new work at Wisdom of Crowds

moralism < jokes < the crumbling of kings

Some new writing out today at everyone’s favorite pro-dialectic, anti-consensus venture, Wisdom of Crowds. I’ve done some work with them before and it’s a pleasure to join in once more! Here’s the link:

The Jester's Power

This is one of the more “intervene in a discourse” type pieces I’ve done in a while, so here goes. I continue to be interested in the genre, aesthetic, and mood of the language we use to describe our moral and political troubles. Language is never neutral, and while there is always a new and potentially interesting way to express a thought, there’s a hundred ways more to crunch the thought back; and where language goes astray, there’s usually something astray in the soul as well.

One thing I’ve noticed on the language beat in the last few months or so is that instead of talking politics, practical or grand, in the face of all these difficult-to-describe events, people are falling back on the same kind of moralizing and moralism that, language wise, fell apart fairly soon the last time we tried it. (Maybe there is something about liberalism specifically, and the way it insists it is not just the best regime, but obviously eye roll the best regime, that is at work here, I am not certain; if the liberal state is obviously the stable endpoint of human striving, then to depart from it is not a political issue, but a moral one, tut tut, perhaps.)

So I’m experimenting with the thought that maybe what we need are better jokes instead. Not irony, with its tendencies towards quietism or nihilism, or sadistic, brutal, or wasteful humor, but rather something insolent, something a little French: like the complicated and revelatory humor of La Bruyère’s Characters, for instance, or the plays of Molière, that, crucially, were performed in front of the very people they most of all call to the laugh. (Many thanks to Alexis de Tocqueville for pointing this out, and giving me the reason to read both of these authors for the last few weeks.)

Hope you all read and enjoy!