Right-Wing And Left-Wing Humour

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The other day I came across an interesting (if thoroughly flawed) article in the the Huffington Post titled ‘Why Conservatives aren’t funny”. It sought to set out the familiar case that right-wing political concepts do not lend themselves to humour, or at any rate, that right-wing people themselves are not imbued with the gift of comedy to the extent that Left-wing people are.  

“Why aren’t conservatives funny?…” Ellis Wiener asked “We’re compelled to ask this because, what with The Daily Show and The Colbert Report and Real Time With Bill Maher spending most of their time making fun of “conservatives,” it seems like there’s a disproportionate amount of “liberal” humor on TV…”

A similar question was posed in The Atlantic (a largely neoconservative magazine). In an article entitled “Why There’s No Conservative Jon Stewart”, columnist Oliver Morrison wrote that “Liberal satirists are… having no trouble making light of liberal institutions and societies… Jon Stewart has had success poking fun at Obama’s policies…(and)…Alison Dagnes, a professor of political science at Shippensburg University, has found that the liberal Clinton was the butt of more jokes on late-night shows of the 1990s than either George W. Bush or Obama would later be…So if liberals are such vulnerable targets for humor, why do relatively few conservative comedians seem to be taking aim at them?”

While both articles go on to offer their own explanations for this disparity, neither fully convince me. I don’t believe, for example, that reactionary ideas are inherently more straight-faced (as one piece claims). For support of that disagreement look no further than Jeremy Clarkson or the fictional police officer Gene Hunt from the magnificent sci-fi drama series ‘Life on Mars’. Conservatives, that is to say traditionalists, that is to say the inflexible advocates of common sense, are notoriously amusing. Pointing out absurdity or naivety in others (which is a common occupation of necessity for right-wingers) makes the basis of some of the most conventional comic relationships; see Laurel and Hardy, the Honeymooners or The Day Today. Stephen Colbert’s eponymous alter-ago drew laughs for this very reason. People laugh at right-wing caricatures because more often than not they agree with them. They agree with them, but only feel comfortable doing so indirectly. That was the secret of Colbert’s success; the self-denial of a whole generation.

To make ‘liberal’ jokes work on the other hand requires extraneous charisma on the part of the joke-teller. Jon Stewart, whether one agrees with his positions and views or not, is a naturally charming and agreeable fellow. His political positions were often highly warped, but people of my generation and the one before it perceive in him a warm-hearted, intelligent and humane nature. He was – and still is – iconic of America’s reasonable coastal minority – those who view middle America with a coffee cupful of scorn and suspicion, aligning themselves more with the postmodern elites of Europe. People laugh at Stewart’s intelligence, the way he makes complicated things seem simple, counter-intuitive things seem intuitive. They do not laugh in recognition that what he is saying is true – that is, not in the way they laugh at Colbert, Clarkson or Hunt’s feigned personas.

By way of conclusion, liberal comics predominate because the majority of thinking people do not like to acknowledge certain basic realities. They would rather Fox News was making it all up, that terrorists aren’t really hiding behind lampposts or amassing in immigrant processing centres. Sartre had a term for this – mauvaise foi…

Bad Faith.

D, LDN

In Defence of… Christian Movies

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When I feel low, I often cheer myself up by watching US-made Christian movies. I’m not proud of this. Very few are well made or intellectually complex. I’m drawn to them for other, perhaps less respectable reasons, some of which I will share here today.

First, you should understand that the Christian movie industry is a very much booming trade. After the injection of pace with Mel Gibson’s (slightly dodgy) ‘Passion of the Christ’, even the most atheistic Hollywood producer has come to recognise the massive profit-potential in religious film-making. Most ordinary Americans are devoutly attached to their faith, and of these a great number feel alienated by the over-worldly content churned out by conventional L.A productions. It seems only logical then that faith-based productions enter the void left over.

And they have done. They really have. Christian films now reliably bring in millions of dollars, usually despite a paltry budget and so creating a gaping profit margin for the makers.

