Humour (or humor for American readers), by its very nature, resists tyrannical, technocratic control. Why? Modern forms of tyranny work by attempting to reduce the nature of things in the world — including the human soul — to smaller manageable bits and processes which can be mastered. However, humour resists a reductionist view of the person and so defies the technocratic “will to power”.
Reductionism and control
There has long been a drive to explain the world, objects, and human experience, by breaking them down to something more basic — a single substance or smaller bits that make them up. The ancient philosopher Thales, believed water was the key principle for everything that exists. He needed something that explained life, motion and being (the essence of a thing) — three things that bother philosophers! He noted that all the things he could see in the world fell into the category of either solid, liquid or gas. Water could exist in all three states and so fitted the bill for the basic substance that made up reality. “From here it is a short speculative step to consider all liquids as particular forms of water, all gases as particular forms of steam, and all solids a particular forms of ice“.[1] All life is dependent on water, and so Thales had found his explanation for existence and life. And, from observing the apparent self-driven flow of rivers, water seemed to be a good candidate for a substance that was capable of self-motion and therefore capable of moving all things, from one spot to another, but also from one state to another. So, Thales reduced the world to water.
As far as I know, Thales didn’t turn out to be an ancient technocrat. However, the belief that we should explain the world by reducing it to something more basic, offers up the illusion that we can harness the elements of life and arrange them into something else. There have been many candidates for the “basics” since Thales’ suggestion of water. If we skip to the modern era, we find many options: DNA; energy; stimulus-response pairings in behavioural psychology and cognitive psychology; materialist economic and historical processes (Marxism); or the management of desire (Freud). The technocracy movement of the 1930’s (which has been resurrected in all but name by the green movement, the UN, the WEF, and the WHO etc.[2]) advocated for viewing all human life and activity in terms of energy production and consumption, which could be managed and balanced by energy credits. The value of a human life would also be measured in terms of energy production, consumption and balance: The deep connections between technocracy and the eugenics movement have been well documented by Woods and continue on, unabated, in the green movement. Exercising the will to power over what we consider to be the basic building blocks of life never ends well for humanity or the environment.
Why is that? Why does this drive to find the basic substance, or building blocks of life and experience, lead to the kind of assessment of the value of a human life in base, totalitarian, terms like those of the technocrats? One answer to this question is that the reductionist form of inquiry into the nature of life, starts out on the wrong foot; by looking for the parts, it looks past what it wants to understand and misses the whole. It treats the thing to be understood as a mere appearance, a construct made out of more basic bits or concepts that are taken to be real and the proper focus of “scientific” interest. What does this do to the human? We look past ourselves to something more basic, and less than ourselves, to understand our life, worth and experience. The person disappears.
Think of the experience of grief. Is the experience of devastation at the loss of a loved one a mere appearance, constructed out of some more basic elements or parts that, in themselves, are incapable of feeling? Is the experience of grief reducible to, say, a set of learned stimulus-response patterns, like Pavlov’s dribbling dogs, who learned to associated the ringing of a bell with the delivery of dinner so that the bell (the stimulus) became paired with the response (dribbling)? Do our human responses to loss only appear to be of a higher and different emotional, spiritual and cognitive order to that of animals? Are they really, underneath it all, just more complex arrangements of learned stimulus-response (S-R) patterns, which could be managed away by learning a different set of S-R pairings? The drive to explanation by reduction, and the subsequent “will to power” over the elements, misses the person for the parts. The result is dehumanising: The basic move of all totalitarian programs.
We know that grief and loss must be understood as a whole experience. It can’t be reduced to an appearance constructed out of some more basic, less than human, parts. If grief defies reduction to lesser parts, then so does humour. And, whatever resists reduction, by its very nature, stands as a stumbling block to the technocratic reduction of life to mere manageable code or stock, ready to be overseen by totalitarian elites.
The essence of humour can’t be defined
In his short book Ha! A Christian Philosophy of Humor, the Roman Catholic Philosopher Peter Kreeft says humour “cannot be reduced to any other terms, or explained in any other categories, or reduced to any other concept, or analyzed into any number of parts[3]”. Nevertheless, philosophers have attempted to nail down the essence of humour. Kreeft sites a few examples:
For some, its essence is irony (Kierkegaard). For some, it’s class envy and resentment (many Marxists). For some, its tension-relief (Freudians and many materialists). For some, it’s the deflation of the ego (Chesterton). For some it’s the refutation of static stubbornness (Bergson).
He argues that all of these are wrong. Humour does include all of these things but is not reducible to any one of them. And, in turn, each one of these things is not itself humour. Class envy is not humour, although it might create the context for some laughs — Basil Fawlty and Captain Mainwaring just wouldn’t be funny if they weren’t frustrated with their station in life. Tension-relief is not itself humour, although humour might release tension. The reason humour is not definable, says Kreeft, is not because it is a subjective experience, but because it is, what he calls, a “fundamental category”, like religion, music and language.
