North Gare

If 'religion is poetry', it's blank verse

[A few months ago, a friend, who is an ordained minister, asked what I thought about a piece at salon.com, which is an interview by Steve Paulson with James Carse, who ran the Religious Studies program at NYU for 30 years, about his book The Religious Case Against Belief. A lot of the issues are the same ones which came up in my comment/post regarding Mark Lawson's recent waste of space in the Guardian, so this is a bit of a companion piece. What's below is the reply I sent to my friend, with a couple of minor tweaks here and there.]

Some general thoughts first, and then some more specific.

It's not a bad interview, in that the questions are good ones, which do well at picking up apparent ambiguities and inconsistencies. Carse's views seem to be an interesting mixture of the sensibly pragmatic and the more, um, vague and wishful. He seems a good example of the sort of intellectual who's become very good at compartmentalising his way of seeing the world, so that he can apply as much critical thinking as he wants over here, but doesn't allow himself to apply so much over there.

The parts about Jesus, for example, seem entirely sensible. But the way in which he suggests in several places that there's something intrinsically wonderful about the mysterious and unknowable is deeply uncritical. It's where I lose him completely.

I also found myself hearing my PhD supervisor asking 'Yes, but what do you mean by that', over and over again, because what might have seemed perfectly clear and formal to me wasn't anything of the sort. It's generally hard for someone in the sciences - even someone as marginal as me - to deal with the hand-waving generalities in a piece like this.

But he's also critical of the new crop of atheists. 'What these critics are attacking is not religion, but a hasty caricature of it,' he writes in his new book, 'The Religious Case Against Belief.'

I think there's a good degree of disingenuousness here. He might have (what seems to him to be) a more sophisticated view of god and religion, but it's very much the case that for hundreds of millions of theists around the world their god is a real figure, who actually created the world, who actually hears prayers, heals the sick, and so on. It's probably true that a good deal of what Dawkins and Hitchins, etc., are attacking, isn't the more vague beliefs of someone like Carse, but that doesn't mean those beliefs don't exist, and I suspect they're far more common. So I don't think it's a caricature.

To Carse, religion is all about longevity; it's what unites people over the millennia.

As is made more clear later on, I think he has this backwards. Rather than religion being defined as that which has longevity, I think it's far more that theism is just a very powerful meme. It persists for all sorts of reasons, which have to do with indoctrination, feelings of community, ritual, comfort, etc., and also poor science education in many parts of the world.

I also slightly resist the implication that longevity is in itself a good thing. To the extent that a belief system or a way of life doesn't change, it often means that it's perpetuating dogma. Things should change, as we find out more about the world, and about life. That's a good thing.

He writes that religion's vitality is based on mystery and unknowability: 'Religion in its purest form is a vast work of poetry.'

I'm not sure what this means. I'm sure that most theists would argue that there is poetry in religion and its rituals, but I'm not sure how many would agree that that's its purest form. This is also where he begins to place ignorance on some sort of pedestal, and there's something offensive to me about that.

Exactly. In fact, very passionate believers are often not at all religious. However, it does happen to be the case that people who hold on to beliefs with great passion begin to describe themselves as religious.

No. I think he fails to qualify this nearly enough. Some might well use vaguely religious-sounding language, but if one equates passion with the religious, then the word 'religious' is being used so vaguely as to lose all meaning. Passions can be rational and truth-based.

A belief system is meant to be a comprehensive network of ideas about what one thinks is absolutely real and true. Within that system, everything is adequately explained and perfectly reasonable. You know exactly how far to go with your beliefs and when to stop your thinking. A belief system is defined by an absolute authority. The authority can be a text or an institution or a person. So it's very important to understand a belief system as independent of religion. After all, Marxism and Nazism were two of the most powerful belief systems ever.

He conflates two very different concepts here, and ends up confusing the issue. I mostly buy his definition of a belief system - in that it seeks to describe something that is 'absolutely real and true'. But I don't think that includes political/social philosophies such as Marxism. I'm not really a political scientist, but I don't think (for example) Marxism seeks to represent some absolute truth. It's just a way for a society to organise itself. There's no meaningful sense in which Marxism could be claimed to be true.

I think he's right that a belief system doesn't have to involve religion, but the difference between a belief system (in his definition) and a political or social philosophy is just as important. One says: 'I believe this is true'. The other says: 'I believe this is a good way to live'. It's the difference between what's true and what's pragmatic.

In your book, you say the only defining characteristic of religion is its longevity. It has to be around for a very long time to qualify as a religion.

Exactly. That's a very interesting contrast with belief systems. Belief systems have virtually no longevity. Think of Marxism. As a serious political policy, it lasted only about 70 or 80 years. Nazism only went 12 years.

He gets very confused here. In contrasting belief systems with religions, he seems to be saying that religions aren't in fact belief systems - which doesn't make much sense. Even by his own definition of a belief system, they clearly are. Following on from what I wrote above, I think a much better dichotomy is between religious belief systems and non-religious belief systems - or between religious belief systems and political/social philosophies.

But even with that dichotomy, you're really trying to compare apples and helicopters. They don't work in the same sorts of ways, and don't have the same sorts of goals. Political/social philosophies appear, vanish, and reappear over and over again across the globe, over millennia. What doesn't happen is that they're somehow proved false and then ditched forever. What we might call 'Marxism' might have been found thousands of years ago, and might be found again thousands of years in the future. It's not so specific a 'belief system' that it's delimited by time and place. It's more general than that, and 'Marxism' is only a temporary name in our society and our time for the concept. A religion, on the other hand, is defined by its specific beliefs, idols, rituals, etc. Religions across the world and across time might share concepts, but they're different religions.