What are they like? As I perceive the matter, Christian films are usually small variations on the following plot structure: Good Christian girl/boy living a wholesome American life – falls into temptation (drugs, fame, sex, wealth etc…) – gets burnt by the sin they fall into – are saved by their old friends or family from their former wholesome life.

Sounds stupid? I suppose it is. But then there is something weirdly magnetic and comforting in the uncomplicated innocence these films advertise. If the idea of the movies is to tempt you into a different, more wholesome way of life, they are successful to the extent that they make that way of life seem joyful and safe. You come away from one of these films with a desire to avoid falling into life-traps, perhaps even to get out of life-traps you are already in. The feeling doesn’t last long enough for you to do anything about it, of course, but it certainly stays in your mind longer than the messages of Taken 3 or the latest sci-fi abomination.

Christian movies are also appealing to me because of their all-American feel. The characters at the beginning of each film (before the temptations and fall from grace) are living the American dream; a suburban house, a nice car, and a tight family with one beautiful cheer-leading daughter and one athletic and good-mannered son. I’ve always been drawn to idyllic caricatures like that. It matters nothing that this isn’t the reality for 90% of real American families. As shtick goes, it works for me – like a social watercolour painting.

A list of Christian cinema’s flaws would be as long as the list of its virtues. Christian movies are often anti-Semitic (the temptation villain trope character in a film usually looks Jewish). They are homophobic as a matter of course. And though the lead character in each production is usually female, she is also passive, secondary and naïve. These films are anything but politically correct, and this explains sufficiently why they will never break through into the mainstream.

By any religion’s standards I’m a sinner. I like anything that brings me pleasure and have indulged more than I should in uncountable vices. Perhaps it is for that reason that the morals of Christian cinema strike me as exotic and fascinating. They are foreign, but in a way I can’t easily belittle or reject.

D, LDN

Islam and Popular Culture

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Having nothing better to do last night, I sat down with a friend to watch a DVD performance by the brash, Hicksian comedian Jim Jefferies. The show was called ‘Contraband’.

About half way through, as seems to be obligatory in modern comedy, the Australian performed a routine critiquing the religious, beginning (naturally) with Christianity, moving onto Judaism and then, to my great surprise, Islam.

And he didn’t ‘tackle’ Islam in the playful, tip-toeing style of Dara O’ Briain, Frankie Boyle or Ricky Gervais, but with a dirty-mouthed fearlessness usually only employed against Biblical ideas.

Commenting on a recent scandal involving blasphemy against Mohammad (there have been so many, I honestly don’t know which one this was), Jefferies informed any Muslims in the crowd that his microphone stand was the literal incarnation of Mohammad and that it was ‘fucking gay!’.

I was taken aback, not because I have never encountered this sort of thing before (the internet is filled with anti-Islam comedy), but because Jim Jefferies is not a ‘right-wing’ race-baiter, and nor is he a reviled ‘working man’s comedian’ of the Jim Davidson or Bernard Manning variety. He is a respected liberal who campaigns against race-discrimination and in favour of gun control (born in Australia, Jefferies now lives in Los Angeles), and yet here he was, giving an equal allotment of hatred to a variety of anti-liberal targets. I surely don’t need to remark as to how rare that is.

Jefferies is said to have form on this. I am told that his Islamophobic gestures from ‘Contraband’ are repeated in his other performances (most of them are available on YouTube). We must hope that this bravery has sufficiently cleared the way for others to follow in his footsteps. As an American observer commented in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks – “blasphemy (against Islam) must become so commonplace that it bores people” rather than shocks them.

Of course, it is inevitable that popular culture and Islam will collide at certain points and in regard to certain subjects. While no-one is going to risk being murdered in the defence of bacon, a celebrity or two might be tempted out of PC-world by issues like Muslim homophobia, sexism, and the prohibition of music.