Religion, music and language exceed the sum of their parts. They are not mere appearances constructed out of something more fundamental or real. Religion (in the old sense of the word) is more than ritual and liturgy; it is the life of faith, of a soul that has been reconciled to God on the terms provided by God. Music is more than notes in a sequence. No one can explain how we associate one note on a piano with the preceding and subsequent notes to hear a tune, let alone how we come to be moved, body, mind and soul by music. And language is more than a string of symbols we call words. Language describes the being of things, and states of being and change (think of how important being and doing words are in language). Words are a way in which the being of things enters in to us and mingles with our inner world. Language is a way of participating in the being of things and people, through description, reflection and response. Talking, reading scripture, song writing, poetry, stand-up comedy, etc., are ways of participating in the world, with God[4], and in each other. Religion, language, music and humour defy reduction to parts or lesser concepts. Because of this, these things, along with the ongoing desire for them in our lives, signal to us — in world that wants to reduce us to processes, pathogen carries, consumers and producers — that we are more than parts and more than the mere sum of parts.
Humour points us outwards and upwards for self-understanding
Kreeft goes on to include humour in a list of seven things that are fundamental to being human, and making us happy:
1. beauty
2. mystical experience
3. romantic love
4. music
5. humor
6. sanctity, i.e. genuinely self-forgetful altruistic love
7. wonder and worship in adoration of God.[5]
All of these defy reduction to baser “more real” lower elements. All of them defy attempts to be mastered and managed. In fact, they have a power over us: We are caught up in the beautiful, in love, music, laughter, service, worship etc. These things exceed the experience of the self. Through these fundamental things, we come to know ourselves and find joy and fulfilment from the outside — in some sense — as we are directed outwards and upwards towards happiness and joy by participation in things and events and activities that are beyond the self. We could put it this way: The technocrat sees self through a process of fragmentation into the lesser; on the other hand, a love for laughter tells us that our humanity is enacted, and our souls flourish, in participation with things that are bigger than us.
Laughter is a glimpse of the soul in action as it reaches out beyond the self, seeking joy at the hands of “higher forces”. Kreeft talks about laughter as a spilling over of the self.[6] He goes on to say:
A good joke turns us into Shakers. It makes us shake with laughter. It’s like a mental orgasm. It is a mental orgasm. We are out of control, we are in the playing hands of Higher Forces, like a kitten in the hands of a juggler. In the words of the old romantic Hollywood cliche, “it’s bigger than both of us.”[7]
You don’t need to be a philosopher to know that humour tells us that we are more than parts to be managed by experts. Our love for laughter is a common sense, easily available, and constant signal from our very souls, that we are more than the sum of our parts. Humour tells us that reaching beyond ourselves is fundamental to being human. Rather than looking down to a collection of lesser things to know ourselves, our capacity for humour points us in a different direction for self-knowledge and fulfilment. Humour points outwards and upwards beyond ourselves as our souls reach for joy. Our capacity for humour and finding joy — even in darkness[8] — transcends the reductionist, biological, mechanistic and economic ways of understanding the self.
Humour and the experience of laughter is our soul in full flight, beyond ourselves, beyond our circumstances, as we participate “in the playing hands of Higher Forces”, as Kreeft says.
And so, dear technocrat, if you ever happen to read this, quit your schemes. Laughter is the sound of the thing you can’t ultimately define, suppress or control: the human soul on an upward quest for self-understanding and joy.
[1] R.C. Sproul, The Consequences of Ideas: Understanding the Concepts that Shaped our World (Illinois, 2000),16.
[2] See for instance Patrick Wood’s work, Technocracy Rising: The Trojan Horse of Global Transformation, (2016).
[3] Peter Kreeft, Ha! A Christian Philosophy of Humor (Indiana, 2022), 4-5.
[4] Yes, stand-up comedy is a way of participating in God, in this sense: God is unchanging eternal joy in himself and humanity is made to know God and enjoy him. All seeking for joy finds its fulfilment in knowing God. God is the first cause of Joy. The human capacity to engage in efforts to experience joy is not original to us, it is a feature of being image bearers and a refraction of God himself as joy’s first cause and sustainer. Any joy we find in this life, is always a calling to be reconciled to God, to know God in himself, in and through his Son.
[5] Kreeft, Ha!, 9.
[6] ibid, 10.
[7] ibid, 12.
[8] My mind immediately goes to Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago but also to everyone’s experience of the mixture of tears and laughter at funerals.
Excellent, Jonny x