regimes, there are occasional "crazy laughs." But the citizens of democracies are always serious because they hold power. He may be right about the superiority of sober politics. As Carroll points out, "the clowns are starting to climb the ladder of power" is by no means a good sign.

(The original English version of this article was published in the London Review of Books on December 16, 2021, and was translated with the author's permission)