Commonweal Magazine: The Politics of Humor

The Russian philosopher and critic Mikhail Bakhtin wrote that “laughter in the Middle Ages remained outside all official spheres of ideology and outside all official strict forms of social relations. Laughter was eliminated from religious cult, from feudal and state ceremonials, etiquette, and from all the genres of high speculation.” The oldest monastic rule we know of forbade joking, while the Rule of St. Benedict warns against the provocation of laughter, an impertinence for which St. Columbanus imposed the penalty of fasting. The medieval church’s dread of comedy leads to murder and mayhem in Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose. Aquinas is typically more relaxed about the matter in his Summa Theologiae, recommending humor as a form of therapeutic play of words or deeds in which nothing is sought beyond the soul’s pleasure. It is necessary, he believes, for the solace of the spirit. Indeed, a reluctance to engage in humor counts in his eyes as a vice. For Christian theology, the pointless delight of a joke reflects the divine act of Creation, which as the original acte gratuit was performed simply for its own sake, driven by no necessity and with no functional end in mind. The world was fashioned just for the hell of it. It is more like a work of art than an industrial product. [...]

Comedy poses a threat to sovereign power not only because of its anarchic bent, but because it makes light of such momentous matters as suffering and death, hence diminishing the force of some of the judicial sanctions that governing classes tend to keep up their sleeve. It can foster a devil-may-care insouciance that loosens the grip of authority. Even Erasmus, author of the celebrated In Praise of Folly, also penned a treatise on the education of schoolchildren that warns of the perils of laughter. The work admonishes pupils to press their buttocks together when farting to avoid excessive noise, or to mask the unseemly sound with a well-timed cough. [...]

Many a commentator has observed that, though Jesus weeps, he does not laugh, a reticence that might seem in line with the Book of Ecclesiastes’s grim insistence that “sorrow is better than laughter, for by the sadness of the countenance the heart is made glad. The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth”(7:3–4). It is true that the Jesus portrayed by the New Testament is hardly remarkable for his side-splitting sense of fun, having as he did a fair amount to feel glum about. It will be a sign that his kingdom is imminent, however, when we see the poor being filled with good things and the rich sent empty away, a classic carnivalesque inversion. Unlike the reversals and upendings of carnival, this will prove more than a temporary affair. In The Fool: His Social and Literary History (1966), Enid Welsford records that at vespers on the medieval Feast of Fools, the gospel words “He has put down the mighty from their seat and exalted the lowly” were sung over and over again, as the prelude to a mischievous parody of the Mass. Jesus and his plebeian comrades do no work, are accused of drunkenness and gluttony, roam footloose and propertyless on the margins of the conventional social order, and like the free spirits of carnival take no thought for tomorrow. As a sick joke of a Savior (the notion of a crucified Messiah would have struck the ancient Jews as a moral obscenity), Jesus enters Jerusalem, the stronghold of Roman imperial power, on the back of a donkey, and having been deserted by his comrades will be left to face an ignominious death, one reserved by the Romans for political rebels alone. Yet the folly of the cross proves wiser than the wisdom of the philosophers. The intimidatory power of the Law is overthrown, the meek inherit the earth, the sublime becomes human flesh and blood, the most sacred truths are cast in a plain idiom intended for fishermen and small farmers, and weakness proves the only durable form of strength.

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Aeon: Against cheerfulness

The Ancient Greeks named four virtues: temperance, wisdom, courage and justice. Aristotle added more, but cheerfulness wasn’t one of them. The Greek philosophers didn’t seem to care about how we felt compared with how we acted. Aristotle said that we would ideally feel good while acting good, but he didn’t consider pleasure necessary for beautiful action. Acting virtuously meant steering clear of excess and deficiency. But in order to reach his ‘mean’, we need to jettison every action that misses the mark. Most of the time, the mean is incredibly tough to find, but if it came down to a choice between feeling good while acting badly or feeling badly while acting good, Aristotle said to choose good behaviour. He understood that feelings are hard to control, sometimes impossible, but he also knew that positive feelings like to hang around virtuous actions. While we’re waiting for the good feelings to show up, he asked us to get to work on temperance, wisdom, courage and justice. But he never said anything about smiling through it. [...]

To the Stoic list of virtues, the Christians added faith, hope and love. These are a gift from God, unlike patience and justice, which can be achieved on our own. Faith is the belief that with God all things are possible; hope is risking that belief in real time; and love is willing to be wrong about it. These three add an undeniably emotional element to the mix of virtues, but even Jesus didn’t ask for cheer. The closest he got was telling the disciples not to look depressed when they fasted. Paul got even closer when he declared that ‘God loves a cheerful giver’. But the original Greek still sounds more like ‘God loves it when you give without needing to be persuaded’ than like the Boy Scout definition of cheerfulness. But Paul also said that Christians should ‘do everything without grumbling and arguing’. The pivot from action to attitude started by the Stoics and egged on by the Christians set the historical stage for Scout Law in the US. [...]

It’s no surprise that cheerfulness was embraced not only by Boy Scouts but by the greater American culture too: the US is a melting pot of Christianity, Stoicism, cognitive behavioural therapy, capitalism and Buddhism, all of which hold, to varying degrees, that we are responsible for our attitudes and, ultimately, for our happiness. A quick browse through the self-help section of any US bookstore announces that lots of Americans are desperate to bootstrap their way to the bright side. Texts on embracing life’s miserable condition don’t exactly fly off the shelves. However, books on how optimism can be learned make millionaires out of their authors. They tell us that the key to happiness is positivity, and that the key to positivity is cheerfulness. The aorta of the US economy pumps out optimism, positivity and cheerfulness while various veins carry back US dollars naively invested in schemes designed to get rich quick, emotionally speaking. [...]

