THE PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE: The Decline of Laughter
Scruton, Roger
THE PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE The Decline of Laughter by Roger Scruton R EASON SHOWS ITSELF in all our attempts to understand the world and in all our ways of relating to each other. It is...
...Such accusers know how to discern racist, sexist, and homophobic thought-crimes in the most innocent-seeming small talk...
...That this is an unhealthy situation surely goes without saying...
...Until Islamic leaders muster the integrity to relentlessly condemn anti-Semitism (and its evil twin, anti-Zionism), we can’t expect Israel to accept a forced peace with the Palestinians...
...But try making a joke of the masculine defects, and you will be in just the same trouble as if you had made a joke about the weaknesses of women...
...They enable us to pursue these goalsand to publish these messages in national newspapers and magazines...
...What was traditionally regarded as a way to prevent social conflict is now seen as a major cause of it: The ethnic joke is accused of “stereotyping,” and so tainted with the indelible stain of racism...
...Hyenas make a noise like laughter, but it is not a sign of amusement, nor does it have the social function that laughter has—which is to make light of our differences and to rejoice in what we share...
...The Old Testament is full of them— think of that appalling Book of Joshua—and the Koran is as rigidly humorless as any document that has survived the efforts of humanity to laugh it off...
...Conference that, “today Jews rule the world by proxy...
...Moreover, the ability of the self-appointed censors to discern ideological sins and heresies has been vastly enhanced by their daily exercises in resentment...
...Even more sinful than the ethnic joke in the eyes of our moral guardians is the old comedy of the sexes...
...Yet there was no condemnation by the Muslim world of Mr...
...To learn how you can qualify to participate, write: Young Journalism Program, c/o The American Spectator 1611 North Kent St., Ste...
...U.S...
...It is displayed in our choices, and also in our involuntary reactions...
...Jewish humor is one of the greatest survival mechanisms ever invented—which has aided not only its own survival but the survival of Jewish identity, through an unparalleled history of attempts to rub it out...
...Mohamed’s comments...
...Most perniciously, Palestinian children Authority, declared in a 2005 television sermon, “Jews are a in Allah’s victory...
...Announcing The American Spectator’s Promoting Excellence in Journalism by Training the Next Generation of Writers & Journalists Young Training Program provides developing effective writing and will be published in TAS and Spectator.org...
...You might think that the censorship goes only one way: After all, savage denunciations of men, and whole disciplines of pseudo-scholarship devoted to repeating them, are familiar features of academic life in America...
...Likewise, until moderate Muslims reject racism in all forms, they can’t expect Islam to enjoy full respect as a political and spiritual force among the world’s people...
...However, many Muslims have an exaggerated capacity to feel slighted, and there is scarcely a humorous remark to be made about Islam that will not instantly be read as an expression of hostility...
...Mencken, Nathanael West, and other great exponents enabled America to weather previous social upheavals, and even to accommodate the new kind of American woman, is now marginalized or disapproved...
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...In one of the most astonishing propaganda coups ever, More than half of Israel’s Jewish population consists of people of color—blacks from Ethiopia and Yemen, as well as brown-skinned addition, Israel’s population includes more than one million In contrast, anti-Semitism—a poisonous form in Muslim nations, but it is propagated shamelessly by their leaders, in state-sponsored media, and by Muslim clergy...
...people from Morocco, Iran, Syria, Egypt and Israel itself...
...A joke in bad taste can cost you your career, as Don Imus recently discovered—and any joke, however sophisticated, that touches on race, sex, or religion runs a serious risk of punishment...
...Program emphasis includes news writing, investigative journalism, writing and editing for the e-news media, and skills...
...Muslim clerics like Imam Ibrahim Madiras, an employee of the Palestinian cancer” and later that, “Muslims will kill the Jews . . . [and] rejoice dissertation of Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas makes the astounding claim that “Zionists” collaborated with the Nazis to annihilate the Jewish people in order to drive the survivors to Palestine...
...This ad has been published and paid for by Gerardo Joffe, President 94A What are the facts...
...This was one of the functions of the ethnic joke...
...Christians, Jews, atheists, and Muslims, living side by side in acute consciousness of the divisions between them, are greatly in need of the religious joke...
...some were on the right, like Utley and Worsthorne...
...It is the end of your prospects in any career over which the censors exert their control—and that means any career in education or government...
...of the kind directed at Tartuffe by Molière is surely what our mullahs deserve...
...Congressman Tom Lantos called the Prince’s assertion “an outrage . . . blatant hypocrisy,” but Islamic leaders were silent...
...And laughter, though confined to rational beings, must be spontaneous if it is to be real...
...spontaneous laughter is an acceptance of the thing that provokes it, even when, by laughing at something, you cut it down to size...
...Even more importantly, how can Israel hatred and murderous intent toward Jews on a daily basis...