Indeed, that last element is potentially the richest Islamophobic vein of all. Surely nothing is so fundamentally beloved by and interwoven with the spirit of the Western world as music. It is an art the West (and the West alone) has perfected and through which the highest forms of Western expression have been communicated. It consoles our deepest miseries, undergirds our joys and sustains us through all the voids in-between. Naturally then, music artists are revered with an intensity superior to that aroused by the practitioners of any other art-form.

I sometimes wonder what would happen if Taylor Swift – a woman currently worshipped like a Nordic Goddess – fell victim to a Muslim bullet for being ‘Haram’ (which, like all musicians, she undoubtedly is). I’m pretty sure the backlash (among the public, if not the government) would be palpably more severe than followed 9/11, 7/7 or Charlie Hebdo. At a stroke, the youngest billion of the world population would be transformed into dead-eyed, anti-Muslim zombies, horny for violent relief. Such is the terrifying power of sex, groupthink and idolatry.

Popular culture has, by definition, immeasurably greater political influence than the exotic fancies of the intelligentsia. Very few people pay any attention to books or newspapers. The majority of people live in a state of cheerful stupidity, a kind of apolitical daze. What would happen if they were shocked out of it? The mind boggles.

D, LDN.

The New Atheism: A Clarification.

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I wrote a post last week that seemed (and was) hostile to the school of thought labelled as ‘New Atheist’ – more explicitly, the works of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens.

Specifically, I criticised these personalities for repeatedly lying about Hitler’s religious convictions – for claiming, as they do, that the Fuhrer was a believing Catholic, when his real views were closer to rational unbelief.

I don’t want to write the same article twice, so if you’re interested in my argument, please scroll down to ‘Hitler Was an Atheist’ in last week’s bunch. On this occasion, I’d like to clear up my position in regard to the ‘New Atheism; and atheism in general, lest my previous words have failed to communicate my true opinion.

I’ll start by restating that I am the son of a Church of England minister, and (as it goes for most vicar’s sons) the experience has often led me to an extreme and reactive rationalism, inspired by (among other figures) Nietzsche and Sartre, the traditional heroes of the thinking Western adolescent.

At the time of my enrolling in University, I was so convinced by atheism that I rarely thought about it. As far as I was concerned, the debate was dead, and all that remained to do was for the rising generation to destroy any legacy of Christian thought; to liberate the West from its dusty idols, arbitrary loyalties and primitive moral worldview.

Since then, I’ve not gone back on my view of the cosmos, the historicity of religious texts, or the facticity of evolution. But what I have done is read more about the human animal and the role that religion plays in sustaining him, in reminding him of things he might otherwise forget.

I remember at college coming up with what I considered to be a bold new scientific theory: the idea that there is an ‘optimal IQ range’, below which the human behaves in a destructive or abusive fashion to others, and above which the human being malfunctions, seeks to destroy himself or otherwise rebels against natural law. The ‘theory’ (if it can be so dignified) was drawn from the observation that high-IQ people tend to neglect the fundamental practices of nature, most notably the need to reproduce, to avoid suicidal thinking, and to maintain connections with the rhythms of their fellow man.

In retrospect this seems slightly daffy. There are clearly benefits to high intelligence and not just for the individual possessed by it. But that said, I still believe there is something vital in the wisdom of the less able, in their commitment to the essentials of life.

This very week it was reported that by 2070, the number of Muslims will overtake the number of Christians to make Islam the largest religion on Earth. This has to do with three synergetic factors. First, Muslims still believe in reproduction. Secondly, Europeans and Latin Americans no longer reproduce at the required pace and quantity. And thirdly, Europeans are becoming more disjointed and secularised, leading to a collapse of the only cultural coalition large enough to compete with the spread of Islam.

This has less to do with theology than with natural priorities. Religion, though it may on occasion go against science and progress, nevertheless tethers the human mind to very important primal truths. To sever the European from his traditions is to sever him from the destiny those traditions were laying out for him.