So one can only talk about something like Marxism having lasted 70 or 80 years in such and such a society, at such and such a time. It'll be back, in other places and at other times. His claim that Nazism only lasted 12 years is only true using a very odd interpretation. As a belief system, it's alive and well - albeit smaller. What he's talking about is merely a single instance of a political movement, whose demise owed far more to some terrible military decisions than to some sort of natural lifespan. If Hitler had concentrated more on the Western front than Russia, he'd at the very least have lasted quite a bit longer. I don't think that sort of circumstantial eventuality is really what Carse is talking about.

And his linking of religion with longevity is once again backwards. The point is that religions tend to persist, because of how they're constructed, not that belief systems have to have persisted to be called religions. Should Christianity in its youth have been called a religion? Of course. There was no need for it to wait several hundreds of years to qualify.

The reason the great religions don't run out as quickly is that they're able to maintain within themselves a deeper sense of the mystery, of the unknowable, of the unsayable, that keeps the religion alive and guarantees its vitality.

This is really tantamount to saying that religions persist because they don't make any falsifiable claims. They carve out a safe haven of vague mysticism, which is beyond any practical scrutiny. The difference between that and a political/social philosophy such as Marxism is clear: Marxism can be put into practice, and tested within a time and a society. If it doesn't work - for whatever reasons - it can be rejected. That doesn't mean it can't work, in some other time and place; merely that it's been rejected in that context.

So, I think he has a point here. One of the reasons religion persists is that it hides in constructed mysticism from any practical testing. Unlike him, I think, that position strikes me as anti-reason. It tries to make a virtue of ignorance, which is pretty reprehensible.

But if the only test of a religion is its staying power, are you saying Mormonism, which has been around less than 200 years, is not a religion? Or Pentecostalism, which some religious scholars say is the most important religious movement of the last century?

Those are large questions. Will Mormonism hold out over the centuries? It's a difficult judgment. I don't have an answer for that. What I'd really like to focus on is how extremely long the great traditions are. There are other traditions that aren't that long: Sikhism, various kinds of Middle Eastern religions, mystical movements. Mormonism is an open question. You could even talk about Scientology. Does it really have staying power over the centuries? I would doubt it, but we don't know yet.

He's talking himself in circles here, and he avoids the question, which isn't whether these things will last, but whether the fact that they're still relatively young means that they're not religions. He's begging the question: something has to have persisted to be a religion, and it has to be a religion in order to persist.

Are you religious yourself?

I would say yes, but in the sense that I am endlessly fascinated with the unknowability of what it means to be human, to exist at all. Or as Martin Heidegger asked, why is there something rather than nothing? There's no answer to that. And yet it hovers behind all of our other answers as an enduring question. For me, it puts a kind of miraculous glow on the world and my experience of the world. So in that sense, I am religious.

He's right. His enthusiastic embrace of the 'unknowability' (whether that's how things are or not) strikes me as deeply religious. The scientific mind sees the gaps in knowledge as a challenge, and tries to fill them. If it turns out that some gaps can't be filled, well, that's a shame, and regrettable, but it'll keep on trying. The religious mind leaps all too eagerly to ideas of the mystical, the unknowable, and wraps them around it like a comfort blanket, as if there's something upsettingly dangerous about knowledge. Or it makes stuff up to fill the gap.

In fact, human intelligence has a certain limitation that keeps it from being able to embrace the infinite or the whole. Therefore, every one of our statements about God and the universe is tinged with a degree of ignorance. I would say that I am deeply moved by the thought of an unnameable mystery. If you then ask me, exactly which mystery are you then referring to? I can't answer. That's as far as I can go. But it's got its grip on me, for sure.

See above.

His claim that there's a 'limitation' on human intelligence, which licenses the ignorance that he's so fond of, reminds me very much of the way that the whole new age subculture trots out concepts of quantum physics - which they barely know anything about other than the name - to justify pretty much any crackpot bit of alternative medicine or pseudo-science. As he pretty much admits here, his 'beliefs' are so vague as to be meaningless.

Are you talking about atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris?

Yes. There are several problems with their approach. It has an inadequate understanding of the nature of religion. These chaps are very distinguished thinkers and scientists, very smart people, but they are not historians or scholars of religion.

The obvious irony here is that he's only just finished talking with apparent authority about the limitations of human intelligence - as if he feels entirely qualified in that area - yet is quick to deny the validity of the views of others who aren't experts in his own field. That attitude towards science is all too common, unfortunately.

PZ Myers' 'Courtier's Reply' is relevant here, I think.

The basic idea is that theology is largely about intricate argument concerning the exact nature and construction of the Emperor's new clothes.

To be an atheist, you have to be very clear about what god you're not believing in. Therefore, if you don't have a deep and well-developed understanding of God and divine reality, you can misfire on atheism very easily.

Again the Courtier's Reply. It's really not clear what he means by a 'deep and well-developed understanding of God and divine reality', other than what the Emperor's new clothes happen to look like and be made from. It's really like saying to the child who points out that the Emperor is naked: "You really need a deep and well-developed understanding of fabric and tailoring before you can say that the Emperor is naked." Well, no, not really.

And yet, you've just told me that you yourself don't believe in a divine reality. In some ways, your critique of belief systems seems to go along with what the new atheists are saying.

