Juno News - Humour is the best weapon in politics

00:00:00.320 What can we learn from studying political theory and how can we use wit and humor to

00:00:04.880 persuade people but also to save our society from the march towards the woke tyranny?

00:00:10.080 I'm Candice Malcolm and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.

00:00:16.880 Hi everyone, thank you so much for tuning in. If you're watching this video on YouTube right now,

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00:00:42.400 don't forget to subscribe to The Candice Malcolm Show and if you like the show, please leave us a

00:00:47.120 five-star review. Okay, so sometimes when you're watching the news, and this happens to me so often,

00:00:52.960 I'll see a headline on the CBC or I'll read a report and sometimes it's just so absurd,

00:00:59.360 so ridiculous, so offensive, you don't know whether you should laugh or you should cry.

00:01:04.800 Well, my guest on the show today says that you should laugh and that when we look to political

00:01:09.360 teachings, when we look to the ancient Greeks, people like Aristotle and Plato, when we look at

00:01:13.680 the New Testament, when we look to philosophers and writers like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Hobbes,

00:01:18.800 Mark Twain or even modern-day comics like Norm MacDonald or Jon Stewart, they all use humor and

00:01:24.480 wit as a helpful tool to navigate the world, to warn us on the dangers of tyranny and to persuade an

00:01:30.720 audience. So my guest today on the podcast is Travis Smith. Smith is a professor of political

00:01:36.480 theory at Concordia University in Montreal. He completed his master's and doctorate in political

00:01:41.280 theory at Harvard University and he was recently a guest on my show. Now, while I was preparing for the

00:01:46.320 show, while I was prepping for the interview, I came across an amusing essay that Travis wrote

00:01:52.320 called Thomas Hobbes Comedian and I really enjoyed it. When I reached out to him to ask him about it,

00:01:58.240 he sent me another essay that he wrote called An Introduction to the Politics of Wit, A Symposium,

00:02:03.840 which was also a great read. And so I've invited Travis back on the show to do another deep dive

00:02:08.560 into political theory. So Travis, thank you so much for joining us. Welcome back to the show.

00:02:13.200 I'm really glad to be here today. Thanks for having me on the show today, Candice.

00:02:17.040 Okay, so let's talk about comedy. Let's talk about the use of comedy in writing about politics and

00:02:21.520 thinking about politics. Can you first tell me about these essays and just basically the idea of

00:02:27.280 wit as a political virtue? Right. So whether or not there's any sort of humor in our politics is maybe

00:02:34.640 a sign of its health, right? When politics becomes absolutely humorless, we know that things have gone

00:02:41.600 horribly wrong. And tyrants in particular are renowned for lacking a sense of humor.

00:02:49.840 So when we see parliamentarians, you know, getting their jabs in, when we see, you know,

00:02:57.200 op-eds written with some wit. When we have, you know, media personalities and comedians who are able

00:03:07.600 to sort of help us not only stick it to the people we disagree with, but also help us, you know,

00:03:16.640 understand things a little bit better, make us think twice about things. Those are all signs that

00:03:19.920 things are going a little bit better for our polity. And when things become too dour or too angry,

00:03:28.240 it's a sure sign that something is really amiss.

00:03:32.640 Well, and we see that, I would say, especially in the last 10 years or so, the rise of the sort of

00:03:39.280 nighttime comedy, it was really big and powerful, say, in the era of George Bush when he was president.

00:03:45.920 Then Barack Obama came around and I feel like comics had a tougher time with him. They didn't

00:03:52.320 really know how to make fun of him. And part of it was because so many comedians are on the political

00:03:56.720 left and they saw Obama as an ally. They see Justin Trudeau as an ally. So you don't see them poking fun.