According to Richard Lynn, Japan is the most intelligent country on Earth, yet it is turning into a high-tech nursing home. Sweden is similarly dying. Norway is dying. Germany is dying. Italy is dying. Even China is dying.

And that last example is an especially illustrative one. China has been forcedly atheist for over fifty years. In that period of skyscraper building, the birth rate has steadily but surely declined. This has been helped by – but cannot be wholly explained by – the ‘one-child policy’ that (in any case) accompanies the confident atheism of Communism.

Outside of reproductive issues, the abandonment of Christianity by Europeans has another global effect. The more impressionable and cultureless races, most notably the booming population of Africa may be increasingly drawn to confident religions like Islam and turn away from the tired out, apologetic religion of their former colonial masters. The wonderful civilising effect of European Christianity may vanish and plunge great swathes of the world into barbaric darkness.

To repeat my general position – none of these concerns imply religion is true or science false. All I recommend is to consider the void that comes after religion and weigh its benefits against those of history.

D, LDN.

Hitler Was an Atheist.

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By far the most obnoxious trait in the movement described (somewhat grandly) as the ‘New Atheism’ is the denial of well-established historical facts. In a flagrantly dishonest campaign, the propagandists of unbelief have sought to depict a cartoon version of history; one in which religion was the source of all malady and science the soft-spoken voice of moderation and progress.

This is anti-history, plain and simple. It is as abusive to the truth as anything attempted by the religious or political.

The Russian communists were, despite what the New Atheists say, a viciously anti-religious gang of crooks who took immense delight in arresting and killing those still committed to immaterial beliefs. Such actions are thus directly attributable to their atheism. There is no other way of justifying (if that is even possible) the burning of Russian churches.

Likewise, Adolf Hitler, despite what the New Atheists say, was a very committed – distinctly German – unbeliever, who saw Semitic faiths as foreign and harmful to the natural instincts of the Aryan folk.

Being a canny politician in a still religious nation, Hitler inevitably made friendly gestures to the Church in public (and these are the statements shamelessly cited by the New Atheists, who are surely aware of their context). But in private, Hitler was – as we all are in private – more honest in describing the vibrations of his heart.

“Christianity” he said in the presence of Martin Bormann “is a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature. Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure.”

In another conversation, the meth-head Fuhrer let loose the following rant: “The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity’s illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew. The deliberate lie in the matter of religion was introduced into the world by Christianity. Bolshevism practises a lie of the same nature, when it claims to bring liberty to men, whereas in reality it seeks only to enslave them. In the ancient world, the relations between men and gods were founded on an instinctive respect. It was a world enlightened by the idea of tolerance. Christianity was the first creed in the world to exterminate its adversaries in the name of love. Its key-note is intolerance.”

This is not even worth arguing about, of course. It is so obvious to the reasonable that debate can only have a recreational value. It is nevertheless infuriating to hear New Atheist claims made without repudiation on a regular basis. Hitler was not a Christian. He was a pure-blooded atheist, and his actions were only allowed for by a non-Christian system of ethics.

D, LDN.

How Does Denial Work?

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The showdown between Ben Affleck and Bill Maher (regarding Islam) has been widely publicised. Affleck’s warped arguments have been subjected to great and detailed criticism (including by ‘liberal’ Muslims) and yet the ideological trenches on both sides remain almost completely unmoved.

That’s no surprise, really. On the issue of Islam, people are only semi-rational. Left-minded folk especially are wedded to their ideas in a very intimate way. Arguments that go against their position are evil spirits. The orthodox defence of Islam is their religion.

I won’t therefore offer yet another analysis of the Maher-Affleck conflagration. I think it will be more worthwhile to consider the human aspect behind the politics; to pose the broad and vital question – How does someone deny the terrors of Islam in the modern world? If we answer this, we may be able to better understand how far we are from winning the argument.

Imagine for a moment that you are a ten-a-penny liberal. Imagine that every night you sit in front of Fox news and scoff at Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity and all their stupid bigotries, that you know for certain that they are wrong and that you are convinced Islam is an unfairly maligned religion of peace.