The difference, though, is that I wouldn't call myself an atheist. To be an atheist is not to be stunned by the mystery of things or to walk around in wonder about the universe.

There are two important points here. The first is - once again - that to be 'stunned by the mystery of things' is just a simple-minded embrace of ignorance. It might be the premature leap to a conclusion that something is unknowable when it is nothing of the sort; alternatively, it might be an acknowledgement of the inevitability of certain gaps in knowledge. Either way, to celebrate such gaps is a strange and primitive position.

The second point is that there's a good deal of straw man in Carse's argument. An atheist might not celebrate gaps in knowledge, but they're perfectly capable of finding plenty that's worthy of awe in understanding how the universe works. The implication in Carse's words is that atheism is somehow dulling of the senses, and that's not at all true. To argue that ignorance is somehow more life-enhancing than a true understanding of the processes behind life is backwards indeed.

Even if atheism were somehow dulling of the senses, that would not in itself be an argument for theism, except as a comfort blanket. Something being emotionally appealing doesn't make it more likely to be true.

Respecting the mysterious

[Copying here a comment I just posted to a piece by Mark Lawson on the Guardian website, which seems to me a perfect example - as the first commenter testily notes - of the borderline ignorance of the scientific model among even the best and brightest of those whose intellectual centres of gravity are in the humanities.]

Echoing a couple of other commenters: this is a really woolly-headed mangling of a number of issues.

...it has always seemed vital to me that those who reject the sacred continue to respect the mysteries of how and why we are here.

The idea of 'respecting' a mystery can mean several things, just as the very idea of a 'mystery' means different things to different people. If 'respecting' a mystery means blindly assuming that there is a mystery in the first place, then even this can be a serious mistake. For example, a believer in homeopathy might profess to respect the 'mystery' of how it works, since no plausible scientific explanation exists. The problem with that is that homeopathy very clearly doesn't work. Properly controlled double-blind studies show nothing other than the placebo effect. But if one took as axiomatic that it does work, and then retained sufficient 'respect' for the 'mystery' of how it works, one might resist - or even suppress - the truth that it doesn't work. 'Respect' for a mystery can very easily obscure the fact that there's nothing mysterious at all going on. This has clearly been true of the 'mystery' of the origin of species. Evolution by natural selection removes any such mystery. Nevertheless, the simple-minded, aesthetic, emotional or dogmatic appeal of the 'mystery' is the foundation for anti-scientific nonsense such as 'intelligent design'.

If, on the other hand, something genuinely is a mystery - 'first cause', for example - it's reasonable to propose that the most 'respectful' position to take is the most conservative one: that is, to fill the gap with nothing which isn't consistent with what we do know, and otherwise to claim nothing. In that respect, it seems to me that good science is entirely consistent with the idea of respecting such mysteries. Rather than a self-satisfied pleasure in the gap that a 'mystery' represents - a kind of aesthetic which values ignorance - science approaches such gaps in knowledge as challenges to be overcome. But until and unless they are overcome, its claims are appropriately modest, and gaps aren't in the meantime filled with wishful thinking.

Just Not As Bright

To Vons, a few nights ago, to buy some old-fashioned incandescent filament light bulbs, because the batch of long-life fluorescent bulbs we got at Costco a few months ago lend our living room the snug, inviting glare of a car parts warehouse.

Standing, slightly baffled, in front of the display, it took me a few moments to figure out that I couldn't see any 100 watt bulbs, and a few moments more to figure out why. General Electric, at any rate, doesn't seem to supply them to Vons any more; they've been replaced by a 'reduced wattage', 'energy saving' alternative. Good for them. Pictured is the packaging.

The copy takes a little unpacking. Note the prominent '95' at the top right, to which the eye is drawn, and then note that it's only '95' - that the fact that this is actually the wattage is gently elided. It might almost simply be some sort of internal code number for the bulb type. Perhaps less charitably, sandwiched between 'ENERGY' and 'SAVING' there's an implication that this might be the extent of the energy saving; that what we're being offered here is a bulb which saves us 95 somethings - probably a whopping 95% - compared to some other product. (It borrows ad-speak from the conceptual flip which results in products touted as '95% fat free', or somesuch, to represent the fact that they're 5% unreconstructed, unequivocal fat.)

The reinforcing smaller-print below adds to the bamboozlement:

Provides 1610 lumens, nearly the same light as 100 watt GE Soft White bulb providing 1690 lumens

'Nearly the same' is a very nice touch. It suggests that the bulb we're looking at is the end product of a dedicated research effort to match the output of a 100 watt incandescent bulb, despite the massive energy saving of something connected to the number 95.

The narrative here is pretty simple: it's an attempt to borrow some of the zeitgeisty love for energy-saving products in general, and long-life, low-energy bulbs in particular. More than that, it's more or less an attempt to imply that these are those long-life, low-energy bulbs we've heard so much about; that we're looking at sparkling new eco-friendly, thrifty technology, which nevertheless keeps our homes 'nearly the same' brightness.

It's not hard to imagine the rationale: they've got huge investment in incandescent technology, which also keeps turnover nice and high, since the bulbs, you know, burn out. At worst, Ms Consumer sees a product which does practically the same job as before; at best, incandescent masquerades as eco-bulb for a while, and Ms Consumer misses the fact that this doesn't use less energy because it's fancy new technology, or because greater efficiency is squeezed out. It uses less energy because it's just not as bright. There's a metaphor there, I think.

