The Jester's Power

Mary Townsend on "the Molière Option.”

A hundred days into the second Trump term, the #Resistance movement, which was born during the first Trump administration, seems dead and buried. Its moralistic rhetoric and cringe aesthetics — brilliantly lampooned by the Onion’s “ResistanceHole” — are largely to blame for its demise.

Today,

Mary Townsend

proposes a better way to resist tyranny: by making fun of it. She calls her strategy “The Molière Option,” after the French comic playwright.

Mary is a professor and multitalented philosopher who writes scholarly tomes (The Woman Question in Plato’s Republic), popular essays about philosophy (for example, about effective altruism) and philosophical essays about pop culture (like this brilliant piece about Dolly Parton). She wrote previously for Wisdom of Crowds about the tension between expertise and democracy.

— Santiago Ramos, executive editor

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The moral language of our time seems to me to be like this: an asteroid hit the other side of the planet, and the cloud is going to get you soon. However, there’s still time before you smell the smoke yourself. You would like to express to your friend that the asteroid is bad. Words seem inadequate to the magnitude and fiery nature of the rock, but you try nonetheless.

“This asteroid is outrageous!” you exclaim. Your friend responds: “Horrifying!” A passerby overhears, and observes to you both: “There has never been an asteroid of this magnitude before!” Together, you agree: the asteroid ought to be stopped.

Notice how extraordinarily pleasant it is to temporarily frame the trouble with Trump, Musk, Congress and the rest, as an asteroid. Briefly, in this image of something quite different, there is a respite of a sort. Of course, if it really were an asteroid that was the trouble, we’d probably still be nearly as tongue-tied — almost, but perhaps the rock would be significantly more enjoyable to lament: an act of God, rather than human scurrility.

The fact is, I am worried about moral language at the present time. It is having a rough go. I fear that it will soon exhaust itself, and then, where will we be?

Ordinarily, one of the most useful functions of moral language is not just that it articulates or identifies what is bad, but that it sort of pins something, briefly, in place: there is a recognition and a place to stand that takes shape around my willingness to call something what it is. It was wrong, for instance, to give Harry Truman an honorary degree at Oxford after he signed the order dropping the atom bomb, and Elizabeth Anscombe said so. It didn’t change Oxford’s mind. They gave it to him anyway. But the saying of it was a human act not merely of valor, but also of pinning: a kind of saying or calling, not a law but some single naming, that makes the usually quite fraught connection between the manifold of fractal goods and bads, in all their multifarious manifestations, somehow easier, a relief. For a moment, the whole picture feels less obscure.

But unfortunately, moral language doesn’t always do this. Real pinning, real judgment calls, are usually easier after the dust settles, after the bomb has dropped and not before. (And even when someone is able to call it at the time, it may take decades to send respect when due.) But amidst all the ordinary sorts of upheavals that make this basic sort of judging more difficult, revolutions — the savage¹ or unjust kind that is, not the organic crumbling of something already hollow by common consent — form a special case of difficulty.

In such revolutions, Thucydides points out, generously across the ages, the problem is that everything that normally is already in motion is in motion even more. More factions, more betrayals, all these produce more motion than a hurricane, or a nice honest daylight battle. But worse, language itself becomes a flux: what is really hubris is called bravery, probably by some self-interested moron, and criminal negligence, on these grounds, becomes wise moderation. If you work yourself up to say that it’s criminal, even your closest friends start worrying you might be saying so just to be on the other side. Such revolution saps the ability of words to mean, to name, to pick out — and to call to act. Language quits on you the moment you need it most.

At that moment, your plight is extreme. On the one hand, you are surrounded by bad actors using language hyperbolically to suit their dastardly ends. Prayer-hand-emojis send bombs. On the other, your friends, lovers, and countrymen’s best instinct is to fight fire with fire: hyperbole to hyperbole, asteroid to asteroid. Outrageous! Horrifying! Well, who could disagree?

But somehow this method of attack is unconvincing. Why does it still feel, in the midst of my attempts at denunciation, that I’ve said so much less than I mean? And why does my conscience, or some stranger form of guilt, tell me that I haven’t said enough? And why do I also feel that with each new denunciation, I’ve said less and less of substance at all — even if I know that underneath the attempt at moral language, the badness I’m trying to point to is undoubtedly there?

All of this has happened before. Last time, during the first Trump administration, I was there on Twitter, watching the Muslim ban in real-Twitter-time, walking to campus feeling far-sighted about tyranny and Plato, and letting a fair amount of dogmatic slumber about politics shake itself awake. I attended workshops and encouraged protests. I altered to the extent I found relevant the tenor of my research. But what I found is that I and most everyone else I knew in this milieu quickly became morally exhausted at the pace of the outrage. I fault myself very much for allowing myself to be manipulated, much too often, by the absurdly-purposeful-absurdity of the latest troll. And the thing is, this manipulation had an additional cost: for many, even anger itself, eventually, wouldn’t come when called. And so the soul became just fog all the way down, as some of my students eloquently reported. Too tired for another variation of “Horrifying!” and “this asteroid must be stopped,” the clearest path seemed to be to wait for it all to be over.

This time I want to do something different. I do not wish to let myself be emotionally pushed around anymore. Not adding tears to the coffee mug of malice that someone else is hoping to drink — that’s one goal. Nor will I be browbeaten into pronouncing moral shibboleths that do the opposite of what they intend. I want to be obstinate. I want goodness: but I want a better way.

