No Laughing Matter
Giles Fraser
Whatever happened to the laughter of the Enlightenment? OK, Kant was hardly a barrel of laughs. But Voltaire, Lessing, even Hume - these were writers in touch with their funny side. Humour was a symptom of their creativity. In contrast, these days, the heirs of the Enlightenment have lost their capacity to laugh - especially at themselves. And that's as sure a sign as any that the Enlightenment is as creatively dead as the proverbial parrot.
Why is this important? Call it political. For whenever laughter is absent, the heavy drumbeat of political control is never very far behind. From Lear's fool to Steve Bell in the Guardian, laughter is how we speak the truth to power. Dictators and demagogues always take themselves too seriously. Which is why the ability to laugh at oneself, most especially when one is being utterly serious, is an essential form of self-critical vigilance. When this laughter dies - or worse, is ruled out as inappropriate - then is the time to worry.
The place where the lack of laughter is most obvious is within religious fundamentalism. From the Puritans of the seventeenth century to the jihadists of the twenty-first (who are also Puritans of sorts), the sound of laughter is forever being silenced. God is too serious a thing to be the subject of humour. In Umberto Eco's masterful novel The Name of the Rose, the monastery librarian descovers Aristotle's lost work in praise of comedy. Realising its potential to undermine the status quo, he poisons its pages. Laughter is deemed anarchic, disrespectful and insulting. And when this is the conclusion, we can be pretty confident that religion has become all about control.
But religious fundamentalism is not the only place where laughter is absent. Since Adorno and Horkheimer wrote The Dialectic of Enlightenment in the shadow of World War 2, the case is often made that the Enlightenment was implicated in the creation of the gulag and the concentration camp. The Enlightenment, they argued, was a means of domination, an attempt to impose order on the chaos of nature. In the grand plan of European rationalism, one finds the wellsprings of twentieth century totalitarianism. Stalin's commitment to the inevitability of scientific progress and Hitler's sense of imposing order and of using modern technology to revolutionise human potential were all the products of the Enlightenment. With the Enlightenment, fascism and communism shared a colossal sense of ambition that all of human life could be made subject to rational solutions. We now see the hubris. But too few people were laughing then.
The thinker that has done most to explore the moral necessity of laughter is the brilliant Czech novelist Milan Kundera. The novel, Kundera notes, is itself a product of the same historical period as the Enlightenment, but unlike the Enlightenment, has laughter programmed into its very DNA. In his acceptance speech for the Jerusalem Prize for literature, Kundera commented: "There is a fine Jewish proverb: Man thinks, God laughs. Inspired by the adage, I like to imagine François Rabelais heard God's laughter one day and thus was born the first great European novel. It pleases me to think that the art of the novel came into the world as the echo of God's laughter."
The enemies of laughter Rabelais dubbed the agélastes, the humourless ones. "No peace is possible between the novelist and the agélaste. Never having heard God's laughter, the agélastes are convinced the truth is obvious. But it is precisely in losing the certainty of truth and the unanimous agreement of others that man becomes an individual. The novel is the imaginary paradise of individuals. It is that territory where no one possesses the truth … but where everyone has the right to be understood."
It is no coincidence that this speech was delivered in Israel. The message is that the novel was an eighteenth century phenomenon that could never have played any part in encouraging the holocaust. For the novel prefers understanding to certainty, and whereas understanding leads to peace, certainty leads to conflict and violence. "The art inspired by God's laughter does not by nature serve ideological certainties, it contradicts them. Like Penelope, it undoes each night the tapestry that the theologians, philosophers and learned men have woven the day before."
The problem with the Enlightenment was its potential for hubris, not its commitment to science. I say potential, because much of the spirit of the Enlightenment was critical and sceptical, concerned with the limits of what can be known. But in taking a more positivist turn the Enlightenment inspired grand palaces of thought where human mess was forever being tidied away. The novel, by contrast, is supremely the place where human mess is celebrated.
Today's agélastes are often religious fanatics. But they are not the only ones. The grim faced Puritans of contemporary media atheism, inspired by the Enlightenment, also seem to feel little need to laugh at themselves.
This may be partially why the contemporary debate between religious fundamentalism and enlightenment values has turned so nasty. Neither side can hear the laughter of God. Or, to use language more suitable for atheists: neither side sufficiently values the sort of understanding characterised by the novel as a prerequisite for speaking about the truth.
Were this simply an academic spat, it wouldn't matter all that much. But especially since 9/11, the defence of Enlightenment values has led some commentators - and Christopher Hitchens comes particularly to mind - to launch vitriolic attacks upon Islam as something backward and ignorant.
It is in this political context that I read with mounting anxiety things like the founding statement of the Richard Dawkins Foundation: "The
enlightenment is under threat. So is reason. So is truth. So is science. We have to devote a significant proportion of our time and resources to defending it
from deliberate attack from organised ignorance. We even have to go on the attack ourselves, for the sake of reason and sanity." Without laughter, all
this is smug and dangerous.
