Thinking out loud

I jot a lot of things down on Facebook. Just stuff that occurs while I'm reading something. It's a way of keeping track of my writing ideas, and throwing them out for appraisal. But I've only got about 140 FB contacts, so I never really think about who's reading it. It's funny that when I'm jotting things down on FB, I tend to think that it's for public consumption, even though the number of contacts I have there is quite small. (They're almost all professional contacts, news services, research orgs, lobbyists, etc.) But when I'm writing here, to you guys, I tend to think of this as my private conversations with the 500 friends who drop in to chat every day, and therefore less public. It's funny how our brains work.

Speaking of which, the latest research is in and yes, we are actually addicted to Facebook and similar social media. Does anyone use email for anything but subscriptions any more?

"That little zing you get when someone likes' your picture or sings your praises on Facebook? That’s the reward center in your brain getting a boost." I read a study once that showed rats would get so addicted to a similar dopamine zing that given a choice between the thing that clicked the dopamine thing and the thing that gave a pellet of food, they chose to starve.

Dopamine, baby... and it's the drug of choice for a lot of us post-divorce wave kids or others raised by the hippie narcissists who didn't get the affirmation from our parents we were supposed to get in early childhood. Which is why most people of my generation, the Xers, are all attention hounds. Another cyclically depressed Gen-X friend of mine called all the positive interactions you get on Facebook and blogs and twitter and whatnot, "love bubbles". She admitted to me that she had allowed herself, especially when in the throws of a depressive attack, to become helplessly enthralled to Facebook because every five minutes or so there was a possibility of that tiny zing of affirmation.

Love Bubbles. She quit Facebook. Successfully. A few months later, she entered a Discalced Carmelite monastery. I don't know if the two things are related.

(BTW: just to let y'all know, reject nearly all FB friend requests I get from people I've never met.)


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"Fixated"

It's funny the pope should mention being all fixated on what some people have called "the pelvic issues", because I said something about it at LifeSite's staff meeting this August. I think it might be part of the reason the conservatives had such a shock hearing the same thing from the pope that we get from the libtards from whom we hear it as a constant refrain.

Trust me, I'd love to write about something else. I'd love to write about anything else, frankly.

I'd love to have the issues I cover include more stuff about the economy, to talk more about the application of Catholic social teaching, economic ethics, to our large social and economic problems. I'd like to write about environmental issues. About art. About nature. Movies. I care about pollution and environmental degradation, about exploitation of workers in developing countries, about the persecution of Christians in Islamic countries, about prison and criminal justice reform, about fitness and health, GMOs and Monsatan. Hell, I even care about fashion and pop culture. I would like to write about what it means to be interested in these things, in nearly all aspects of the human world, through the lens of Catholic social teaching and philosophy.

But all the New York Times/BBC/CBC/Guardian/MSNB/CNN (etc) know anything about seems to be, not to put too fine a point on it, sex.

Get a Mainstreamian journalist alone for a second and play word-association. Say the word "Catholic" and he instantly thinks "gay marriage!" or "abortion!" or "no contraception!" or "war on women!". Not because any of them has read so much as the Wikipedia version of what the Church teaches on any of these things, but because it is simply his lifelong habit. An almost Pavlovian response.

It's not us. It's the culture. Flipped through any of the magazines at the supermarket checkout lately? Scrolled down the latest music videos on YouTube? Watched any sitcom produced in the last 40 years?

Sex is the way the Bad People have decided to destroy our civilisation. So sex is what we have to talk about if we want that not to happen.

Trust me, it's not the Church that's fixated on sex.


~ * ~


Also, here's Teddy the Talking Porcupine eating a pumpkin.



~

Spooky

It's that time of year, so I thought some ruminations on the goings-on on the other side of the mirror of reality might not be amiss.

Other people are doing it:

Exorcist shares past experiences with demonic possession

I have often thought that there seems, at least in the way most people practice the faith, two kinds of Catholicism. What I have arbitrarily designated "The Rules" and "Spooky Catholicism".

Of course, a balanced Catholic lives his life according to The Rules because he knows that Spooky Catholicism is real. This is the correct way of looking at it. The supernatural really actually exists in the really real world and therefore things like the difference between good and evil is not merely the subject of dry academic debate but an urgent and immediate reality to be contended with daily.

The reality of the supernatural is something that seems quite difficult for modern people to understand. And this despite the vast and growing proliferation of the occult in popular culture, which seems odd.

