Satire Can Save Us from the Left Hemisphere's Tyranny
Moderns Latch onto Abstractions with a G.I. Joe Kung Fu Grip. It's a Breeding Ground for Satire.
Satire is everywhere these days. The Onion, before it went woke. The Babylon Bee. I even wrote a series of Middle Earth satires (which greatly amused me, if no one else).
Satire can savage just about anything. "Hardly any institution, group, or individual," said Fowler, "lies beyond the reach of such ridicule."
But let's face it, satire works best when it savages the serious.1
Big Brother Stalinism is serious stuff, so Orwell satirized it. The “scientifically manipulated anthill state”2 3 is serious, so Huxley satirized it.
You can satirize a clown, but why bother? It's much more effective and easy to satirize something that people take seriously. By taking something seriously, they've propped it up in their minds into something great. The incongruity between the ideal and its satirized version is thereby magnified and so is the humor.4
A culture that likes to spout ideals gives the satirist a huge hunting ground filled with prey.
You know what really likes idealized things?
The left hemisphere of your brain. It values abstract ideas more than truth. If facts arise that conflict with its abstract idea (its inner narrative), it'll discount, distort, or deny them. It’s why Ortega y Gasset said that, when concepts come in the window, reality leaves the room.5
Modern culture is the product of left-hemispheric consciousness.6 People today tend to embrace ideas and latch onto then with the firmness of the G.I. Joe Kung Fu grip.
Enter satire.
It specializes in mocking the left hemisphere's idealized abstractions.
Significantly, satire became wildly popular in the early eighteenth century: the era of Jonathan Swift. There's a reason: the left hemisphere's abstractions were idealized by Descartes' wildly popular philosophy 100 years earlier, creating a society of idealized notions to be satirized.7
There's a reason Orwell and Huxley were arguably the most popular writers of the twentieth century: they satirized gnostic worldviews (which are always left hemispheric).
And there's a reason satire is popular today. The left hemisphere is running rampant and shamelessly subjugating Western culture to its demands. It's even frantically trying to cement its rationalistic cocoons by restricting free speech.
Enter the satirists. They attack abstract ideals but not in a way that riles people too much. By playing comedians, the satirists claim innocence. By “only joking,” they skirt censorship. By mocking, they chop at the left hemisphere's knees.
And maybe, just maybe, by eliciting a little laughter, the left hemisphere's rationalist cocoon can be cracked, allowing the right hemisphere's suggestions to seep in.
And the first thing the right hemisphere will notice is that all these abstract ideals are a bit ridiculous.8
And it might work best when the satirist satirizes himself (something we should all do occasionally). I imagine I’ll enter my senescence, shamefully chuckling at Justin Timberlake mocking his videos in the SNL skit, D*** in a Box. For older readers, recall the early 1960s album, Kookie, and Edd Byrnes mocking his character in “77 Sunset Strip” (I think that album is satire; if not, it’s even funnier).
Walker Percy’s phrase. He also made the reference to “Big Brother Stalinism.”
My apologies if you don’t like footnotes. I agree with Nassim Taleb that the best stuff is found in the footnotes. I just hate it when I must search for a footnote at the end of the book . . . and really hate it when I finally find it and it’s a mere citation. Dear bibliopegists: Put the footnotes at the foot of the page, like Substack does automatically. Better yet, shrink the outside margins of the page and line them up vertically, which is the approach Iain McGilchrist uses in The Matter with Things, which, in addition to being the opus maximum of the early 21st century, is aesthetically the finest set of books I’ve handled since my dad’s regular shipments from the Folio Society in the 1990s.
Humor always involves a measure of juxtaposition and is often nothing but juxtaposition, which is why a man slipping on ice is funny, even though it’s dangerous.
Dear reader: I can’t find the source of the quote. I’d wager it’s in a Joseph Epstein essay, but neither I nor AI can lay our dirty hands on it right now.
Consciousness follows culture . . . and only then does politics follow culture. More on that soon.
See Basil Willey, The Seventeenth Century Background (Doubleday Anchor, 1953), p. 96, or click that link for a short essay that revolves around Willey’s observation.
Laughter in general is the right hemisphere's rebuke to the left, but that's a topic for another time. . . . or maybe yet another footnote.