This is why I could never be a successful salesperson. I couldn't bring myself to this level of bamboozlement and bandwagon-jumping. It's not honesty that would stop me; it's embarrassment. I'd be embarrassed to stoop to such mangling of clear thought, just as I'd be embarrassed to try to puff a product that was borrowed wholesale from another. This is where you end up when your job is to make money, rather than to make a thing you believe in, or to have a genuinely new idea.

A small postscript. At the checkout, always a place of minor annoyance for me, gazing hopelessly at the uninviting American chocolate ('Oprah Magazine: Because you owe it to yourself to be the best narcissist you can be!'), sat a copy of - and I really wish this wasn't true - The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Last Days. Hoping for an Onion-esque spoof, or at least a measure of detached irony, I was disappointed. It's exactly what it claims to be: a 'Biblical' guide to armageddon and the rapture, complete with charts and timelines. The people it's aimed at?

Just not as bright.

Big Talk

I always knew I had no small talk, and now I know I've got no big talk either.
- Sue Townsend, The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole

I feel like I've grown up with Adrian Mole. We're roughly the same age, and I have a nagging suspicion that I have more of his pretentiousness than I'd like. (Does suspecting that make a difference?) I hope I have a little more self-awareness.

I've always loved the line about small talk and big talk. Adrian's mother's father has just died, and he's at a loss for what to say to console her. The first half of the line is typical Adrian - it's as much bragging that he has no small talk (because he's an intellectual), as it is an admission. The second half of the line is far more human. He's confronted suddenly by a frailty that matters to him.

My dad died two-and-a-half weeks ago. I'm finding it easy to write reams of wanky stuff about US and British comedy, but not much about my dad. I don't think that's because the loss is too raw. If anything, I think it's because I'm not feeling the sense of loss that I should be. Probably some combination of my basic difficulty with feeling anything terribly strongly, and the fact that he and I didn't have much of a relationship. I wish that hadn't been the case, but it was. We tended to circle each other warily and respectfully, aware that we'd mostly just piss each other off if we got too close.

When I was a kid, my bedroom was at the top of the stairs. It wasn't a huge house, which meant that if I had a mind to I could eavesdrop on the adults' conversations downstairs after the kids were in bed. One night I heard my dad recount something he'd said to me earlier that day - some sort of remark or riposte intended to stop me in my tracks, to put me in my place, perhaps even to hurt me a little. My vague memory is that it had something to do with my (limited) skills as a football player. He'd probably had a couple of pints by that time, so he didn't even attempt to hide his satisfaction in the recounting, and the effect was to kill the downstairs conversation stone dead. I don't remember being hurt, either by the remark or by the later recounting, but it did seem to set out the terms of engagement - a respectful but competitive distance. I was probably about twelve or thirteen at the time.

I also remember him climbing the stairs one morning, having arrived home after an early football match, covered in mud and still in his gear, describing with a childlike glee how he'd flattened one of the opposing team - who also happened to be one of my teachers - with a ferocious tackle. Me, I was still in bed, but listening, and I don't think I've ever been as proud of him. The competitive instinct was just the same. He was stubborn and argumentative and cantankerous, but also fiercely proud and honest. You could trust him with your life. He drove the people close to him crazy, but he was a far better human being than I'll ever be.

After a life of considerable activity and rude health, my dad's body started to fail him about ten years ago - a process which accelerated a year or two ago. By all accounts, he didn't go gently - that would not have been him - although by the time I'd made it back home from six-thousand miles away, he was calmer, and meaningful communication wasn't really possible. It's probably an admission of cowardice, but part of me was relieved that I wasn't put in the position of finding out that - like Adrian Mole - I had no big talk. But I don't see any reason to believe that we'd have done anything other than talk in the system of coded messages by which my family has always expressed affection and love. Still, he knew I was there, and I'm glad of that.

The afternoon of the day my dad died, my brother and I walked up to the local cricket club, where my dad had been president for some time. We'd heard that the flag had been set at half-mast, and indeed it had:

The sky was blue. The day was still, and quiet, and the cricket pitches had the deep green promise of early summer. The world suddenly seemed a more peaceful place.

A week later, I stood outside the gate to what was now my mother's home, waiting with my sister, brother-in-law, and my dad's brother for the hearse and the funeral cars. Across the village green, we watched as people appeared from all directions, their dress and purposeful stride giving away their destination. We watched them converge at the church. There turned out to be standing room only, and not much of that. I'd had two-hundred copies of the order of service printed. It wasn't nearly enough.

Perhaps what I've written here might make it make more sense, but I find messages of condolence addressed to me to miss the point. My dad's gone, but I don't feel the sense of loss that I should. That relationship had faltered many years ago - and that was the real loss for me. What I find myself feeling for my dad is a kind of perverse hope that he was sufficiently fed up with how much his body had failed him - the pain and indignity - that letting go seemed preferable. I hope he wasn't afraid.

And life goes on, even after the loss of someone who filled a church to overflowing, and for whom a flag was lowered. There's something comforting about that, I think.

Entropy and the BBC

Stephen Fry's latest is worth a read, or a listen. Having seen his programmes on manic depression, I can't help feeling that his online writings seem to be a product of his more manic periods. Even when he's tackling a serious subject, about which he is more than passionate, the tangents and meanderings make him such good company. He also manages to say in a few words most of what I took a couple of thousand trying to capture in my last post. I'll co-opt it as a postscript:

Seriousness is no more a guarantee of truth, insight, authenticity or probity than humour is a guarantee of superficiality and stupidity. Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.