00:04:02.640 as much. And the same thing can be said about Joe Biden today. We still see so much of the political

00:04:08.000 humor being aimed at the right. So when you had Trump come along, in some ways it was easy for

00:04:13.600 them, but in some ways it was also the bar was so low that you just saw so many comics kind of going

00:04:19.360 out of their way to bash Trump that it wasn't funny. It was like watching amateur pundits that didn't

00:04:24.160 really know what they were talking about. So is it possible sometimes that humor can be used the

00:04:31.360 opposite way and it can undermine political discourse? Sure. Right. Well, I mean, with President

00:04:37.120 Obama, there were humorous things about him. Some comedians got really good at doing doing

00:04:41.360 impressions of his very particular peculiar cadence. You're right. Previous president was a target of a

00:04:49.600 great deal of comedic attack or late night comedy sketches and bits. There is a lot of meaning going

00:05:00.400 on about the current president as well. But right during the past little while, what I tend to think

00:05:08.480 really was the sort of the downfall of a lot of this was the Jon Stewart style of comedy in which almost

00:05:16.240 every Jon Stewart joke for years had the same punchline and the punchline was some version of

00:05:21.760 can you believe these guys or what a bunch of idiots or look how stupid they are with always being the 0.92

00:05:27.280 sort of think about how smart we are being the joke night in night at night out nonstop and it's tiresome

00:05:34.880 and it's and it's cheap. It's easy stuff. And that became the mode of of of that kind of comedy. Now,

00:05:45.680 a lot of late night comedy is also what they call punching down of that kind. Right. We have contempt

00:05:52.320 for the people that you are making fun of. And you're just, as I said, trying to show how stupid they are,

00:05:58.720 how bad they are. And, you know, when you look at a classical conception of the role of wit in politics,

00:06:07.600 there's an understanding that there's something very unseemly, you know, very base, vulgar about

00:06:12.240 just punching down, you know, taking the targets that you think are contemptible and just showing how

00:06:17.680 contemptible they are. And so it's a it's a sign of, again, the health of things when you have a kind

00:06:24.640 of respect for the people that you're also poking fun at or. Right. I mean, on the other hand,

00:06:34.240 punching up can also be something that you need to do when you have something that's gone horribly

00:06:40.000 awry and you've got people who are behaving oppressively when the wit can be used in order

00:06:45.200 to try to take down the very powerful when you have almost no other weapons and you have no almost

00:06:49.920 no other weapons. Sometimes humour is the thing that you can make recourse to, especially in order to

00:06:56.080 get people to to realize that things are are need to be called into question.

00:07:05.520 Well, and so reading reading some of your essays on the use of comedy and wit throughout sort of some

00:07:11.680 some of the classic political theorists and contemporary political theorists, a lot of it seems to be

00:07:17.280 aimed at sort of the aristocracy or the religious leaders, like, for instance, with Benjamin Franklin,

00:07:24.400 that he he poked fun at the the ideas around religion, not because he wanted to abolish religion,

00:07:30.400 but sort of because he wanted to save it. So can you walk us through a little bit, either of the

00:07:36.240 classics or the more contemporary thinkers, some of the best uses of comedy to help persuade an audience

00:07:42.880 or prove a point? Right. Well, that's that's that's sort of the thing for about when when the people

00:07:49.120 make fun of those in power. Sometimes that's the only sort of weapons they might have, but also it can

00:07:56.000 be effective for piercing their conceits and exposing to people that they aren't quite as smart or as

00:08:04.800 virtuous or as righteous or as pious as they pretend to. And therefore, you might use wit in order to call

00:08:10.160 their legitimacy into question. And so, right, in early modern times when the democratic revolution

00:08:15.520 was really getting underway, a thinker like Thomas Hobbes was, you know, had lots of fun pointing out

00:08:21.200 how ridiculous aspects of the regime of the aristocrats or the rule of the church had been.

00:08:30.800 And so that was an important sort of weapon in his philosophical arsenal. Hobbes is famous for claiming

00:08:36.640 that he's just offering, you know, a purely scientific mode of thinking, purely rational,

00:08:43.360 purely materialistic. But despite those claims, he is constantly using literary devices, rhetorical

00:08:50.960 devices, especially wit, in order to communicate and persuade people of the claims that he's making,

00:08:58.400 the accusations and the criticisms that he's offering. And wit is something that, you know,

00:09:04.720 is one of the things that Aristotle and classical political science recognizes one of the highest

00:09:09.440 social virtues. He puts it in his list of virtues just before justice. So it's not higher than justice,