As you know, I have just finished reading a series of very dumb teenager vampire romance novels. (Yes, I enjoyed them ... sort of...in a weird way.) One of the things that made them dumb was the fact that the authoress, Stephanie Meyer, did not seem to understand the difference between the natural and the supernatural. She regularly referred to her vampire and werewolf characters as being part of the supernatural world, but then said that tests had revealed that they had a different number of chromosomes in their cells from humans.

She indicated that the change from being a natural human to a supernatural vampire was merely a physiological change, the vampire "venom" (good grief!) would work its way though the body via the bloodstream re-writing the person's DNA to give them super-powers. (No, it really wasn't very well thought out, but that's not why all the teenyboppers are reading it.) And that was it, really, no more to it than that.

I suspect the banality, the flat-universe quality, of her books is a result of Stephanie Meyer's Mormonism, which does not even try to address the issue of "where does the universe come from". Mormonism also doesn't understand or acknowledge the difference between the supernatural world and the natural world. In Mormonism, the gods are more or less just humans with superpowers, and no one ever notices that the question "Who or what is the Prime Mover" is never asked.

At least with Buffy's vampires, there was a supernatural exchange of "souls" and the vampired person would become, essentially, possessed by an incorporeal demonic creature. (This system often broke down in Buffy, but that was the idea). In the Buffyverse, there are any number of "demons", "gods", "oracles" and assorted representatives of classical, pre-Christian and extra-Christian entities of varying degrees of supernaturalness (though perhaps significantly, never any angels. In all of Buffy, I think God only got a mention once or twice). And as the series progressed the rules about them seemed to shift according to the needs of the plot.

I note, however, that in Buffy, and even more later in Angel, the "demons" were again just a different kind of natural being. In Angel, there were actually different "species" of demons who were just modified humans and the damage they could do was not moral damage to a person's soul, but physical damage according to the potency of their super-powers. Plus, you could kill them with a gun or a sword. So ... you know.

It all gets a little fuzzy, really. It's not like I was really looking for theological consistency in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

I believe that Harry Potter has solved the literary problem of the supernatural by more or less proposing that the wizards are a different species from the regular humans. A species that can naturally manipulate natural "forces" and that magic is essentially just another physical force like electricity. Again, this kind of breaks down in practice during the course of the books (which I haven't read), but that seems about the gist again. Once again, the modern occult writer does not seem to know what the supernatural really is.

I have noted several times that the universe accepted by the sci-fi writers is dualistic, that there is a distinct split between the physical and the incorporeal, the old mind-body split, but still no actual supernatural. Despite all the story lines of people exchanging bodies with each other and "ascending to a higher plane of existence" and whatnot, all of this is still strictly within the realm of the natural, the physical, the scientifically recordable. It's really just Cartesianism with special effects.

Nothing in, for example, Star Gate SG1's ideas about "ascended Ancients" was remotely supernatural. You just spent a few decades meditating and, pow! you got a pretty, glowy, kind of ghostly-looking body that could fly and control weather or whatever and live in some other "higher plane" that was, essentially, just another "dimension". This seemed to be as close as the sci-fi world could get to the idea of something "outside nature".

Whether we like it of not, we live in a culture that has, for 400 years or more, been rejecting the existence of the supernatural. And now that we're looking for it again, we don't know it when we see it and think we see it when we really don't.

I think that our modern obsession with the occult is not in fact a result of an innate human fascination with the supernatural. Or perhaps the purveyors of the occult pop-culture are so unimaginative that what they are peddling is merely naturalism dressed up in sparkly CGI costumes.

As a result, we Catholics seem to have a hard time understanding what the actual supernatural is. We have popular Catholic literature that talks about things like birth, and sunsets and butterflies as "miraculous". Well, it might be a poetic way of speaking about how great nature is, but it is misleading too. Natural things are not, by definition, miraculous. The supernatural is not just the natural with super-powers.

We really have a hard time with the idea of something that is real, has a will and an intellect and the ability to do things in the natural world, but no body at all. A spirit, in the strictest sense.

We have a heck of a time understanding the thing about God being outside, above and preceding time and space.

Now that the Church has more or less given up talking about the supernatural and continues to justify its existence based on its record of social work projects in the third world, we Catholics have fallen into the habit of thinking naturalistically. So much so, I think, that things like the "Catholic charismatic movement" have sprung up in reaction.

People who are interested in religion are really interested in the Spooky parts. They want to know about the grand movements of Heaven and Hell, of angels and demons and the Great War between them. They want to know that their own moral struggles are about something greater, taller and more grand than global warming or the dangers of smoking. Something better, that is, than what the secular world offers.