I tend to be sceptical of the rose-tinted nostalgia which encourages us to regard certain periods of the past as golden ages (reserving particular bile for the entire reactionary 'Greatest Generation' construction). I do genuinely fear for the future of the BBC, though. Partly the stakes are so high, so there's much to lose. But mostly, free market bamboozlement is such powerful voodoo. There's some form of tacit working assumption in all of us that - whether or not it's actually of benefit to a wider population (as if that were a genuine question) - a deregulated, market-driven approach to broadcasting is an inevitability, and the very best that true public-service broadcasting (by which I don't mean the pathetic parody which exists in the US) can do is delay it a little. Absent the Sysiphean consequences of catastrophes - World War II begets the British welfare state; the Great Depression begets the WPA - the slow slide away from a sense of collective good feels destined, a kind of universal entropy, which we ultimately have no control over.

George Carlin Wasn't Funny

Bill Hicks wasn't funny. Lenny Bruce wasn't funny.

Okay, some caveats up front:

In the absence of any meaningful objective measure of funny, what I mean is that I didn't/don't find Carlin funny myself. His stuff - and Hicks's, and Bruce's, etc. - doesn't make me laugh.

Also, what I'm not saying is that Carlin wasn't a talented and influential performer. There was a hypnotically compelling rhythm to his stage act. But funny? No, not really.

In fact, I can scarcely think of an American stand-up comedian I'd be interested in paying money to see, past or current. An obvious exception is Rich Hall, who on several occasions I deliberately saw a couple of times during a single run at the Edinburgh Fringe, the better to scope out the admirably seat-of-the-pants structure of his act, and the extent to which the conscious localisation of his material showed profound respect both for his audiences and his craft. But it's perhaps relevant here that Hall has become Anglicised to the extent that a DVD I saw a while back in my local (US) Blockbuster, containing work by his Otis Lee Crenshaw character, did not consider it worthwhile to mention Hall by name.

What I'm angling for here is a claim that there are some fundamental differences between how stand-up works in Britain and the US, its goals and values - and that I very much align myself with the British approach. Not as a matter of choice; it just works for me.

Imagine a graph on which we might be able to plot stand-up styles. The x-axis of the graph represents the extent to which the comedy is about the world around us. To the extreme left, we might have surrealism and silliness, which aren't really about anything. They curve inwards on themselves. They're completely internal. In the middle might go the sort of whitebread observational humour that keeps most moderately competent stand-up comedians in business the world over, night after night. It's about the world, but in a cosy, non-confrontational sort of way. To the extreme right, on the other hand, is comedy that's completely external. It's clearly and consciously about using comedy as either a way of opening eyes and consciences to something bad, or - and one suspects that this is the hope - of effecting some sort of change.

The y-axis of this same graph captures the extent to which the performance style is about projecting an image of cool. At the bottom is a gawky, clumsy style, which isn't intended to create any sort of rapport or connection with the audience - in fact, such a style is most likely to work because of the disparity between how cool the performer's self-image (typically the performer's character's self-image, of course) is perceived to be, and how uncool it actually is. In the middle is an unaffected, naturalistic style. At the top is a conscious swagger, intended either to project power or control, or to attempt to forge a bond with the audience. (The two axes are not quite so orthogonal, of course. A world-changing, external style rather presupposes a cool style. One isn't likely to take advice from someone playing the part of an idiot.)

Now, take your favourite stand-up comedians and plot them. There will of course be an amorphous mass in the centre. Most comedians are unexceptional; their stage personae are more or less the real them, and their material is by necessity bland. (Jerry Seinfeld might well stand right on top of the origin.) Note, while you're doing that, that neither axis is intended to represent objective funniness. There is, in theory, funny to be had in all directions. It's simply a matter of style. It's also the case that there's significant overlap between British and US comedians in the centre, simply because normal distributions tend to overlap, and most members of any normal distribution inhabit the centre.

But the most interesting comedians to plot are the most influential, the most highly-regarded - one assumes in some sense the best examples that a culture believes it has produced. It seems uncontroversial to place Carlin way up at the top right. His targets were large, and real, his manner was confrontational, and his intentions were to open eyes and minds. After his radical reinvention in the '60s, his style was consciously cool, anti-establishment, counter-culture. Carlin's obituaries and tributes have been careful to namecheck his influences and peers, and to place him in the same pantheon: Lenny Bruce, Bill Hicks, Richard Pryor. They also belong up at the top right, and for the same reasons. The cultural references might not have been exactly the same, but the styles were congruent.

At this point the next step is to plot the best, the most influential, British comedians, for purposes of comparison, but there are two problems. The first problem is avoiding begging the question, by talking only about the British comedians who best make my point, rather than those - like Bruce, Carlin, Hicks, Pryor (to whom we can probably add Chris Rock, of the living) in the US - who seem to be raised by some sort of consensus to greatness. I'm honestly not sure what the equivalent consensus would be. The second problem is that if one looks for the same sort of British stand-up comedian, one won't get very far. They really don't exist, and never have.

But this in itself makes the point, I think. Those few British stand-up comedians who have achieved a measure of universal appeal - Billy Connolly and Eddie Izzard come to mind - don't really inhabit quite the same territory. Connolly is probably the closest, but his approach is far more whimsical than that of Carlin et al. - his business is pointing out the absurdity of the world, rather than trying to rouse or antagonise; his style is amiable and inclusive, rather than confrontational. He's not trying to change anything. Izzard is much more distant. He might stand on a stage to perform, but his material is pure silliness and surrealism, and therefore almost entirely internal - Reeves and Mortimer for the masses, albeit in black eyeliner.

