I’ve been a big fan of satire for a very long time. Perhaps it’s been since I first read “A Modest Proposal” in the 10th grade. Or maybe it was since I read Mad Magazine in the 8th? In any case, I’ve written an appreciation here in these pages before about Mark Twain, the great American satirist of the post-Civil-War era. And if I allowed myself a bit more political leeway, nowadays on any given day I could probably post something from The Onion or Andy Borowitz and we could all have a good laugh together.
However…
Today’s NY Times has an op-ed, written by a philosophy professor, last name “Smith.” (Smith? Yeah, right!). The piece is titled “The End of Satire.” I don’t recommend you read it. That’s not because it’s not worthwhile, mind you. After all, it was provocative enough to get me thinking about these things. Rather, it’s because there’s nothing even remotely funny about it. And my take has always been: Go funny, or go home. The subtitle gives a sense of where this thing is headed: “The toxic disinformation of social media has rendered traditional forms of humor quaint and futile.” Good Lord. Can somebody please just shoot me now?
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not overtly suicidal here. And social media commentary like this certainly has its place – even if that place is not always center stage. Hell, I’m even willing to listen to a philosopher pontificate once in a great while – so long as said philosopher knows when it’s time to sit down and shut up. But I guess the point of this particular piece – which starts off with a nod to the 2015 terrorists’ slaughter of French cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo, then goes downhill from there – is that technology (and more specifically, Internet technology) has transformed our world to such an extent that satire is now obsolete.
Really?
Jonathan Swift wrote “A Modest Proposal” when the Potato Famine was killing Irish men, women, and children by the thousands, and displacing millions more from their homeland. Swift’s biting satire recommended (tongue-in-cheek, of course) that the Irish should cook and eat their own children as a means to avoid starvation, and to further the general economic good. Say whatever else you will about him, Swift, as an English clergyman who was criticizing his own government for oppressing the Irish, knew exactly what he was doing.
Or, to quote from today’s Times op-ed:
Satire is a species of humor that works through impersonation: taking on the voices of others, saying the sort of things they would say, using one’s own voice while not speaking in one’s own name. It is not surprising that this craft is so often misunderstood. For when satirists do their job convincingly, when they get too close to their target, it is easy to hear them not just as the channelers of the views expressed in the satire, but as defenders of these views as well. It is at such moments that critics like to exclaim that a satirist has “gone too far.” But it would be more correct to say that the satirist has only done his job too well.
I hear you, Mr. Smith. And as far as it goes, you’re entirely right.
Then, in the very next paragraph, there’s this:
Today, with the pollution that new technologies have brought to our information ecosystem, this distinction is no longer so easy to make. And this is the real problem – and danger – of satire. Not that it mocks and belittles respect-worthy pieties. Not that it “punches down.” But that it has become impossible to separate it cleanly from the toxic disinformation that defines our era.
I will grant you that, here in the Internet Age, things have sped up. This includes the muddying of media waters by those with an ax to grind. I will grant too that human nature has not changed one iota. From time immemorial, the human urge to tear down competes tooth and nail with what Lincoln famously referred to in his Second Inaugural as “The better angels of our nature.”
Still…
We humans have had technological revolutions before. From the domestication of grain to the invention of the wheel, the printing press, and the assembly line, all the way down to the dawn of the atomic age: Over the grand sweep of things, is Internet technology really all that much bigger of a deal? Are the Charlie Hebdo killings more heinous than what happened to Irish babies in the 18th century, when Swift wrote? Than what befell our own country in the wake of the Civil War, when Twain wrote? Than Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
Again, let me say it: Really?
In defense of Mr. Smith, he does end up in a bit more nuanced of a place than his title or subtitle would at first lead us to believe:
Over the past few years I have been made to see, in sum, that the nature and extent of satire is not nearly as simple a question as I had previously imagined. I am now prepared to agree that some varieties of expression that may have some claim to being satire should indeed be prohibited. I note this not with a plan or proposal for where or how such a prohibition might be enforced, but to acknowledge something I did not fully understand until I experienced it first hand — that even the most cherished and firmly-held values or ideals can change when the world in which those values were first formed changes.
OK then. All’s well that ends well. Times change. Caution’s warranted.
I’m good with all that.
And yet sometimes…
Well, perhaps Swift said it best in 1729:
“I am assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London; that a young healthy child, well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food; whether stewed, roasted, baked or boiled, and I make no doubt, that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or ragout.”