...How can the Palestinian people embrace peace with a people represented by their religious and political leaders as be expected to trust a so-called peace partner who expresses abject U.S...
...Here too the censors are hard at work, depriving humanity of its natural way of defusing conflict, and forcing upon us all a kind of tiptoeing and apprehensive deference that is in fact far closer to hostility than any robust guffaw...
...we also distinguish their ludicrous self-righteousness from the gentle path of accommodation that ordinary Muslims want and need...
...No wonder the U.S...
...Alas that most of those journalists are no longer with us, and reading about the Don Imus affair in the American press, I wonder whether they ever had their equivalent over here...
...Anti-Semitism and the prospects for peace: Islamic antiatmosphere in which Jews are reviled and represented as subhuman...
...And it doesn’t matter if it is not a fault: Your remark may have been misunderstood, your joke may have gone unintentionally wrong, you may have made a slip of the tongue—you may, like the hero of Philip JUNE 2007 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 43 THE PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE Roth’s great novel The Human Stain, have merely used in its traditional meaning a word that, in some novel usage, has been placed on the political index...
...As a result, those movements gained control only of the universities and not of public opinion...
...A society that does not laugh is one without an important safety valve, and a society in which people interpret crude humor not as the first step toward friendly relations, but as a mortal offense, is one in which ordinary life has become fraught with danger...
...Utley, Peregrine Worsthorne, George Gale, and Colin Welch would treat their readers to witty, disrespectful, and outspoken dismissals of the new intellectual movements...
...For the feminist the failings of men are no laughing matter...
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...Only a rational being can weep or blush, even though weeping and blushing lie outside the reach of the will...
...It seems to me that we stand in need of a repertoire of religious jokes and a bold habit of expressing them...
...They get about blacks, Latinos or any other race—what a justifiable uproar, perhaps even an impeachment, would ensue...
...Itspurpose is the research and publication of the facts regarding developmentsin the Middle East and exposing false propaganda that might harm theeducational work, for these clarifying messages, and for related direct mail...
...You can grovel as much as you wish, like Don Imus...
...901 Arlington, VA 22209 44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 2007 a United Nations conference on racism, which took place in Durban South Africa in 2001, declared that Zionism is racism...
...and many European nations continue to demand that Israel make one-sided sacrifices for peace with a people steeped in racism and committed to its destruction...
...This axiom does not, it seems, apply in the world of American censorship...
...T HERE ARE MANY JOKE-FREE ZONES in our religious literature...
...As a result the rabbinical traditions are full of self-deprecating jokes, which underline the absurd position of God’s chosen people, living on the margins of a world that does not know that that is who they are...
...But this points to another area in which humor has become dangerous...
...Satire Many Muslims have an exaggerated capacity to feel slighted, and there is scarcely a humorous remark to be made about Islam that will not instantly be read as an expression of hostility...
...Perhaps nowhere is the hatred of Jews more virulent than are taught in school that Jews are descended from apes and pigs and that the most noble thing they can do is to kill Jews...
...and Israel walked out of the meeting, which was dominated by representatives of Islamic and Arab states and other anti-Israel forces, and whose conclusions were predictable from the outset...
...The jokes and teases that Christie assembles are gestures of conciliation, in which difference is made harmless and set laughingly aside...
...THE PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE The Decline of Laughter by Roger Scruton R EASON SHOWS ITSELF in all our attempts to understand the world and in all our ways of relating to each other...
...And only a rational being can laugh...
...By satirizing them, we come to terms with them...
...No surprise, then, that the 1982 doctoral Semitism permeates the Arab Middle East and creates an dehumanized, evil beings...
...One fault and you’re out...
...As a result, an eerie silence surrounds the great questions of modern American society—a silence punctuated by the hysterical outbursts of the humorless, whenever their factitious sensitivities are provoked...
...When Poles, Irish, Jews, and Italians 42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 2007 competed for territory in the New World to which they had escaped, they provisioned themselves with a store of ethnic jokes with which to laugh off their manifest differences...
...But in the fight against the censors they stood together, united in their contempt for the puritan disease...
...But losing your career is not a laughing matter...
...The desire to accuse, which brings with it a reputation for virtue without the cost of acquiring it, takes over from the normal flow of human forgiveness, creating a wooden personality familiar to all who have had to deal with the lobbies that now control public opinion in America...
...We have virtually no overhead...
...The Jews, through their experience of the Diaspora, living as strangers and sojourners among communities that at any moment might turn against them, have long been aware of this...
...Roger Scruton, the writer and philosopher, is most recently the author of Culture Counts: Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged, published this month by Encounter Books...
...In Israel hate speech is banned, and it is against the law to discriminate based on race or religion...
...Zionism is the code word often Muslims still insist that Zionists were behind the September 11 Anti-Semitism is expressed so freely and ubiquitously in most Islamic societies that no citizen can escape it...