I suspect it's the case that most British 'comedians' who have acquired some consensus measure of greatness are really not comedians at all - or not, at any rate, 'stand-up' comedians of the conventional form. The transition from vaudeville gag merchant to angry preacher, which Lenny Bruce pioneered in the US, took a rather different path in Britain. Such as it was, the new comedy of the early '60s was all about satire. Bruce might have been championed by David Frost and Peter Cook, but the transatlantic styles were coming from very different places. If Beyond the Fringe was angry, it hid it well behind silly voices. It was geeky and self-deprecating, rather than earnest and up-front. Significantly, it worked as an amalgam of sketch and character comedy, rather than front-and-centre stand-up. That Oxbridge approach to comedy projects all the way through Python, Fry and Laurie.

A second major branch of significant British 'comedians' are/were really comic actors: Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan, Tony Hancock, Benny Hill, Ronnie Barker; more recently, Steve Coogan. It's perhaps tangentially relevant that their most famous characters apply effective leverage to that useful gap between their perceived competence and their actual competence - Inspector Clouseau and Alan Partridge leap out as the best examples - such that there is certainly no projection of cool. It's also relevant simply that these performers did choose to express themselves through character, rather than as themselves. (Insofar as they did work as conventional stand-ups - notably Hancock and Coogan - they were significantly less successful.) That indirection more or less precludes the sort of cool, earnest preaching style honed by Carlin, Bruce and the others. Character comedy is also intrinsically far more internal than conventional stand-up. It can of course raise important issues, but to the extent that the character comedy works well, it is primarily a study of character, often to the obfuscation of any wider context - witness the not-uncommon phenomenon of viewers empathising with Alf Garnett, missing that his views were typically presented for ridicule.

The point here isn't that character comedy is uniquely British - although stage-based character comedy, as opposed to film-based character comedy, is far more fertile there, to the extent that much of what one considers to be British stand-up these days is at the very least a blurring of the lines between stand-up and character comedy - Harry Hill's stage persona being a good example - and often explicitly the latter - Laura Solon, Catherine Tate, and much of Victoria Wood's stage work. The point is that character comedy - which intrinsically does not project an image of cool, and which is intrinsically far more internal than external - is where much of the best of British comedy talent gravitates, rather than to naked stand-up.

A further branch of British stage comedy scarcely changed course from its music hall/variety roots, but just added an extra layer of knowing post-modernism. Gag merchants didn't go away, they just took a step to one side, buying themselves some intellectual distance. The engine of Tim Vine's act isn't his jokes; it's that he knows his jokes are terrible, and that his audience knows they're terrible. Yet, famously, much of his original material is often misattributed to the far more widely-lauded Tommy Cooper. Cooper's own act relied heavily on a studied incompetence, the vent act sub-genre of which goes back to Sandy Powell, and forward through Eric Morecambe, to Harry Hill, and Steve Delaney's astonishing Count Arthur Strong. Here's a characteristic snatch of the Count:

What's going on here is profoundly anti-Carlin. Stand-up is always a performance, of course, but Strong is an acting feat of dazzling skill, such that Delaney disappears completely. Similarly, nothing occurs in a vacuum of cultural reference, but Strong's references, such as they are, are purely internal: the grammar and conventions of variety; the Strong character himself, his as-the-wind-blows obsequiousness and belligerence, his vocal trips and malapropisms, the chasm between perceived and actual competence. Nothing is intended to serve any function external to the character; there are no lessons, no morals, no sermonising. Lines are casually thrown away, rather than preachily hammered home. There is also nothing resembling cool here. As a character, Strong is egotistical, self-serving, delusional, and quite possibly lost to dementia. Nor is this the flavour of character comedy which works by recognition. We're not supposed see Strong in ourselves, or our subculture; he's just who he is.

So, I'd like to plot Delaney/Strong way down at the extreme bottom-left corner of my graph - the uncool internal - as some sort of destination of the journey south-west from Carlin - the cool external. This general region seems to me to be quite heavily populated by some of the very best British 'comedians': Harry Hill, Reeves and Mortimer, Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt, Steve Coogan, to grab just a few of the most obvious. As a bridge to an earlier generation, Spike Milligan also belongs there. Can we find American comedians alongside? Not many. Those that come to mind are prop comics such as Gallagher, Carrot Top, and The Amazing Jonathan. Notably, their performances share a one-note shoutathon style, rather than the subtle and layered characterisation of the Brits, or their fantastical creativity. Perhaps even more notably, they inhabit a disregarded underworld of the US circuit, their acts preserved in aspic and greasepaint, displayed in Vegas with all the cutting-edge relevance of a Tutankhamun exhibit. It's clear where Bill Hicks's mind was focused towards the end of his life:

It's not entirely fair to take this line of Hicks's out of the context of his routine, in which it has a degree of self-deprecation, but it nevertheless serves as a kind of motto for the Carlin/Bruce/Hicks quadrant - the cool external:

I had to have this weird thing about trying to illuminate the collective unconscious and help humanity.