It's the real reason movies and books like the Da Vinci Code are so wildly popular. Why Hollywood always dresses its pretend nuns to look more like real nuns than the real nuns have looked in 40 years. And why the Godfather movies all have depictions of the brocade and velvet, pointed arches, gold-curliqued and marble-columned Catholicism of the pre-Vatican II era. No one who is looking for the real, Spooky, Supernatural version of religion wants a priest to dress in a polyester poncho and sing folk songs.

There's The Rules, yes, and we give intellectual assent to the doctrines of the Faith, (which is what "The Rules" is shorthand for.) But what are The Rules guiding if not the supernatural life of the soul?

What is it all for if there's no Spooky?

Political Compass

I'm told so often that I'm an evil far-right fascist that I occasionally take a moment or two to re-take the Political Compass test. It's like checking my pulse or blood pressure because people keep telling me I look pale and wan.

Of course, every time I take it, I get the same result. I get "moderate conservative". Less "authoritarian" than Mrs. Thatcher.

But taking the test is a good way to give some thought to various aspects of the political and social realm.

Economics
I've noticed that my economic answers have grown more towards the rightist side, but they remain pretty wishywashy in general. There's a good reason for this: I really don't know enough about the current economic state of things to have an opinion. I realise that this is a huge gap, but at least it has the effect of allowing me to keep a relatively open mind. But what I have seen is that governments trying to take over the running of people's daily lives, and taking their money by force, is nothing but destructive to society. Socialism is bad. Government isn't bad, in theory, but government that thinks it can tell people what to do with their money seems inevitably to become very bad.

But I remain somewhat softer on these things than most of the evilrightwingfascists of my acquaintance. I guess I'm just not trusting enough of the private sector to look after the poor, any more than the government. At least not the "private sector" of our times and in our current economic condition, in which it appears there is not a great deal of difference between these heavily subsidized mega-corporations and the governments propping them up.

As I've said, being pretty mystified by contemporary economics, my opinions are developing only very slowly and tentatively. I wish I knew more but it seems nearly impossible; even the people called experts by the press can't agree. But I do have a few basic principles: the rights of private property, subsidiarity, and a firm conviction that government paying for everything with money they take by force from private citizens to redistribute to officially sanctioned "needs groups" has worked very badly.

Over the years, I've developed a method of figuring out complex and difficult things that I like to call the "Laws of Rational Thought". I've applied it pretty succesfully to religion and philosophy and various areas of politics and it has stood me pretty well. Principles and evidence. I'm betting that starting with a few principles that we know are true, and examining the evidence and data available to us, we could probably figure out more or less the arcane economic mysteries as well.

I suspect that the reason none of the experts seem to know what is going on is that most modern academics don't have principles. They, being in the postmodern academic world where there cannot be anything certainly true (except the idea that nothing is certainly true...) don't have a solid idea about human nature, about how the world is supposed to work, about what is good for people. But again, that is simply an extrapolation from a combination of principles and the available data. I've never met an academic economist, so maybe I'm wrong. It is certainly true of the political class. At least the ones I've met. The Laws of Rational Thought are nowhere more scorned than in Houses of Parliament. (Which is why their speeches are so dull).

I suppose that in today's parlance, being against socialism; thinking that "the poor" are a largely imaginary subclass invented by social workers and politicians; that people should be responsible for themselves and their families; that the state, if it has anything to do with the private lives of its citizens should concern itself with bolstering and protecting the family and should thereafter leave them alone; that all attempts to have government seize private property for redistribution in order to "eliminate poverty" have failed to eliminate anything but social stability...

makes me economically firmly on the right.

But what qualifies as "far right"?

Obviously it is unwise to expect journalistic slogans and bafflegab like "far right" to hold up to rigorous examination, but perhaps it is useful to explore the question a bit.

Anyway, here is today's outcome for my Political Compass test:


slightly higher on the authoritarian scale than the last time, but still pretty firmly "moderate conservative".

Oh well. I suppose much depends also upon whom one is standing next to. In Britain, with a population so completely brainwashed and it having been such a long time since anyone has actually met one, I might look like a "fascist".

To give a little perspective, and to give you an idea whose company one is keeping, the P.C. site gives us an estimate of some public figures:



Next up: more on Socialism

When the world is free

And righteousness shall be the girdle of his loins, and faithfulness the girdle of his reins.

The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together: and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice' den.

They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea. And in that day there shall be a root of Jesse, which shall stand for an ensign of the people; to it shall the Gentiles seek: and his rest shall be glorious.

There'll be blue birds over...

