September 2024

To Laugh Is Really to Love

By in books, jests japes jokes jollies, religion

Humour, however, belongs very much to the world. Life is suffering. As Shakamuni pointed out long ago, we cannot have what we want, and we must have what we don’t want, but humour is not escapist. It overcomes the world, not by ascending to heaven, but by laughing at the paradoxes of life. We overcome the world by laughing at it; we overcome it in so far as we laugh at it. Humour is thus a religion. It is religion itself. It belongs to the will, to the subconscious will, and sets its will against communism and democracy and Buddhism and Christianity, and every other will, that is, every other religion.

Buddhism, like Christianity, hates this world. The world, the flesh, and the devil are lumped together in the New Testament. In Buddhism the world is, as said before, suffering, something we hate. Perversely, Christianity and Buddhism both tell us to love what we hate, to love our enemies, to be compassionate to the things or creatures or human beings that annoy and destroy us. Humour, on the other hand, makes us laugh at our enemies, and at our friends still more, laugh at God and the Devil, laugh at ourselves. To laugh is really to love. This we see in Hamlet and Ophelia, Othello and Desdemona, whose humourless love causes their tragedy.

If we take humour to be the nature of the universe, the origin of life and its object, the antagonism of Christianity and Buddhism to humour shows their irreligiousness. Of course, when we assert the importance of humour in this serious way, humour itself is absent, and we get only one more humourless -ism or -ology. What I really want to say is that it does not really matter whether a theory of life is good or bad, right or wrong, so long as it is humourously so.

— R.H. Blyth, Poetry and Zen: Letters and Uncollected Writings of R. H. Blyth

I’m reminded of Mary Beard’s comments on Democritus in Confronting the Classics:

The most revealing ancient discussion of Democritus’ laughing habit is found in an epistolary novel of Roman date, included among the so-called Letters of Hippocrates – a collection ascribed to the legendary founding father of Greek medicine, but in fact written centuries after his death. The fictional exchanges in this novel tell the story of Hippocrates’ encounter with Democritus. In the philosopher’s home city, his compatriots had become concerned at the way he laughed at everything he came across (from funerals to political success) and concluded that he must be mad. So they summoned the most famous doctor in the world to cure him. When Hippocrates arrived, however, he soon discovered that Democritus was saner than his fellow citizens. For he alone had recognised the absurdity of human existence, and was therefore entirely justified in laughing at it.

Melting Into Air

By in books, extraordinary popular delusions

Despite the massive intellectual feat that Marx’s Capital represents, the Marxian contribution to economics can be readily summarized as virtually zero. Professional economics as it exists today reflects no indication that Karl Marx ever existed. This neither denies nor denigrates Capital as an intellectual achievement, and perhaps in its way the culmination of classical economics. But the development of modern economics has simply ignored Marx. Even economists who are Marxists typically utilize a set of analytical tools to which Marx contributed nothing, and have recourse to Marx only for ideological, political, or historical purposes.

In professional economics, Capital was a detour into a blind alley, however historic it may be as the centerpiece of a worldwide political movement. What is said and done in its name is said and done largely by people who have never read through it, much less followed its labyrinthine reasoning from its arbitrary postulates to its empirically false conclusions. Instead, the massive volumes of Capital have become a quasi-magic touchstone—a source of assurance that somewhere and somehow a genius “proved” capitalism to be wrong and doomed, even if the specifics of this proof are unknown to those who take their certitude from it.

— Thomas Sowell, Marxism: Philosophy and Economics

I picked this up at a library sale early this year. Honestly, I’m not sure I ever expected to get around to reading it. I just thought it would be nice to have a copy anyway. But the Lady of the House has a friend, a woman who works in marketing. This friend recently recommended that she read some of the “Marxist economists,” before naming Ernest Mandel (?) and Emma Goldman (!) as examples. Yes, her understanding of “Marxism” seems to be glib and shallow, but nonetheless, I was so surprised to discover that a person whom I had supposed to be reasonably intelligent could be earnestly preaching from this particular soapbox that it suddenly seemed like a good time to give Sowell’s book a read.

The overall impression I took away was how fairly Sowell treats Marx and Engels. In several instances, he takes pains to illustrate nuances of their thought which have been ignored by both acolytes and opponents. In itself, this may not seem extraordinary. The internet is full of spergs who will argue at length that some obscure passage in the Grundrisse is the overlooked key to making Marxism work in practice, and professional apologists like Howard Zinn have produced propaganda insisting that everyone’s always had Marx all wrong. But the effect of Sowell’s sober treatment is to defuse “pure” Marxism and leave it looking quaint, like a period piece. We’re reminded that had it not been for a singular fanatic like Lenin, determined to stretch and mutilate an entire nation to make it fit the Procrustean bed of Marxist theory, Marx would just be a footnote in mid-19th-century intellectual history, of interest only to specialists. Then again, he did create a new holy book, and how many people can claim that?