This, I think, is the standard by which American comedians are judged - and by which Carlin, Bruce, Hicks, Pryor and the others are considered to be standard-bearers. It quite explicitly describes a form of preaching. I'm not going to try to account for why the preacher mode of comedy is so prevalent in the US, and so absent in the UK - nor why it is so highly-regarded in the US (whether that is a different question, or the same one in other words). Some ideas come to mind, though. Evangelical preaching is a mode of communication far more prevalent in the US generally. To some extent the US remains a country not quite hardened from its firing. As a consequence, it's still trying to define itself, to decide what it wants to be, and the malleability creates an opportunity for people of passion and vision to try to mould it to their wishes. Britain, to the contrary, is a far more settled society, so there's far less scope for moulding or remoulding. It might also be the case that comedy in the US at some point took it upon itself to fill a yawning gap for critical cultural evaluation and self-evaluation left behind by a soporific and pacifying mass media.

One of the problems with attempting to account for why my own preference is for the uncool internal quadrant - other than the head start of being British - is that internal qualities are generally quite hard to intellectualise. Like our responses to music, and to feelings of love, our responses to the internal qualities of comedy aren't really accessible. We might explain what we find funny about something - or transporting about music, or lovable about a person - but that might not necessarily explain why we find it funny. (Aside: Pretty much the definition of a guilty pleasure is something whose internal qualities work for us, but whose external qualities don't: that music which gets into our brain, but which is performed by that lame boy band.) Conversely, what I can do is to intellectualise some of the reasons why the cool external quadrant isn't an appealing place for me. Earnestness generally strikes me as naive and simple-minded. The fearless teller of difficult truths is a tiresome, self-important figure. It's a little hard not to feel patronised: religion is nonsense (oh, really, I hadn't noticed); big business doesn't necessarily have your best interests at heart (gosh, thanks for letting me know); politicians are full of shit (well blow me down).

These irritations aside, I don't see that the importance of the subject matter necessarily reduces the funniness of comedy. But nor do I see that it necessarily enhances it, and I do think it often gets in the way. Tributes to Carlin seemed far more eager to stress his importance, his fearlessness, his influence, than how funny he was. I'm almost persuaded that there's an underlying difference in semantics here. Rather than simply assigning different relative values to the funniness of comedy, and the importance of its subject matter, I wonder if we just have different cultural meanings for 'funny'. Whoops of recognition, appreciative applause, and nods of agreement don't strike me as signals of funniness - they've come through too many of the external, intellectualising filters. They're much closer to the responses of a congregation, than an audience. Fortunately, a laugh - a giggle with a life of its own, or one of those big, uncontrollable belly-laughs that come from nowhere - is a dead giveaway.

Finally, some recognition

On getting onto the Big Blue Bus in Santa Monica:

Me: [Puts last of fare into machine]

Driver: "You're wearing the right colour tape on your glasses."

Me: "I think you should give me a discount."

Driver: "I agree. You should have asked earlier."

See? I knew it would come up trumps. Maybe if I work it I can get the tape to, I dunno, <dooce caps>PAY FOR ITSELF</dooce caps>.

(Reminds me of a favourite joke, from Bob Monkhouse of all people: "They all laughed when I said I wanted to be a comedian. They're not laughing now.")

Shadow Boxing

There's something apt-to-the-core about the rebuttal to theists who insist on misrepresenting atheism as a religion, or something akin to a religion, that, if atheism is a religion, then not collecting stamps is a hobby. However, while this identifies the theoretical heart of atheism as the absence of a specific belief, and nothing else, in practice things are a bit more complex.

I glanced through American Atheist at the Santa Monica Public Library this afternoon. I was actually looking for Non-Stamp Collector's Monthly, but it happened not to be on the shelf. You see the point, of course. Even if atheism is the absence of a specific belief, and nothing else, it also serves, unlike non-stamp collecting, as a rallying point for a collection of causes and interests semi-coherent enough to support organisations, meetings, publications, and such, at least in the U.S. This might have something to do with the position of the atheist community (see, there I go again; a non-stamp collector community is the stuff of a comedy sketch) here, misrepresented and marginalised at all turns (hence with plenty of axes to grind), but also constitutionally free to express itself. It neither enjoys the more mainstream position common in Western Europe, nor suffers the more overt suppression and even persecution of places in thrall to even greater theistic monomania. It has a voice; just a very small one, used to argue for separation of church and state, for teaching of evolution (because it's true; not because it has any bearing on the god question), rejection of Intelligent Design, and similiar issues which place science and reason at the foreground.

It might partly just be an aversion to joining communities of any sort, but, while wishing more power to their elbows and opposable thumbs, I'm not remotely drawn to such organisations. It might also be a pointlessly stubborn stand against the very fact that there's even a need for them, in what should be a post-post-post-post-post-Enlightenment society; instead, we have a kind of Hokey Cokey in and out of the circle of reason, to the music of time. The very existence of a word for someone who doesn't believe in a god (rather than someone who doesn't collect stamps, for example), never mind organisations and publications, ought to have been buried dinosaur-deep. Reason implies a simple default, and it isn't theism. The Google search I just performed returned (approximately) 778,000 results for 'theist', but about 12,500,000 for 'atheist'. The moral is pretty clear: it's (obviously) not that someone is sixteen times more likely to be an atheist than a theist; it's that someone is sixteen times more likely as an atheist to need to refer to themselves that way, or to be referred to that way, in order to override the societal default. Theism is assumed. This isn't really any happier a situation than one in which a non-stamp collector had to explicity self-identify that way, in order to override the widespread assumed default, or in which belief in unicorns was sufficiently prevalent to make useful a word meaning its opposite. Society pushes atheists to define themselves as other, by providing unacceptable defaults, then points to those very same definitions as evidence that atheists are something they're not.