...Ethnic humor has been studied in depth by the British sociologist Christie Davies, and his findings— in The Mirth of Nations—are a salutary reminder of the ease with which spontaneous social solutions can be confiscated by the po-faced censors who seek to govern us...
...In response to a terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia in May 2004, Crown Prince Abdullah declared that “Zionism is behind [these] terrorist actions in the kingdom...
...FLAME is a tax-exempt, non-profit educational 501 (c)(3) organization...
...During Ramadan in 2002, “Horseman Without a Horse,” a program based on the notorious The Protocols of the Elders of Zionthe blood of non-Jews to make Passover matzot...
...of racism directed specifically against the Jewish people—is rampant in most all Islamic societies...
...still less is it a laughing matter to be put on a list of targets by the Islamist offense-machine...
...But in a world of increasingly belligerent affirmations of faith, the British solution is no longer available...
...But who now would risk making a joke about sexual relations or the female temperament in a faculty lounge...
...Not surprisingly, therefore, the literature of feminism is devoid of humor—and advisedly so, for if it ever were to employ this resource it would die laughing at itself...
...Imagine if an American president had made a similarly sweeping and bigoted statement voiced their approval...
...In Iran, a TV Palestinian children and harvesting their organs...
...One remark judged to be “racist,” “sexist,” “stereotyping,” or “homophobic,” and you must leave the community of the saved forever...
...For years, the U.N., led by Islamic and Arab nations and their sympathizers, has accused Israel of racism, but the world consistently turns a blind eye to open, seething anti-Semitism in Islamic society...
...When will moderate Muslims speak out...
...Rather, virtually all of the conference’s Muslim leaders actually used by Islamic anti-Semites for Jews...
...interests of the United States and its allies in that area of the world...
...In Arabs, who enjoy the same civil rights as Jewish Israelis...
...Some of that bold class of journalists were on the left, like Alan Watkins and Hugo Young...
...Until Muslims reject racism in all forms, they can’t expect Islam to enjoy full respect as a political and spiritual force...
...Egypt’s state-controlled TV aired forgery, , in which Jews allegedly use series, “Zahra’s Blue Eyes,” portrays “Zionists” kidnapping among the Palestinians...
...We had such a class of journalists until recently in England...
...More depressing, however, is its effect on ordinary morality...
...Of course, religion is a sensitive topic, and the traditional British response, that it should therefore never be mentioned in polite society, is understandable...
...The supreme irony of this conference was that it accused no other nation of racism—only Israel...
...you can perform the equivalent of King Henry II’s barefoot pilgrimage to Canterbury, and it will make no difference...
...It is easy to say that we should laugh at it...
...Yet the To receive free FLAME updates, visit our website: www.factsandlogic.org You deserve a factual look at . . . Racism in the Islamic World How can peace prevail in the Middle East in the face of Islamic bigotry and hate...
...Young Journalism Training Program The Journalism practical, hands-on journalism training for journalists by journalists...
...Throughout the left-wing takeover of the universities in the 1970s, journalists like T.E...
...In fact, millions of attacks on the World Trade Center...
...Candidates accepted into the program will have regular hands-on supervision, training, and editing, Are you an aspiring writer or journalist looking to take the next step in building a life-long career as a professional journalist...
...As a result, each could be as rude as he liked about the surrounding sea of stupidity and still raise an accepting laugh from his readers...
...An outside observer cannot fail to be struck by the decline of that kind of humor in America...
...Despite all the ingenious labor of the feminists, ordinary people notice the very real differences between the sexes, and the very great need to accommodate those differences and to defuse the conflicts to which they might give rise...
...W HAT SHOULD BE our response to this...
...And they know no forgiveness, since they are cut off, like all humorless people, from the process of self-knowledge...
...Willed laughter is a kind of sneer...
...What is needed, it seems to me, is a seriously rude, arrogant, and well-educated class of journalists, who would lend each other support in ridiculing the pretensions of the censors...
...Human beings who live in communities of strangers are greatly in need of laughter, if their differences are not to lead to civil war...
...Humor has been the traditional ROGER SCRUTON recourse of humanity in this predicament, as men jokingly defer to their “better half,” and women submit to the edicts of “his nibs...
...Yet everywhere in the modern world a kind of puritanical vigilance is extinguishing the ethnic joke, condemning it as an offense against our common humanity...
...In truth, Israel is perhaps the most racially and ethnically diverse and tolerant country in the world...
...Laughter is not only a joy and a balm, it is the principal way we have of accepting the failings of our fellows...
...Almost all of our revenue pays for ourFacts and Logic About the Middle East P.O...
...Not only is anti-Semitism commonplace For example, former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamed declared in a 2003 speech to the Organization of Islamic others to fight and die for them...
...In the past it has been axiomatic that faults are forgiven, if followed by a clear intention to mend...
...This universal human resource, which in the works of James Thurber, H.L...
Vol. 40 • June 2007 • No. 5