00:09:18.080 right? Justice is sort of the pinnacle of the political virtues. But it's the one he discusses right

00:09:24.880 before justice to indicate how important it is. And my interpretation of that is he knows that because

00:09:31.360 we don't ever actually live in a condition of perfect justice. And the natural reaction to injustice is

00:09:38.160 anger. But excessive anger is itself a condition that's unlivable, that we need something to temper

00:09:46.240 anger in order to render living in an imperfect world tolerable, right? And wit is one of the things

00:09:53.280 that we have in order to help us cope with and also cope with injustice, but also help us fight for greater justice,

00:10:02.560 especially in the face of abuses of power, in the face of people whose claims to expertise, wisdom,

00:10:13.440 righteousness, so forth, are exaggerated and pretentious and deserving of ridicule.

00:10:19.280 Okay, let's take that sort of idea from Aristotle and try to apply it to today's political left,

00:10:26.880 because some of the themes you were talking about, the sort of excessive anger, like,

00:10:30.960 sometimes the left will criticize something, and you kind of say, okay, they have a point,

00:10:35.360 you know, they found something that is unjust, they pointed out something about our society that can be

00:10:40.640 true. But it's just that their solution to the problem is usually, you know, either completely

00:10:47.680 changing the system and proposing something that's impossible, never been tried, or you just see

00:10:52.880 their sort of righteous anger, you see it in the environmentalist movement, in the sort of woke left

00:10:57.520 and the quote, unquote, anti-racist movement. But also that aspect of humorlessness, like they don't,

00:11:04.240 they don't use humor, they cancel people for trying to use humor, hence why comedians don't even bother to

00:11:10.160 to go to university campuses anymore. So I want you to try to help us understand what the left,

00:11:18.000 perhaps, could learn from using more, more wit and humor, what they could learn from trying to pick

00:11:22.960 up on what Aristotle was trying to teach. Okay. I'm going to, I'm going to be sort of less ready to just

00:11:31.840 accuse one side of the political spectrum of being guilty of this problem myself, Candace. But that said,

00:11:39.360 let me say that, right, you mentioned something about designs for trying to transform all of society

00:11:48.560 as if we could, through sufficient reason, sufficient willpower, sufficient imagination, we might be able

00:11:56.080 to impose ourselves upon the social system and re-engineer it and reconstruct it in accordance with

00:12:02.480 what we know to be right and true. And we could fix everything and treat society and treat human beings

00:12:09.280 as an engineering project, to be reconstructed, overhauled, recreated. And what it requires are,

00:12:18.080 as I said, the very virtuous and the very wise to take charge and repair it. And this isn't something

00:12:26.160 that I'm willing to sort of accuse any particular movement of being exclusively guilty of. This is

00:12:32.560 something that dates back, concern that dates back even to Plato's Republic, in which the idea of

00:12:38.320 philosopher kings was first pitched as what would be necessary in order to achieve the just society,

00:12:45.120 with an understanding that Plato knew that we actually could not do that. Any effort to try to

00:12:50.320 manufacture the just society would be something that would not only be monstrous, but humorless. Plato's

00:12:57.920 writings are full of humor. And he loves telling stories and using irony and jokes. And so, right,

00:13:06.640 part of why there's the susceptibility to this in modern times, however, is that, you know, you've heard

00:13:14.480 people talk about seeing modern times as a kind of secularization of Christian ethics or a Christian

00:13:20.240 conception of history. And that put human beings in the role of imagining that we could save ourselves,

00:13:26.000 and we could manufacture a heaven on earth. As I said, if only we had enough willpower, enough

00:13:30.240 imagination, enough material means and powers at our disposal, and sufficient righteousness and wisdom

00:13:36.160 in those in charge. And that's an attempt to imagine that we could use our reason to manufacture

00:13:43.920 what is actually a comical outcome, right? Comedies are always when there's a happy ending. Comedies are

00:13:50.880 when, despite all appearances, things go well. And even people who are not really up to the task succeed,

00:13:58.240 you know, beyond belief. And people who might not even deserve great happiness all get it, right? And

00:14:04.560 that's comedy. I'm a reader of comic books. I wrote a book on superheroes a few years ago.