There is a fundamental difference between practising the Greek virtues of patience, justice or courage, and practising the American virtue of cheerfulness, which borders on psychosis. Patience asks us to change our behaviour, but it neither asks us to feel differently nor to pretend to feel differently. Granted, Aristotle believed that practising patience over a length of time would naturally make us more patient, but pretence was never part of the deal. You can act patient while feeling impatient, and it’s no lie. But when you fake cheerfulness, you are telling someone else that you feel fine when you don’t. This encourages the most maddening American T-shirts and aprons that say: ‘Smile! Happiness looks gorgeous on you!’

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Scientific American: Be careful with Occam's razor, you might cut yourself

However, analyzing natural selection at the level of the genes explains these situations. Those individuals share their alleles (forms of genes) with their family members; and what Hamilton showed is that natural selection favors traits that maximize the passage of underlying alleles to the next generation, whether or not those alleles are in the individual with that trait. [...]

So, are we comprised of selfish genes? Well, genes can’t literally be selfish, but yes, in a poetic sense that has some biological basis, we are. But this fact in and of itself has limited metaphysical implications. The term “selfish gene” is mainly a rhetorical device to explain the evolutionary process as I have described it above. [...]

What I’ve described here is called reductive elimination, whether fans of evolution are getting rid of meaning and purpose, or fans of neuroscience are getting rid of consciousness and the self. This strategy is often sold by an appeal to Occam’s razor, the principle that one should cut away any unnecessary assumptions to produce the simplest possible solution to any problem (often called parsimony). Although practically helpful within science in order to identify effective hypotheses and test them against alternatives, the principle loses its footing outside of science, and does not warrant or justify being radically minimalistic about reality as a whole. In fact its originator, William of Occam, was a man of faith and would have been horrified at his principle being wielded to slice off parts of his worldview (like God) that he held most dear.

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Literary Review: Gazing at the Moon

In Seen from Behind, Patricia Lee Rubin pays much attention to Signorelli and is no doubt properly circumspect about outing him: sexual mentalities in 1500 are not to be crudely submitted to 21st-century models. But then, if Signorelli wasn’t in some sense gay, what did his focus on the male backside mean, to him and to his contemporaries? Of course, Renaissance art revived the idealised bodies, male and female, of the classical world. The naked male figure soaked up meanings, conveying ideas of both physical power and divinely inspired grace. At the same time, art granted a licence to look at, and appreciate, things concealed by social convention. The heroic male nude could not, I think, be used today to signify civic pride and glory, as it was when Michelangelo’s David was placed at the entrance to the Palazzo della Signoria in Florence, or when the Foro Italico was laid out in Rome four centuries later. Fascism has polluted it, feminism questions it, irony and pornography undermine it. Recapturing its earlier meanings is a complex task. [...]

Rubin doesn’t mention Cornelis – she focuses mainly on painters and sculptors of the Italian Renaissance and their work, from a stooping labourer in a Giotto fresco turning his backside towards Christ to Michelangelo’s insistence on seeing the male nude, in two or in three dimensions, from every conceivable angle. One of her themes is that though the male bottom may be sexy, its baring had long been a sign of derision (as in mooning), with certain vernacular meanings – in one Signorelli mural, the Devil, whom the artist shows tempting a pilgrim, has his leggings down to show his tight white underpants, ‘embodying the expression andare a fare in culo – go to Hell’. Rubin notes too that in the 15th century military costumes became far more tightly fitting, inviting eroticised display; St Bernardino of Siena explicitly attacked such dress as ‘invitations to sodomy’. [...]

Rubin examines the eroticisation of Donatello’s David, created, she insists, with no intention of arousing illicit desire, but ‘queered’ by Horst Janson in the 1950s – the formidable John Pope-Hennessy thought Janson’s teasing-out of homoerotic meanings had left a ‘trail of slime on a great work of art’. But homoerotic exploration clearly had its part in the sophisticated court culture of 15th-century Florence. The latent queerness of Donatello’s work was surpassed in the final years of the century by the unignorable sensuality of Michelangelo’s marble Bacchus, one of the first monumental nudes of the Renaissance, showing a youth on the brink of manhood, upright but teetering with drink, and designed to be seen in the round, the back view (with a hidden satyr’s head aligned with Bacchus’s left buttock) as important as the front.

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The Telegraph: Archaeologists find secret chamber decorated with centaurs and a sphinx inside Nero's palace in Rome

The room, which was part of the huge Domus Aurea palace built by the emperor in the first century AD, had remained hidden for nearly 2,000 years.

It was discovered by accident during restoration of an adjacent area of the palatial complex, which was built on by subsequent emperors, including Trajan, and now lies interred beneath a hill next to the Colosseum in the historic heart of Rome.

The colours of the frescoes, which depict mythical water creatures as well as a crouching sphinx, a panther leaping at a man armed with a sword, the god Pan and a centaur, are remarkably bright given their age. [...]

Much of the 15ft-high chamber is still filled with dirt, which will be excavated in the next few months. That could bring to light further discoveries.

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