There'll be love and laughter
And peace ever after
Tomorrow
When the world is free

The shepherd will tend his sheep
The valley will bloom again
And Jimmy will go to sleep
In his own little room again

There'll be bluebirds over
The white cliffs of Dover
Tomorrow
Just you wait and see

Here's a thought

What if our sins showed on the outside?

I mean, what if we couldn't hide our wicked deeds and thoughts because they showed on our faces?


Apostasy, fornication, lust, lies, abuse of love and trust, petty thefts from the office? What if it all showed and only Confession could restore your face?


What kind of attraction would sin have then?

I think God should have thought of that.

A Magnificent Genius

GAWWWWD but Orwell was a genius!

Sometimes I forget.

The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them . . . . To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies — all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.”

I remember when I first read 1984. I was fifteen and had asked my father (perhaps one of the last complete conversations I ever had with my gamete donor, now that I think of it) if it was good. He said, "It's painful, but good for you. A bit like going to the dentist".

"His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully-constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them; to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy; to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved using doublethink.

I read it, and, having been raised on cheap trashy sci-fi and fantasy kid-lit, my fifteen year-old brain was only interested in plot and story, which I found highly unsatisfactory. But despite the total lack of romance, even the anti-romance of it, even on this simplistic, comic booky, soap opera level it was riveting, with characters you liked in spite of not wanting to. I recall perfectly that when I had stayed up to two am reading the last bit, when I got to the end, where Winston loves Big Brother, I was so mad, I flung the book across my room and wrote an outraged diary entry about it.

It was not for years afterward that I began to understand the incredible prescience of Orwell's ideas about where Things were going. A friend put me on to his essays, particularly Politics and the English Language. I moved on to Burmese Days, which made me loathe not the English Raj (which I suppose was the purpose) but their corrupt and amoral Asiatic subjects (just a born reactionary I guess).

Being, ultimately, just a girl, I cried when the elephant was shot. The mental picture of the huge placid beast yanking up tufts of grass, banging them on its knees to get the soil off, then stuffing them in its mouth, somehow arouses an almost maternal response.

How a man of this kind of intelligence could have remained a socialist, even after having fought with them in the Spanish Civil War, remains a mystery to me. Perhaps it is one of those cases of the darkening of the intellect brought on by Original Sin.

Here's a low-key quiz for a warm sunny Saturday:

1) How many Orwell books have you read?

2) Which ones do you remember best?

3) Which ones haven't you read, but have either actively lied about reading, or passively allowed people to assume you've read?

4) Which ones made you think differently about the world?

The Surrealist Lightbulb and the Fine Art of Conspiracy

What makes a joke funny? What elements go into humour?

It may seem silly, but two incidents lately have made me wonder about these things in a serious vein.

The first is the hilarious behavior of the British Columbia HRC in its earnest discussion of whether the CBC television programme Little Mosque on the Prairie is funny. I'm fairly sure the Islams bringing Mark Steyn and Maclean's magazine up on blasphemy charges don't think its funny either. I think they think that non-Islams are required to think it is funny because that is how it is expected to work as a propaganda tool. They've been told that Westerners have this thing called "humour", and that when Islam is presented with this substance coating it, the dumb Westerners will accept it more readily. I'm fairly sure they think that "humour" is like a kind of icing that makes the dumb Westerners enjoy any awful bit of baked sawdust presented as cake.

So, in the course of the procedings, the Islams accused Mark Steyn of not finding Little Mosque funny. I am given to understand that the Kangaroos earnestly brought in "humour experts" to engage in a serious discussion of what makes a programme funny, and what doesn't. I was not told the outcome, whether Little Mosque would be stamped as "Official Canadian Humour", and whether that would mean that not finding it funny, or at least not pretending to, would leave open to prosecution in the Human Rights Tribunal anyone who didn't laugh along with the laugh track. Canada's getting pretty weird, and I'm not sure what the rules are these days, not having been keeping close enough watch.

The second incident is the rather odd reaction of Richard Dawkins and his Bright friends when presented with a parody of themselves.

I will not explain at too great a length, but it made me think that I am right and that one of the defining characteristics of the left/atheist/newfangledperson/southpaw crowd is a nearly complete blindness to irony. I've not yet finished thinking about what this means, but if I come up with something, I'll let y'all know.

Meanwhile, someone else has done a pretty good job:

Long ago, I remember watching some film about human evolution narrated by Richard Leakey, Jr. It was interesting as such films go, but you got the sense as it went along that it explained everything at the cost of leaving everything out—like scientists in a Far Side cartoon analyzing humor.