I've been meaning to write something about Dawkins's The God Delusion, too, but haven't found the words. The situation is analogous: part of me is just angry and bewildered that such a work is even necessary. I doubt he'd agree, but it also seems a poor way for Dawkins to spend his time, rebutting and refuting and knocking down targets which ought not even to be standing. As is often the case, it will probably end up his most popular work without being remotely his best. Notwithstanding that I'm not really part of his target audience (though one of the best things about preaching to the choir is to let them know that the choir exists, because they might not), it's a choppy, inconsistent work, which digests material he's covered elsewhere, and at times reads as a literature review.

All of that being the case, I think a work such as this one faces a more or less insurmountable problem, which is only tangentially to do with the subject matter and how well it's handled. My hunch is that as a species we're inclined - perhaps for reasons that game-theoretic approaches to the evolution of behaviour might disentangle - to give positive expressions of belief rather greater weight than they deserve according to their intrinsic rationality and likelihood, and negative expressions of belief rather less weight. All other things being equal, we're more inclined to wish to associate with a positive belief than a negative belief. However kooky, positive beliefs have a siren song which is not necessarily related to believability: rationally, we might reject elaborate conspiracy theories - the moon landings were faked; 9/11 was orchestrated by the U.S. government - but emotionally we're drawn in. We smile at the craziness of the kooks themselves, but have a grudging regard for their tenacity in the face of the evidence. Conversely, rational scepticism has the bitter taste of negativity, a rational sceptic the killjoy's role in the proceedings, no matter how utterly groundless the assertion being challenged. "So what do you believe in?" whines the theist to the atheist, as if not believing in their god implies a knee-jerk disbelief in anything and everything else.

For this reason, expressions of atheism generally, and The God Delusion specifically, must carry an inevitable, unreasonable burden. Just as society pushes atheism to name itself in opposition to a default, so society pushes it to be negative in order to counter the vast arrays of positive but groundless theistic assertions out there which obtain a pass simply because they're positive assertions. The position Dawkins finds himself in is that of a shadow boxer, swinging left and right, left and right, refuting this assertion, and rebutting that logical fallacy, but unable to land any significant punch, both because (the collective) we rather like our positive beliefs to remain standing, however chimeric they might be, and because, well, he's trying to punch something which isn't actually there.

I take heart from the fact that the book has indeed sold so well; there's something very much in keeping with Dawkins's other works in asserting that, no matter how much we might be inherently programmed to prefer positive statements of nonsense to rational debunking, we're perfectly capable of overriding those instincts. It takes a shift in perspective, but rational debunking of myth and nonsense is a positive force for good in the world. Such a shift in perspective faces plenty of inertia, though; the linking of theistic cosmology with theistic morality is the greatest confidence trick in the history of mankind.

A final qualm about The God Delusion is that, aside from all of the above, I actually think The Selfish Gene, for example, is a far more powerful expression of atheism - in the sense that it conveys that life works perfectly well without a divine hand, thanks very much, rather than the sense that it has some sort of subtextual agenda. Partly this comes from the fact that it's an extraordinary progression of positive assertions about how life works, from the small to the large, the microbiological to the social and behavioural, so it benefits hugely from building a positive case, a positive thesis, a positive argument, quite aside from the truth-value of any of the assertions. Rather than boxing a shadow which isn't there, it's about elucidating exactly what is there, slowly, carefully, and with just the right combination of rigour, clarity, and language which inspires while being sure not to do nothing other than that. Accepting that society pushes people such as Dawkins into some unavoidable combination of the boxing of shadows and the building of reality, I think I prefer to get my own inspiration from the latter.

LOTR/Bridge on the River Kwai/Foley noise

That's it. That's the whole post. I have a text file which I (very occasionally) use to make notes of things I'd like to burble about here, and at some point I added the line:

LOTR/Bridge on the River Kwai/Foley noise

But now I can't for the life of me remember what I meant. 'LOTR' is Lord of the Rings, natch, and 'Foley' is the process of making human sound effects for films and such, but together they're all a bit random. They'll have to live on together in Google, until I figure out what the hell I was going to say.

Induction

One of those trucks which serve as mobile billboards sat at the kerbside as I went to buy some toilet paper (the Scott 1000-sheet rolls, since you ask - I'm an enthusiastic convert). This one was advertising Silver Reign. It said:

Free admission if you mention this truck.

Trying to imagine exactly how I would do the business of the mentioning, I settled on:

"I saw a truck which said that you give free admission if you mention it."

Because of course no-one would just say: "I saw a truck with your ad on it." That would sound lame, as if the speaker was just making small talk. The point isn't just seeing the truck; it's seeing what the truck had to say. It follows that what the truck is actually saying is something like:

Free admission if you mention that you saw this truck which offers free admission if you mention this truck.

It might then follow that the business of the mentioning properly goes something like:

"I saw a truck which said that you give free admission if you mention that you saw the truck which offers free admission if you mention the truck."

In which case the implied message on the side of the truck is:

Free admission if you mention that you saw this truck which offers free admission if you mention that you saw this truck which offers free admission if you mention this truck.

And so on and so forth, until the writing became so small that you wouldn't see the ad anyway. Yes, this is what I thought when I saw the ad. What I didn't think was: "Wow! Free admission to Silver Reign!"