00:14:13.440 And comic books are rightly called comic books in some ways because, you know, the superheroes triumph

00:14:18.720 over supervillains that try to take over the world and impose themselves on us all. Of course,

00:14:25.280 the supervillains tend to often believe that they've got some very rational design. If only everybody did

00:14:30.560 what I said that they should do, and I had all the power and I was in charge, and I imposed my will,

00:14:35.840 then, you know, the world would know all the love and joy that only I can bring to it. You know,

00:14:40.080 as soon as somebody thinks like that, they're a madman. They're crazy. They're deserving of ridicule.

00:14:46.560 And so, you know, we have a society that loves our heroes that, you know, defeat our

00:14:52.720 super villainous types. But in politics, we have this idea that maybe some great extraordinary

00:14:57.440 leaders might be able to transform the world and abolish all the injustice, if only they had all

00:15:03.520 the power and all the trust of the people. This idea that we can manufacture comedy through the

00:15:10.640 imposition of technological reason is, however, from a classical point of view, prone to tragedy.

00:15:18.640 That's not something that works out happily like, you know, the victories of superheroes in comic books.

00:15:24.960 That's something that the classics would tell us that we should fully expect to go entirely awry.

00:15:32.080 And so, right, we've seen efforts of a great variety of kinds, especially over the last hundred

00:15:39.600 years, in which people have believed that on account of their nobility, on account of their wisdom, on

00:15:44.960 account of their piety, on account of their righteousness, on account of their virtue, they

00:15:49.520 could fix the world. And I ended that book I mentioned with a claim that, you know, global

00:15:55.760 governance is for super villains. Anybody who believes that, you know, they could fix the world

00:16:00.240 in that way is somebody we should not trust and ridicule.

00:16:06.560 Well, I appreciate you answering the question that way, because you're right, that the anger,

00:16:12.880 the righteous anger, it doesn't just come from one side of the political spectrum. We do see it

00:16:16.720 on both sides. It's just that, to me particularly, the side that I'm concerned about right now

00:16:21.920 is the left. But I agree that when you think of the world in terms of, you know, what the biggest

00:16:28.480 threat is to us, the idea, as you mentioned, I have a son and he's reading a little Spider-Man

00:16:36.080 kids comic book. And in it, the bad guy is just named evil doctor, the evil doctor.

00:16:41.520 And, you know, it's kind of weird, Travis, because, you know, in today's world, we're told to trust

00:16:46.880 doctors, that doctors are good. Doctors are the authority that we should trust. And then yet,

00:16:52.400 interestingly in this, and it's an old Spider-Man book, it's probably from the eighties or something.

00:16:57.120 You know, it's the idea that the villain is an evil doctor, which I sometimes chuckle at when

00:17:02.800 I see the latest news of some doctor imposing these ridiculous rules and or advocating for

00:17:11.040 endless lockdowns. And I kind of chuckle about the idea of an evil doctor. I want to change gears a

00:17:18.000 little bit and just take a step back and talk about the purpose of political philosophy. I remember when

00:17:23.920 I was an undergraduate at the University of Alberta, my first day walking into a political

00:17:28.480 philosophy course or a history of political philosophy course, and my professor saying,

00:17:31.600 you know, why should we bother reading the Greeks? What could we possibly learn from a bunch of old 1.00

00:17:36.480 white dead guys? And, you know, the point of the course was to show that there was some purpose 0.70

00:17:42.720 in reading someone like Plato or Aristotle. This is what you do day in and day out. So maybe you could

00:17:48.320 talk to us a little bit about the relevance of reading political philosophy and what we can learn

00:17:54.160 from from that today. Right? Maybe I can tell you about how I approach it when I'm teaching undergraduates.

00:18:02.160 And so I started off as an engineering student, right? And so when you when you go into engineering

00:18:08.880 classes as an undergraduate, you're going to be treated to, you know, calculus and organic chemistry

00:18:15.840 and heat transfer and fluid dynamics and that sort of thing, where the professor is the expert. Back

00:18:22.880 when I was there, they're still sort of throwing up blackboards, endless blackboards for 75 minutes

00:18:27.600 straight in which, you know, matters regarding which there's we reckon no dispute are authoritatively

00:18:36.400 put in front of you and you are like a student, like a machine to figure out how to add this

00:18:42.560 knowledge to your toolkit to solve future problems. And you're measured on your ability to acquire

00:18:49.360 certainty and exactness precision and the application of this kind of knowledge.