The crowning moment of the film, for me, was when Leakey stood in front of the gorgeous twenty-thousand-year-old cave paintings in Lascaux, France and, with genuine puzzlement in his voice, wondered aloud “Why did they do this? What was the purpose?”

I had the distinct impression he would have expressed equal bafflement were he standing in the Louvre. There seemed to be a gene missing somewhere. He was a man who knew a great deal about human origins and yet, however smart he was, there was something about him that was radically out of touch with, well, what it meant to be human. You felt he needed tape on his glasses, a pocket protector, high water trousers and D&D dice in his pocket to complete the image he seemed to project with such earnest unconsciousness.

So, a friend of mine has decided to try his hand at satirical columniating in his local paper, (No, I won't tell you who and where, not yet anyway), and we are working on his technique.

Maybe I could offer my ideas to the BC. Human Rights Tribunal, they seem to need the help.

What's Funny?

I've come up with four elements that seem to be present in nearly all humour. I have called them:

Juxtaposition, Subversive Truth-telling, Exaggeration Ad absurdam, and Conspiracies

.

Humour in general seems to be dependent upon the element of surprise and all of these elements contribute to creating a reaction of surprise in the audience (except conspiracies, which do the opposite, but play upon our vanities, which is a different thing... to be dealt with last).

Satire seems to depend upon Subversive Truth-Telling and Exaggeration Ad Absurdam more than the others. There is usually the Conspiracies element there too.


Humour:

We laugh when something unexpected happens in a familiar surrounding, that does not threaten. We laugh when John Cleese, himself a living parody of upper-class English manhood, shows up in a dress and starts talking like a Manchester housewife. When we say to someone, "How many psychiatrists does it take to change a lightbulb?" our audience (assuming they are very young and have never heard this old chestnut) begins to smirk in anticipation of being surprised by an unexpected answer; and the laugh, when it comes, is an exhalation of relief. Jokes are for adults what peekaboo is to an infant, a constant surprise.


Juxtaposition:

I will use lightbulb jokes to illustrate.

Q. "How many Surrealists does it take to change a lightbulb?"
Ans: "A fish"

Juxtaposition is probably the first element of humour. It is the one children like most and the one that Monty Python claimed as their own. It is, simply, the placing of a completely unexpected object in a familiar surrounding, as in the Surrealist LB joke above.

We expect the lightbulb joke, which by adulthood is pretty familiar territory, to go in a set pattern. The example is the psychiatrist LB joke, and the answer "Only one but the lightbulb really has to want to change" presents a small juxtaposition between the expected habits of psychiatrists and what we know about lightbulbs. The psychiatrist LB joke is only mildly funny to most people because the juxtaposition does not create a very wide gap. Its humour rests only on the silliness of the idea that a psychiatrist would treat a lightbulb.

The gap is the humour. To make an analogy, a joke is like a ride at an amusement park. We are taken up in a comfy and, we know, perfectly safe chair to a great height, and allowed to plummet to the ground in a perfect simulation of something terrifying and unexpected. The gap created by a juxtaposition of the expected with the unexpected, is the distance one falls. The greater the distance, the more "terrifying" the ride, the more fun. The bigger the gap created by the juxtaposition, the funnier the joke.

This is the first reason the Surrealist LB joke is funnier than the psychiatrist LB joke. Its juxtaposition of the expected answer (something mildly droll, perhaps, about painters) with the totally unexpected non-sequitur of "a fish", creates a vast gap between what we expected and what we now have.

The psychiatrist LP joke is mildly amusing and probably gently mocks our interest in self-help pop-psychology. Whereas the juxtaposition of the Surrealist LB joke creates a vast gap that shocks us into a much bigger laugh.

Exaggeration Ad Absurdam:

The Trad lightbulb joke. "How many Trads..?" "Change?!!" mocks the traditionalists' obsession with never changing anything in their lives, of wanting to hang on to everything of the past, no matter how absurd. It implies they would rather sit in the dark than change even a lightbulb. It mocks their fanaticism and silliness by bringing the issue into to an extreme absurdity. No Trad would ever hesitate to change a lightbulb of course, but the implication that they hold their Traddiness to be a higher goal than ordinary acts of life-maintenance illustrates a true aspect of their characters.

The Surrealist LB joke also has an element of ad absurdam. One would expect that Salvador Dali had not so inculcated his artistic sensibilities that he would not know the difference between a lightbulb and a fish. But it exaggerates what we assume is the oddities of the Surrealist school painters to make their ideas look silly.