Some are arguing, of course, that more anger, more feelings, even more romanticism perhaps, or just saying the same thing over and over, is the solution to impending fog and complacency. I wish them well, but I think they are headed for the same genre of burnout, on a shorter road. On the other hand, the demand to avoid the descending Lethe-like cloud of gaseous vibes is real: this is no time for nihilism, and no time for playing along with the enforced aesthetic of fascism while the sun shines, either. So what then can language do?

In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville criticizes Americans for many things. He also points out we have a problem with our moral language, and the way it limits itself, in part because of our very faith in shared morality.

In our day the most absolute sovereigns of Europe cannot prevent certain thoughts hostile to their authority from mutely circulating in their states and even in the hearts of their courts . . . in the proudest nations of the Old World, works destined to paint faithfully the vices and ridiculousness of contemporaries were published; La Bruyère lived at the palace of Louis XIV when he composed his chapter on the great, and Molière criticized the Court in plays he performed before the courtiers. But the power that dominates in the United States does not intend to be made sport of like this. . . .

The problem, de Tocqueville says, is that we Americans are used to considering the moral opinion of the reasonable majority to be reasonably spiritually binding. This is true, he contends, for us, citizens of a democracy, even more than for citizens of an hereditary monarch, since we build our intellectual life around what makes sense to the majority, or what we devoutly trust is the majority, somewhere. It’s why Americans so instinctively reach for morality when we want to sway public opinion, or even just to get a hit of something shared and common to cheer us up, which is indeed the sort of thing the human spirit cannot do without. It’s precisely this instinct, also, that makes us so very easy to exploit.

But Molière and La Bruyère did something different. They were comedians, artists of the laugh; not moralists as the word is understood today. Their work made it possible to sit in the Court of the unjust king and laugh directly at his face, to his face. And so it became possible to breathe: possible to sit in a room where everyone knew the Court was full of shit, because the common laugh betrayed the truth to all. The King, it could be recognized immediately and with relief, wore no clothes at all. This is a desirable state of affairs.

Let me therefore recommend The Molière Option, to you and to the political-linguistic problems of our times. This name is a good joke, I hope, because I intend it to be the opposite of any benedictine meanderings that might present themselves along the way. The point is not to leave the state, go to Canada, to embrace complacency, nihilism, quietism or slavery. Rather, it’s to find a persona, a habitus, that allows for incisive noticing of every single bad thing that occurs, just as it happens, no less and no more. But not just this: to notice also that it is not only bad, but hilariously and contemptibly so. And then to think on what sort of insolence it might be a pleasure to offer back! The point of this is not to become a Dadaist or to laugh ironically from the sidelines; that’s dumb, as well as not that funny in the first place.² But rather what we are looking for is a way to laugh at the king in the center of the room, to his face; and to take up our moral center in the center of that kind of room, and no other.

Since I am a philosopher of sorts, I am not so good at jokes. I hope that better comedians announce themselves soon. I promise to attend their plays, the good ones, that is. But I do know this: we tried moral escalation before. It didn’t work last time, and it’s not going to work this time, either. More cries of “Outrageous!” will sink us faster than we can believe.

Let me be clear: real moral judgment, the kind of pinning that our ability to understand the world rests on, is real and no joke. But moralism of itself isn’t a perfectly safe or ideal practice. It too easily takes its strength from the status quo under any regime, and as such, it can often flatter a sense of weakness, as Nietzsche, somewhat generously across the ages, has also pointed out. But the point isn’t to flail weakly at what we fear might be too strong. Instead we must learn to look down on what is truly contemptible, to see and to say: this image of the great is actually pretty small; in fact it is puny. It is a sight to see when a self-professed misanthrope falls in love. We’ve all met the guy who is bold before the ignorant and embarrassed before the learned, who wafts to each new opinion as self-interest suggests. Tartuffe was grotesque, but transparent; all he wanted were the same sins as everyone else.

Bad laughter of course gets ugly; and no good comes of laughing at a joke you secretly think is gross or lame; gross joke escalation is real too. But good laughter is no less deeply connected to our rationality, or to goodness, than other noble forms of speaking. And unlike many of the other forms, it does have the power to rebalance our judgment when it has gone astray, and cut through, I think, exactly just the fogs that plague us. I can’t see through to what that clearing looks like yet, myself; but I do know it’s there. And it’s more necessary to imagine this unknown ground, since Trump is more than capable of writing the jokes himself (sad!). Truly, let us make them instead.

And so, playwrights: instead of writing SNL jokes that speak to the already-persuaded, from some safe glamorous room far away, I look to you to present to me the true version of the vile toadying of JD Vance, a little closer to home. Not as “how dare he,” for the five-hundredth time — but as a truly human mess who is funny, as funny as it gets. Only you can save us.

For I am thinking that this laughter will make it possible to imagine the end of kings, their real organic crumbling, and also make it possible to rehumanize the real human people whose existence persists outside what moral escalation tempts us to virulently condemn. And I am looking to laughter to provide that elasticity of the spirit which is stamina itself. I strongly suspect that it is this — both humor’s habitus and art — and not some new definitions, some new think-pieces, or more history-wars, that will cut through the aestheticized will-to-slavery of fascism nouveau. In this way the laugh could show this false aesthetic to be the kind the paper-tyranny that it is: the kind one could simply tear — the moment one realizes it is nothing but paper.

This is the kind of joke I’ll be looking for. Hope you will too.

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1. Thucydides notes, for instance, that it is possible to have ἡσυχαίτερα revolutions, that is, ones that are quieter, more mild (III.82).

2. The Onion, for example, sometimes manages to toss contempt in just the right spot; other times, it collaborates with Dadaism, what Simone de Beauvoir considers a love of pure absurdity that shades into nihilism.

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