The Morality of Laughter

Preface

Preface All theories, dear friend, are grey But green is the tree of life. Goethe, Faust This book had its origin in an elevator at the University of Chicago Law School, where I was a visiting fellow. On the elevator with me was Nobel laureate Ronald Coase, a founder of the law and economics movement associated with that school and with the law school where I now teach. The elevator stopped on the way down, and a U. of C. fundraiser stepped aboard with a donor in tow. “This is Ronald Coase,” she enthused. “He invented the Coase theorem!” Smiles, and a shaking of hands all around. “This is Frank Buckley . . . ,” she continued. And in the embarrassed silence which followed I resolved to have a theorem too. But where to theorize? The areas in which I taught were already wellstocked with theories, so I had to move on. Yet wherever I turned in the useful sciences of law and economics, my side had already won. Over the last twenty-‹ve years, economics has made a slow march through most of the social sciences, breaking through all redoubts and planting its banners atop every public policy bastion. Today, economics is what heraldry was to Sir Walter Scott. “Not know economics! Of whatever was your mother thinking!” If economics has won the day in the social sciences, it has had little success in the humanities, and the border between the two is the front line of a cultural war. Disputes about culture are not a new phenomenon . In the nineteenth century the antagonists were Darwin’s Bulldog, Thomas Huxley, and Matthew Arnold. Fifty years ago Lord Snow proclaimed the preeminence of the hard sciences, and for his show of sham culture was savaged by literary scholar F. R. Leavis. (Of Leavis’s jeremiad, Roger Kimball wrote: “It’s not just that no two stones of Snow’s argument are left standing: each and every pebble is pulverized; the ‹elds are salted; and the entire population is sold into slavery.”)1 Some things are different today. The political positions were reversed in the past. Arnold and Leavis were cultural conservatives, while their scienti ‹c opponents attacked established religion (Huxley) or espoused marxisant politics (Snow). The differences have also become heightened of late. But in one respect the two groups are more alike today than formerly. The older school of humanists had a fairly clear vision about some of life’s basic goods, particularly the value of high culture. Today, few scholars have much to say about life-style choices or culture. On the right, conservative economists are seldom willing to second-guess personal preferences that do not impose physical costs on third parties. On the left, academics in the humanities prescribe a thick set of rules about politics but are studiously neutral about how we should live. As a result, the civilizing mission of the university has largely been ignored by scholars right and left. Clifford Geertz has asked for a “useful miracle” that would give academics a common language and bring peace to the culture wars.2 None of us is a miracle worker, but a modest start might be made through humane studies that look to a common culture for instruction on how to live. The modern obsession with politics blinds us to the far more interesting question of what we should do with our lives. The politician cannot help us there, but the humanist can. The humanist sees culture from the inside, not as an inert artifact but as a living code whose authority is felt within, not as a grey theory but as a green tree of life. One of the strongest cultural signals about how to live comes from laughter, whose sting we can never ignore. We can bear poverty, illness, even shame, but not ridicule, and the strategies we employ to immunize ourselves from it constitute a thick code of conduct that I call the morality of laughter. There are religious, legal, and moral codes that condemn the imposition of harm on others, but the morality of laughter is different for it teaches the individual how to extract joy from his own life. Friedrich Nietzsche recognized the difference and called the study of laughter the gay science. I would write of laughter, then. But how could I do so when academic conventions (with an eye to self-preservation) frown on any attempt at humor? Yet if laughter is banned in the useful sciences, I might examine its...