Of course, satire depends heavily upon Exaggeration Ad Absurdam, as we see with the all-time classic example of Mr. Swift's essay on the Irish Problem. It employs juxtaposition, in the fact that the target audience is familiar with the sad scene of the Irish situation, and exaggeration to a great extreme in suggesting that the solution is to go all the way with the logic and treat the Irish as cattle for food, rearing them, essentially, as an alternative to the beef industry. A Modest Proposal, particularly with its completely calm and matter-of-fact tone, enraged the English ruling elite because it implied that there was only a small step between the way the English treated the Irish at the time, and treating them as animals to rear for food. The target audience got the joke because they saw that the logic was perfectly sound, but the joke was on them, and they knew it. (More on Mr. Swift and the elements and nature of satire later).

Conspiracies and Subversive Truth-Telling:

But the Surrealist LB joke is funnier than most LB jokes, and more sophisticated. First, it assumes quite a lot of knowledge on the part of the listener. It assumes that he has enough grasp of English to know what the expected type of answer is to the question "how many?". He also is familiar enough with the culture to expect a lightbulb joke to follow a familiar pattern: "How many Xs does it take to change a lightbulb?" "(Number)" followed by a brief explanation. This is part of the set-up. The familiar surroundings that will create the distance of the gap created by the juxtaposition. The ground, from which the lift takes up our comfy chair.

The joke also expects that we are familiar with surrealist art, and modern art in general and agree that it is pretty silly. It creates a conspiracy, therefore, between the joke teller and the listeners. The joke draws us into the conspiracy that we all agree Surrealism, and probably most of modern art, is just dumb, and that its practitioners and supporters are so divorced from reality that they can't answer a simple question without going all weird.

It mocks also the modern social convention that we are never allowed to voice this opinion for fear of being seen as philistines. We must never make fun of or take lightly a major modern art movement, (or, by extrapolation, modernity in general). Telling a joke that mocks Surrealism, and by extension its fans and supporters, is a subversive act of Truth-telling that garners a sense of relief from the audience who laugh at the shock of hearing it, but are also glad that someone has dared to say it.

By creating a conspiracy, and engaging in Subversive Truth-Telling, you have both flattered your audience and given them permission to think what they want. It allows them to form an elite of their own, people who are "in the know" about how silly modern art is. You have raised them from the position of philistine bumpkins to being in the same class as the modern art elites. They will love you. The Surrealist Lightbulb Joke is, therefore, the little boy who was the only one who dared to point at the Emperor and laugh. He breaks the spell of the tailors and allows everyone to laugh and point as well.

Satire:

Satire seems to consist mostly of extreme exaggeration of familiar things and people.

Mr. Fowler gives us, in the Oxford Concise, "(Rom. Ant.) poetic medley, esp. poem aimed at prevalent vices or follies; a composition in verse or prose holding up vice or folly to ridicule or lampooning individuals...use of ridicule, irony, sarcasm etc..."

Irony: "Expression of one's meaning by language of opposite or different tendency, esp., simulated adoption of another's point of view for purpose of ridicule ...use of language that has an inner meaning for a privileged audience and an outer meaning for the persons addressed; Socratic: simulation of ignorance as means of confuting adversary.

Let's examine one of the more popular satirical offerings, The Simpsons.

The Simpsons employs three elements that make it great satire (and extraordinarily clever marketing): Conspiracies, exaggeration and subversive truth-telling.

Its satire seems to consist mostly of presenting a world that is only slightly, but absurdly, exaggerated version of our own. It takes cultural elements with which we are all familiar, exaggerates them and re-presents them in such a way as to make the real world seem absurd. That is the purpose of satire, esp of the sort you are proposing. To make other people see the world as we see it. To force other people to recognise the absurdities of the real world by creating a satirical fantasy version of it.

Satirical characters are just exaggerated archetypes, the types familiar throughout literature. The vast cast of two-dimensional background characters in the Simpsons is one of the best examples of this going. We recognise them all instantly, either from our dim recollections of high literature (the salty old sea dog, Captain Creech comes straight out of at least half a dozen 19th century novels and poems) or modern films. Monty Burns is Ebeneezer Scrooge, and probably a dozen others. The Comic Shop Guy, Mayor Quimby, Principal Skinner are all immediately recognisable archetypal characters from films and popular culture, (and sometimes our own high school experiences).

But what the Simpsons does best is the Conspiracy. The Simpsons requires an extremely high level of cultural literacy, coupled with the knowing aloofness that so characterises members of the post-60's generation. People born after the 1960s seem to display the same sense of not really belonging to this culture, but of being stuck in a surreal and nearly always hostile world that we did not create and about which we can do nothing. We all believe, whether our parents are alive or not, that the world we live in was created by them and for them, and not for us. We feel that the Boomers still own the world and only grudgingly allow us to live in it, as long as we don't make too much mess. We feel trapped in a bizarre parodic culture that only dimly resembles the world we think we should be living in. We are, in a word, alienated. Which makes us an ideal target audience for a parody.

