“Just Another Kind of Knife”
In the wake of the Arizona shooting, we have been flooded with discussions about language’s unique power to harm. About how violent rhetoric can create a climate of violence, and how the wrong kind of words in the wrong place can alchemically transform an otherwise harmless lunatic into a bullet just looking for a target.
This is all almost certainly true. The Buddhists got it right: life is pain. If you’ve got any kind of sensitivity, then you know that. The world can hurt us in an infinity of ways, and there are so many more by which we can hurt each other. But pain on its own is meaningless. There’s nothing holy about hurting. It’s the healing that matters. And just as words can harm, they can also heal. A surgeon’s scalpel is just another kind of knife.
As much as anything else, we heal our psychological scars through jokes and laughter. I believe a fantasy novelist once pointed this out: with enough light, and from a distant enough vantage point, all evil looks petty and kind of ridiculous. Keep looking and eventually it turns in on itself and disappears. Humor, when created for the right reasons, gives us exactly this kind of perspective. When we can laugh at something, it loses all power to hurt us.
With some subjects, we’re not there yet. There are certain violations that run so deep that, a victim or survivor might argue, there’s no humor to be found. Moreover, one might say, the trauma is so incomprehensible to someone who isn’t a victim or survivor that using it as a source of humor, even tangentially, vitiates the importance of the issue and dismisses those who have suffered.
I think we can learn two things from this perspective. First, and most importantly: we have to understand that this pain is real, and we probably cannot understand its depths. When trauma runs that deep and marks that indelibly, we need to think very, very hard about what caused it and how we can prevent it in the future. Those who hurt are worthy of help and succor, they are not less for being victims. Saying, “toughen up” is the worst kind of unhelpful, because it shifts the problem from the perpetrator of the crime onto the victim, faulting the latter for a lack of resilience. We are all human, and we all bleed and feel, and denying another’s pain diminishes us all.
The second lesson, though, tells us something about how we should respond to well-intentioned humor, even if (especially if!) we don’t find it funny. In any statement, there’s always context and deeper understanding that never finds its way to our tongues, let alone our keyboards. It’s the height of hubris to ascribe an entire psychological stance to someone just because he or she chose to make or laugh at a joke, regardless of how poor its taste. And that’s doubly true if the speaker or listener expresses even a modicum of awareness, and never intends any actual harm. There’s 150 years and a couple wars’ worth of difference between a South Carolina slave-owner joking about his slaves’ racial deficiencies and Jerry Seinfeld putting a Soup Nazi on television.
Being able to laugh at something isn’t just the clearing at the end of the path—it actively helps us get there. As a general rule, the more we laugh, the better our lives are, especially if that laughter isn’t intended to be at the expense of others.
To paraphrase the famous quotation: “I may not agree with what you find funny, but I’ll defend to the death your right to laugh at it.” Now, if that laughter turns into some sort of actual bad act? If there’s actual causation between words and eventual action (or inaction)? That’s a different story. But the goal of any free society can’t possibly be to perfectly insulate all of its members from ever hurting each other, even incidentally, otherwise we’d be prohibited from interacting with each other at all. If we are to be free people, if individual freedom means anything at all, then we can’t force our perspective on anyone else. We can’t indict someone just for thinking or speaking, no matter how nefarious we might find those thoughts and words. It’s only action that matters, and then only if there’s a real causal chain between the bad idea and the bad act.
You can’t fight bad ideas with a gag and a backpack full of outrage. The only way to fight bad ideas is with better ideas.
This post was inspired by a debate that is currently carving a flame- and troll-strewn path through the internet. It all began with this post on Penny Arcade, in which two gleefully foul-mouthed online cartoonists willingly censored themselves at the request of their readers. Their rationale seemed to hinge on the proposition that the Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) has become something bigger than just the site and the comic strip, and they want to keep it as positive an experience as possible.
This response seems to encapsulate/exemplify the other side. If I read it properly, the primary complaint is regarding Penny Arcade’s refusal to retract the joke, and the perceived dismissal of anyone who finds it unfunny. To the best of my ability, I sympathize with the writer’s pain, and I recognize that painful associations can persist for longer and in more insidious forms than most of us can understand.
There are about fifteen different and very good reasons that I am unqualified to talk about the issue that set this off. But I do spend a lot of my time thinking very hard about free speech and how we talk to each other, and particularly how the Internet influences modern communication. And this is a perfect crystallization of something endemic to the Internet as a medium: it’s fertilizer for knee-jerk responses and simplification.
The way I see it, much of the disagreement here seems to be over the absence of two words: “to us.” Imagine if Mike written in the above-linked post:
“First of all I would never remove the strip or even apologize for the joke. It’s funny to us and the fact that some people don’t get it, or are offended by it doesn’t change that.”
If you asked Mike, I bet he’d say, “Well of course I meant funny to us. The whole comic strip is about what’s funny to us!” And I bet Kirby Bits would say something like, “Gabe’s making a really offensive joke and telling us that if we don’t find it funny, it’s our fault.” If you put Gabe and Kirby Bits into the same room, all the hate and rage and pain would drain out of the conversation like poison from a wound. No one intended to hurt anyone else, and it’s a lot harder to impute intolerance when the other person can respond in real time.
The problem, as Sartre would say, is other people. What begins as a simple disagreement between two speakers with enormous soapboxes balkanizes into what is effectively a clan war. The level of discourse plummets, the various positions grow more and more extreme, and each side sees the other as “the bad guy,” because we humans bolt morality onto every possible conflict. We need Manichean divisions, or else how are we supposed to know who to root for?
Here’s the thing: humor’s an art form that exists on the boundaries—what makes us laugh and what makes us cry is often separated by the thickness of a neuron. That distance is well beyond the resolution of most everyone outside of our own heads, and especially people on the far side of a monitor and keyboard. It’s ripe for disagreement. And the Internet amplifies the disconnect until it’s not just a rhetorical difference, it’s an outright War of Ideas.
Maybe this happens because we’ve grown used to seeing everyone who doesn’t agree with us as stupid, or wrong, or, even outright evil. Maybe, in the words of arguably my favorite television show of all time:
It seems to me that more and more we’ve come to expect less and less from each other, and I’d like to be the first to start bucking that trend. We need each other badly.
We need each other. Badly. I think learning to laugh together is a pretty good place to start.