00:18:56.560 And every student that's in an engineering classroom is someone you are training to be an engineer,

00:19:00.800 even if they don't end up being an engineer and, you know, working in sales for a technology firm,

00:19:05.600 you know, you still train everyone to be an engineer.

00:19:07.680 That's not how you teach political theory. You don't you don't look at a room of 100 students

00:19:14.320 who've been put into your intro to political theory class because, you know, it's a requirement

00:19:21.520 for their degree as if they're all going to become professional political theorists.

00:19:26.560 You know, even when I get one student who says I'm thinking of going into political theory,

00:19:30.800 can I get a letter of reference for a graduate school letter? Can I get a letter of reference?

00:19:36.640 I'm like, why do you want to go into political theory? And they'll give me some answer. Often it's

00:19:41.760 because, well, I want to spend my time reading and writing, right? I really love to read. And I like to

00:19:46.880 say, well, if you really love to read, get a job as a night watchman or something. You know, if that's

00:19:53.040 what you really care about. You know, the study of it from a professional standpoint is one thing,

00:19:58.720 but what is it for as part of, you know, citizen education? What is it part of the liberal education,

00:20:06.640 human education? That's how I sort of tend to think of it. And part of it is when you are, you know,

00:20:14.800 fortunate enough, lucky enough, privileged enough to get to be in university, you know, in the prime of

00:20:20.640 your life, when your mental sort of abilities are there at the prime and when you actually are still,

00:20:27.440 you know, capable of, you know, thinking quickly and absorbing new ideas and still adapting to the

00:20:36.320 world. Exposing students to, you know, ideas that are in some ways familiar but also different and

00:20:43.600 should get them to think a bit more broadly and gain some historical sense and get some theoretical

00:20:49.760 breadth so that you're not just caught in the politics of the day and the news cycle and the

00:20:56.560 Twitterverse and the hashtagging and the us versus them and try to be able to sort of step back and

00:21:02.560 try to perceive things from perspectives that are altogether foreign, not only to you maybe, but to

00:21:11.760 the discourse that prevails today and the back and forth between the parties that are preeminent

00:21:19.520 presently and be able to sort of, you know, reflect on the human condition more broadly and your place

00:21:27.200 in society and your place in the world and the status of the things that you care about and the

00:21:33.680 things that you value. There's a real luxury to being able to do that and so unlike the sort of the

00:21:40.800 training for an engineering career that undergraduates in that program are engaged in, and rightly so,

00:21:48.800 I mean that makes perfectly good sense, when you get to be in a course in which you're assigned old books

00:21:54.400 to read, this is not to train you to solve a problem, right, or to fix anything or to become the expert

00:22:03.040 that will dictate to others what to do, but it's a human activity of just becoming more self-aware

00:22:12.400 and thoughtful and part of that is what I really like to emphasize in the classroom because we don't

00:22:17.680 do this in politics, we don't do this on the Twitterverse, we don't do this on YouTube even very

00:22:25.360 often, which is learn how to, you know, really give a generous reading to the people that we disagree

00:22:33.280 with, try to understand why they're coming from where they're coming from, and abstract away from

00:22:42.160 yourself a little bit, and to gain those kinds of skills. Now of course those kinds of skills can be

00:22:48.880 practically useful because you can always criticize something more convincingly if you do it from the

00:22:54.880 inside rather than just have a straw man that you attack and caricature and so forth. If you really

00:23:02.160 ridicule something, go back to saying about wit before, you can really ridicule something if you

00:23:05.520 you know, explode it from the inside on its own terms rather than just lob grenades at it from the

00:23:10.240 outside, and so there are practical benefits for an education in, you know, philosophy, rhetoric,

00:23:18.320 literature, and so forth, but I still, I guess I'm a bit old-fashioned in this way that I think that

00:23:24.160 politics is not actually the most important thing, and politics is not everything, and that we're

00:23:28.160 human beings before we're citizens, and that we're neighbors before we are members of parties,

00:23:38.480 and that there's an essential purpose to be filled by retaining, maintaining, communicating education

00:23:46.960 in things like philosophy, literature, old books, that's humanizing, and reminds us

00:23:54.960 of that we're more than our party identity, and we're more than our commitments and our sides in

00:24:06.400 one or another debate of the day. So that's part of how I look at it, Candace.