The Simpsons draws us, a very specific target audience, into a vast but at the same time oddly exclusive club for whom the dozens of rapid-fire references to cultural artifacts in each programme act as code words. It is a form of verse and response antiphonal relationship between the show's makers and the audience. A sign and counter-sign required to be let into the club's doors.

Conspiracy, upon which satire is enormously dependent, necessarily creates two camps: us and them, the people who get the joke and the people who are the butt of the joke, or at least the straightman. I think the genius of the Simpsons is to make the in-crowd so huge. Nearly everyone raised after the 1960s, and a fair number who weren't, are in on the joke, but it creates this vast conspiracy that includes nearly everyone, while maintaining the feeling that we are enjoying the company of an exclusive group with the right gnosis. It is an exclusive club, complete with exciting hand signals, that everyone can join.

More on this later.

Pancake People

The playwright Richard Foreman:

I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available.”

As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”

Thank goodness it's not just me

Remember when you were a kid and the grown-ups were always trying to drag you away from the TV and make you run around outside and play? They always said, "That thing will rot your brain and make you stupid". And they were right weren't they? A lot of people either don't have a TV now, don't watch the one they've got or are trying to cut back. The word is out about the TV and we're on to its little game of trying to make everyone into stupid and docile puppets of the state (or Big Business or whatever).

But has anyone else noticed that we have just traded one massive distraction for another?

Anyone care to guess what that distraction is? Here's a hint: How many times in the last month have you been up past midnight with the computer on your lap? Did you even notice?

Steve has posted something that I've been thinking for some time. The internet is doing something to our brains. Something bad. It's not merely a matter of the strange powers of the internet to suck time and put us into a kind of fugue state in which the room we are sitting in recedes into the mist. I once went to confession and said that I was guilty of wasting time on the internet and often found it very difficult to drag myself away, even to do things that I genuinely enjoyed or needed to do. The priest, whom I knew well and is a net-head himself, said, "It can be hypnotic, can't it?"

Are we being hypnotised? And if we are, what sort of suggestions are being put into our heads?

But it is not only this. Not only the attention span problem. Something about the net is altering the way I think.

It has been obvious to me for some time that the internet is doing something bad to my brain and I'm not the only one thinking it.

Steve links to an article in the Atlantic that discusses this. I am somewhat relieved because I had thought it was just me. Some kind of premature senility or perhaps some growing flaw in my personality that I have more or less given up reading deeply and with attention. That more and more of my time is taken up with the little square palantir and I find it increasingly difficult to turn it off and leave it off.

Steve writes:

The way we think has changed, and looking at it from this perspective I see it. I need constant mental stimulation or I am bored out of my mind. I am extremely impatient about getting results, whatever the task at hand. When I have a question about something, or want to know a name I can’t remember, I run to google. If I am at the store and can’t decide between two products, I stand there like an idiot, fire up my PDA internet connection, and start looking for reviews on my way-too-slow connection.

When I read blogs, if the posts are long, my eyes roll back in my head and I start spinning the scroll wheel. When I go to look at an encyclical or some scholarly document to back up a point I’m making, it’s all I can do to just get to the point and cut and paste. I can’t just read through something, I have to Ctrl+F search it for keywords, or use the word tabs on my Google toolbar.

Nicholas Carr, writing for the Atlantic, said,

"My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

Yep. Me too.

I use the internet for a living and I find myself doing exactly what he Atlantic article said we net-heads are increasingly doing. I don't read deeply or with attention; I scan and skim, pick out quick facts and quotes. These set off a series of connected facts in my head and I go to Google to find the related stuff and do the same again: scan and skim, pick and paste.

Mr. Carr again:

Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets—reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link...

As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

I've been thinking the internet is having a destructive effect on my thinking for some time. I have seen that my addiction to it has been very harmful to my spiritual life.

This morning, as I was having my little sit-down, the following struck me:

"But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!"

Could you define that please?

I do love my dictionary, but in this case, it is not much help.
Fascist.
Oxford Shorter, Vol.1, 1972 ed.)

[It. fascista, f. fascio bundle .] 1 One of a body of Italian nationalists organized in 1919 under Benito M. to oppose Bolshevism. Hence Fascism, their principle and organization.