Let’s say that on a single evening, newly severed heads are reported in Syria, Muslim women are reported to have been executed by the Islamic Republic of Iran, and terrorist plots are frustrated in America and London. As a liberal, your goal is to fail to integrate these events, or else to find an equivalent in the West or its allied nations. If you can’t, then the evil spirits will break through your defensive positions and your political identity is threatened.

Where do you go first? Perhaps Israel. Yes, Islam is surely no worse than Israel. What about all the heads severed by IDF missiles in Gaza? Perhaps if we didn’t bomb the Muslims, they would be perfectly friendly.

Where else? How about America? Damn right. The US army bombs Muslims all the time. So what if those bombs are dropped to liberate Muslims from tyranny? America is a fucking tyranny, right? It’s run by evil corporations and hook-nosed, cigar-sucking Zionists. If anything, the Islamists have come to liberate us.

But you’ve used these self-consolations before and this time, for some reason, they’re not helping. You feel that you might be lying to yourself. In a desperate mood, your mind reaches for the stronger stuff…

Well, what does Bill Maher suggest we do with the Muslims? Kill them all? Put into gas chambers and close the door on women, children and innocent moderates? So what if Islam is violent. Where is all this headed? This isn’t actually a bad argument and so it soothes your mind enough that you are able think about something else.

That’s the end of our experiment. You’re back in an educated, rational mind again. I hope that wasn’t too traumatic. The sort of thinking we have described here has a name. It’s called ‘bad faith’, for which the internet definition is as follows:

‘(in existentialist philosophy) a refusal to confront facts or choices.’

Sartre, one of the greatest popularisers of the concept, chose this illustrative example in his Magnum Opus ‘Being and Nothingness’:

“Let us take the case of a woman who has consented to go out with a particular man for the first time. She knows very well the intentions which the man who is speaking to her cherishes regarding her. She knows also that it will be necessary sooner or later for her to make a decision. But she does not want to realize the urgency; she concerns herself only with what is respectful and discreet in the attitude of her companion. She does not apprehend this conduct as an attempt to achieve what we call “the first approach”; that is, she does not want to see possibilities of temporal development which his conduct presents.”

This example fits our subject rather well. The Leftist does not fail to see what we see about Islam because he is ignorant, he does not see it because he does not want to see it. The Leftist has chosen a mindset, not a position. A mindset is invulnerable to temptations from other ways of thinking because it is bigger than the views it holds.

The Western Muslims who are content to smile and proselytise to us now, desire ultimately a society that offends the human spirit. We understand this intention clearly and would rather stop its potential altogether. The Leftists – so expertly cynical in other contexts – deliberately fail to recognise that potential, seeing only the pleasant signs and chastising those who notice the ominous ones. To put it simply, they deploy strategic ignorance.

I really do wonder how they sleep at night. Surely human dignity must naturally spring back from this poise and keep them disturbed. But perhaps I’m wrongly presuming that they retain any humanity at all.

D, LDN.

Atheism is a False Hope (a dialogue).

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Dramatis Personae : A – a fictional interrogator: DTMW – Myself.

A: “Is there a God?”

DTMW: “Possibly.”

A: “The God of conventional religion?”

DTMW: “No.”

A: “So you’re an atheist in that regard?”

DTMW: “Not really. Atheism has become a positive concept. While once it was simply an absence of belief, it is now a very politicised label and suggests a specific worldview built around materialism, liberalism and a forced veneration of science. The New Atheists I find especially dangerous. They do not understand the function religion plays in the maintenance of a civil society, and what would necessarily occur were it removed.”

A: “Which is…”

DTMW: “It protects society from the full consequences of scientific truth. We’ve gotten too used to the idea that the ‘truth will set us free’ – that truth, being a positive value, can only have a positive effect. We forget that it can be beneficial or harmful only depending on its interpretation. Human beings are not naturally good, I’m afraid. Hobbes had this almost correct, except that religion and not government is the most effective Leviathan. Without it, the less evolved among the world population would feel they had no reason to stay within moral boundaries. Without the fear of hellfire, morality becomes a matter of consent. That’s all well and good for intelligent people with their evolved sense of empathy and social nuance. But most people are not intelligent.