00:24:11.120 Well, that's excellent. I mean, there's so many things that I could pick up on there, but the idea

00:24:16.320 that sort of politics in some ways has crept into every aspect of our lives, and this is more of a

00:24:20.400 U.S. phenomenon, but you see politics infused now in things like hockey. You know, hockey used to be

00:24:26.160 something where you would go to escape politics and just go and enjoy something lightheartedly, and now

00:24:32.800 it's like, you know, we hear the woke hectoring throughout sports, entertainment, movies. It's sort of

00:24:39.680 non-stop, and that's also part of a problem. And then the idea of social media, you know,

00:24:45.280 in some ways it's an opportunity to use wit. You can reply to someone, you can say something funny,

00:24:50.240 but at the same time it's also set up for straw man arguments and really putting the worst possible

00:24:57.520 spin on what your political opponent is saying. And for me, I've taken a little bit of a break from

00:25:03.040 Twitter because, you know, you could find yourself getting too deep into that. But my final question

00:25:09.040 that I wanted to ask you, Travis, is, so back to myself as an undergraduate reading political

00:25:14.880 philosophy in Edmonton, I remember I was carrying a copy of Alan Bloom's Plato Republic and a security

00:25:22.080 guard in the building, not at the school, the apartment where I lived. He asked me what I was

00:25:29.520 doing reading that. And the security guard was from India. He was a political philosophy

00:25:34.320 teacher in India. He just moved to Canada and he was working as a security guard. And

00:25:38.480 I said, you know, that I'm a political philosophy student, or actually just political science,

00:25:42.640 and this is a requirement. And he was like, you know, you're too young to be reading that book.

00:25:46.480 You don't understand it. He's like, teachers should be assigning books about philosophy for you to read.

00:25:51.200 You shouldn't be reading the original text yet. You can read that later. And I thought that was kind of

00:25:55.600 interesting. And sometimes I did feel like I was reading it and it wasn't really computing. I wasn't

00:25:59.360 really understanding what I was reading, but I appreciate it nonetheless. And I like reading

00:26:05.360 about political philosophy as much as I like reading or trying to read political philosophy,

00:26:10.560 although I'm pretty slow when it comes to reading philosophy. But all that is just to say, Travis,

00:26:14.960 is there a book that you recommend someone who doesn't really have a background in this stuff?

00:26:18.480 What's a good place to start? Who's a good thinker to start in a journey of trying to read and

00:26:24.000 understand political philosophy? Can I just ask, did you did you get to take a class on Plato with Leon

00:26:31.840 Craig? No, it wasn't Leon Craig. It was Heidi Studer. Oh, I remember Heidi. What book do I recommend?

00:26:44.960 You know what? Let's just go with ones that everybody used to read, even just in high school,

00:26:50.160 and maybe they aren't anymore. If you haven't read your brave new world, read your brave new world

00:26:56.400 right now in late 2021. That's not a bad start. I'll go with that. It's something that everybody,

00:27:06.000 if they haven't read it, they should read it. And if they have read it, they should reread it.

00:27:10.560 Okay. Well, that sounds good. That's our required Christmas reading here on the Candace Malcolm show.

00:27:15.280 And Travis will have to have you back in the new year and you can, you can talk or we can, we can,

00:27:19.280 we can do a little book review on it. Sure. That sounds great. Candace,

00:27:22.640 thank you very much for having me on the show today. All right. Thank you so much to

00:27:26.320 Travis Smith for joining the show and thank you everyone for tuning in. I'm Candace Malcolm,

00:27:30.000 and this is the Candace Malcolm Show.

Juno News - December 16, 2021

Humour is the best weapon in politics

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