But perhaps it is a hint that Oxford treats the word so literally. The word as it is commonly used at protests and as it is commonly flung at pro-lifers, and its actual definition seem to bear little relation to each other. Oxford's blandness actually supports my theory that the vocalization of the word is not actually the same thing as speaking a word at all; it is not a vocal representation of a real thing, but an incantation.

Let us suss it out a bit.

It comes, of course, from the Latin fasces for a ceremonial "bundle of rods with axe in the middle carried by lictor before high magistrate; ensigns of authority." (Oxford Concise) Carrying much the same symbolic meaning as the Mace in Parliament.

Wiki gives us:

The traditional Roman fasces consisted of a bundle of birch rods tied together with a red ribbon as a cylinder to include an axe amongst the rods. Symbolic interpretation of the fasces suggests that the rods represent the authority to punish citizens whereas the axe represents the authority to execute them...

So, it is much like the mace, that was there to remind of the authority of the state to whack you on the head if you misbehaved in the House.

Oxford Concise (1938...therefore and just as the word is gaining public currency and the world is starting to think that war with fascism is inevitable) gives us: "Principles and organization of the patriotic and anti-communist movement in Italy started during the great war, culminating in the virtual dictatorship of Signor Mussolini, and imitated by fascist or black shirt assocations in other countries."

Now Wiki, (bless em) gives us a more modern sense:

Fascism is an authoritarian political ideology (generally tied to a mass movement) that considers individual and social interests subordinate to the interests of the state or party. Fascists seek to forge a type of national unity, usually based on (but not limited to) ethnic, cultural, racial, religious attributes. The key attribute is intolerance of others: other religions, languages, political views, economic systems, cultural practices, etc. Various scholars attribute different characteristics to fascism, but the following elements are usually seen as its integral parts: nationalism, statism, militarism, totalitarianism, anti-communism, corporatism, populism, collectivism, and opposition to political and economic liberalism.

But the word "authoritarian" is relative (and let's not get started on "liberalism"). A lot depends upon whom one stands next to. To an anarchist (if there is such a thing) any state with a police force is a police state. Are pro-lifers fascists because we want abortion to be made illegal? Perhaps, but only if we are being called so by people who believe that totally unbridled anarchy is the same thing as freedom. Freedom to kill the innocent is not what I would call one of those best construed to create a just society.

But there's a little hint too. I am a fascist, but only when the word is being used by someone who thinks I am. It certainly is looking like the word as it is usually used, does not represent any real thing.

But that list of characteristics is interesting isn't it? Because of course, we usually think in rather simplistic left/right terms and fascism is Right with communism being Left. When we write about politics, we usually ascribe things like collectivism exclusively to the Left. But as we have been seeing more and more, those divisions, which are after all 200 years old, are becoming less helpful. The Left, as we used to identify it, is now getting itself bound more closely with big business (which should probably, in this age of multinational and transnational corporatism, be re-named something like "huge business" or "gargantuan business"). But business interests used to be associated mostly with the Right.

Well, we're getting into areas now that I don't know enough about to write anything very intelligent. But the word, or perhaps we should call it an 'unword', fascist seems to be going, along with everything else, in some interesting and unexpected directions.

Is "easier" the same thing as "isolated"?

A faithful reader writes in:

It's not easier to bring up children. I would happily relocate to a traditional culture with fewer creature comforts, but where my neighbors would watch the baby if I came down with the flu. But in the absence of those helpful neighbors it's nice to have disposable diapers and electricity.

It raised an interesting point: Have our creature comforts been the cause of our massive alienation? We know that a big problem of living in the modern world is that we all feel so terribly alone and unimportant. So much so that chemists can't keep enough Prozac on the shelf.

Could it be that we have created this situation by making our individual, independent lives easier?

Discuss.

Ouroboros

The symbol, usually in the form of a circle, of a snake (or dragon) eating its tail.
--The Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition

The snake eats its tail until it disappears:

"There's no such thing as absolute truth."

"What is true for you is not true for me"

"I have the right to choose whatever morality I prefer."

"My brother is an only child."

"I don't speak a word of English."

A question for y'all to think about while I'm doing other things

Is "easier" the same thing as "better"?

It is very easy to live nowadays. We don't have to work as hard as our ancestors did. We don't have to be cold in the winter, or go to bed early because it is dark out. If we want anything, we can usually buy six different kinds in the shops. If we are hungry we go to the fridge and pop something in the toaster or the nuker.

If we are bored, we get on the net or watch telly. If we are lonely, we get on the phone.

Everything can be had, even to people with little income, on easy terms and in easy payments.

Has this change been a good thing?

Discuss.