And even among the intelligent, atheism allows for an icy, almost mathematical form of ethics that can be used to rationalise just about anything. Abortion, murder in all by name, can very easily be made logical by atheist thinking, but less so by the slightly fuzzy sentimentalism of the religious mind. That fuzzy sentimentalism, even if ridiculed by the petri dish and microscope, protects us from a lot of evil ‘common-sense’. The ‘New Atheists’ are greasing the wheels towards a very cold and dangerous void, the eventual filling of which they shan’t themselves be around to influence.

A: “Richard Dawkins says we can be good without God.”

DTMW: “As well he might. He is the product of a charmed life and first-class education. He belongs the upper-middle class and has never truly experienced hardship of the kind the poor must contend with. Solace of an earthly, material kind was at his side come what may. When the poor are faced with a reality that is horrid in every rational interpretation, they must look beyond reality for comfort. Peace between the classes depends in no small way on this function of religion. The concept of a human ‘equality’ before God; of a levelling after death; of a divine reward measured to match the hardship endured in life – all of these concepts prevent the fires of revolution bursting into life. There is a good reason that Communists went for the churches with as much venom as the banks and corporations.”

A: “What about Islam?”

DTMW: “Not all religions are equal. Some are more moral than others. It’s important to remember that a living religion is more than its foundational text. It is the product of elaborations and philosophies inspired by that text over hundreds of years. This is why Judaism and Christianity evolve and Islam doesn’t. The Qur’an, unlike the Bible, is a book that cannot be re-interpreted without fear of death.

A: “So you’d rather the Arabs and Persians and others converted to Christianity?”

DTMW: “I think that would be transformative. A Christianised Islamic world would solve so many of the worlds anxieties that it is difficult to describe how highly I favour the idea. I also expect the second generation growing up in a forcibly Christianised Pakistan (say) would be thankful to those who dominated and converted their elders. Islam makes life hell. Even Islamists are desperate to escape the fruits of their own labours. They are too proud to admit otherwise of course.”

A: “Are atheists evil?”

DTMW: “No. But many are certainly elitist. Elitism hides behind atheism rather well. You might say ‘No, I don’t hate poor White Americans; I just enjoy ridiculing their belief in Noah’s Ark. It’s got nothing to do with the fact that I went to University and they didn’t.’ I’m not convinced by that sort of thing I’m afraid.

As both Nietzsche and the Nazis understood, Christianity has always opposed elitism and made it politically impossible. This is the case today in America. The anti-intellectual instinct of Southern Baptism for example is something I sympathise with. The elite of America would love nothing more than to re-order society based on IQ or erudition. Christianity demands that other qualities are taken into account; unscientific qualities – like modesty, friendliness and warmth.

On a social level, mass atheism (as opposed to scattered, disorganised disbelief) would open Pandora’s Box. Many sleeping ideologies would awaken and moral values would be re-examined. It isn’t enough to say that ‘reason’ would take the place of religion. Whose reason? Can you not make a reasonable case for unreasonable things?

A: “Do you prefer Catholic or Protestant culture?”

DTMW: “My father is a retired C-of-E minister and so Protestantism is more familiar to me. I don’t like the hierarchicalism of the Catholic church, but I like the aesthetics of Catholic communion. Protestantism is more earthly. The West would fare well with either.

A: “Should children be raised with religion?”

DTMW: “I couldn’t be insincere in that regard, so instead I would make them understand that this is historically a Christian culture and that Islam, Hinduism and the like, are foreign to it. We reserve the right to uphold traditions and to maintain a unifying sense of identity. A religious core strengthens a nation by giving it a point of focus. It is terribly short-sighted to recommend the removal of religion from public life entirely.

D, LDN.