“Exactly,” replied Mr. Goma.
The interviewer asked if the verdict would allow more people to download music, and Mr. Goma allowed as how more and more people will be downloading music in the future.
The interviewer concurred. “Thanks very much indeed!” he exclaimed.
DIMITRI: This clarifies everything we’ve been talking about.
TASSO: In what way?
DIMITRI: What you call “philosophy,” I call “a joke.”
{VIII}
Social and Political Philosophy
Social and political philosophy examines issues of justice in
society. Why do we need governments? How should goods be
distributed? How can we establish a fair social system? These
questions used to be settled by the stronger guy hitting the
weaker guy over the head with a bone, but after centuries of
social and political philosophy, society has come to see that
missiles are much more effective.
DIMITRI: Tasso, we can talk philosophy until we’re blue in the face, but when push comes to shove, all I really want from life is my own little house, a sheep, and three square meals a day.
Tasso shoves Dimitri.
DIMITRI: What was that about?
TASSO: What’s to stop me from shoving you—or anybody else—when I feel like it?
DIMITRI: The Guardians of the State, that’s who!
TASSO: But how do they know what to do or why?
DIMITRI: By Zeus, we’re talking philosophy again, aren’t we?
THE STATE OF NATURE
Political philosophers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, traced the impetus for forming a government to man’s insecurity in living in the rough-and-tumble of the state of nature. These philosophers weren’t just talking about the perils of wild beasts in nature; they were talking about lawlessness: the risks of two-way traffic, noisy neighbors, wife-stealing, that sort of thing. These inconveniences led men and women to organize themselves into sovereign states. Limits on individual freedoms were accepted as fair exchange for the benefits of the state.
A wild rabbit was caught and taken to a National Institutes of Health laboratory. When he arrived, he was befriended by a rabbit that had been born and raised in the lab.
One evening the wild rabbit noticed that his cage hadn’t been properly closed and decided to make a break for freedom. He invited the lab rabbit to join him. The lab rabbit was unsure, as he had never been outside the lab, but the wild rabbit finally convinced him to give it a try.
Once they were free, the wild rabbit said, “I’ll show you the number-three best field,” and took the lab rabbit to a field full of lettuce.
After they had eaten their fill, the wild rabbit said, “Now I’ll show you the number-two best field,” and took the lab rabbit to a field full of carrots.
After they had had their fill of carrots, the wild rabbit said, “Now I’ll show you the number-one best field,” and took the lab rabbit to a warren full of female bunnies. It was Heaven—nonstop lovemaking all night long.
As dawn was beginning to break, the lab rabbit announced that he would have to be getting back to the lab.
“Why?” said the wild rabbit. “I’ve shown you the number-three best field with the lettuce, the number-two best field with the carrots, and the number-one best field with the ladies. Why do you want to go back to the lab?”
The lab rabbit replied, “I can’t help it. I’m dying for a cigarette!”
Such are the benefits of an organized society.
Describing what human life would be without government, Hobbes famously deemed man’s natural state as, “solitary, poore [sic], nasty, brutish, and short.” As far as we know, Hobbes was not much of a comic, but there is always something funny about lists that insert a clinker at the end, like the lady who complained that the food at her resort was “cold, undercooked, repulsive—and the portions were too small.”
One aspect of human nature that Hobbes did not anticipate was the romance of life in a natural state, especially these days when so many of us are trying to make contact with our inner wildman or wildwoman.
Trudy and Josephine signed up for a safari in the Australian Outback. Late one night, an aborigine in a loincloth swooped into their tent, grabbed Trudy off her cot, and dragged her into the jungle where he “had his way with her.” She was not found until the next morning, lying dazed at the base of a palm tree. She was rushed to a hospital in Sydney to recover. Next day, Josephine visited Trudy and saw that her friend was despondent.
Josephine: You must feel terrible.
Trudy: Of course, I do! It’s been twenty-four hours and no card, no flowers—he hasn’t even called!
MIGHT EQUALS RIGHT
Niccolò Machiavelli, the sixteenth-century author of The Prince, is known as the father of modern statecraft because he advised Renaissance princes to disregard accepted standards of virtue and “enter into evil when necessitated.” He recognized no higher authority than the state, so his advice to princes was . . . well, Machiavellian. He admitted right up front that his criterion for virtue was whatever allowed the prince to survive politically. While it is better for the prince to be feared than loved, he should avoid being hated, as that could jeopardize his power. Best of all is to mercilessly pursue power while appearing upright. To wit:
A woman sues a man for defamation of character, charging that he called her a pig. The man is found guilty and made to pay damages. After the trial, he asks the judge, “Does this mean that I can no longer call Ms. Harding a pig?”
The judge says, “That is correct.”
“And does it mean that I can’t call a pig Ms. Harding?”
“No,” says the judge, “you are free to call a pig Ms. Harding. There is no crime in that.”
The man looks Ms. Harding in the eye and says, “Good afternoon, Ms. Harding.”
Jokes have always recognized that Machiavellian deceit, especially when we’re pretty sure we won’t get caught, tempts us all.
A man wins $100,000 in Las Vegas and, not wanting anyone to know about it, he takes it home and buries it in his backyard. The next morning he goes out back and finds only an empty hole. He sees footprints leading to the house next door, which belongs to a deaf-mute, so he asks the professor down the street, who knows sign language, to help him confront his neighbor. The man takes his pistol, and he and the professor knock on the neighbor’s door. When the neighbor answers, the man waves the pistol at him and says to the professor, “You tell this guy that if he doesn’t give me back my $100,000, I’m going to kill him right now!”
The professor conveys the message to the neighbor, who responds that he hid the money in his own backyard under the cherry tree.
The professor turns to the man and says, “He refuses to tell you. He says he’d rather die first.”
Unsurprisingly, Machiavelli was a proponent of the death penalty, because it was in the best interest of the prince to be seen as severe rather than merciful. In other words, he agreed with the cynic who said, “Capital punishment means never having to say, ‘You again?’”
No matter how upright we may appear on the surface—or even in our own minds—Machiavelli believed that we’re all Machiavellian at heart.
Mrs. Parker is called to serve on a jury but asks to be excused because she doesn’t believe in capital punishment. The public defender says, “But, madam, this isn’t a murder trial. It’s a civil suit. A woman is suing her former husband because he gambled away the $25,000 he promised to spend to remodel the bathroom for her birthday.”
“Okay, I’ll serve,” says Mrs. Parker. “I suppose I could be wrong about capital punishment.”
But wait one second. Could it be that the joke’s on us? Some historians now believe Machiavelli was pulling our leg with a kind of reverse Machiavellianism—appearing evil while actually subscribing to old-time virtues. In the en
d, was Machiavelli actually satirizing despotism? In his essay “The Prince: Political Science or Political Satire?” Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Garrett Mattingly argues that Machiavelli has gotten a bum rap: “The notion that this little book [The Prince] was meant as a serious, scientific treatise on government contradicts everything we know about Machiavelli’s life, about his writings, and about the history of his time.”
In other words, Mattingly thinks Machiavelli was a sheep in wolf’s clothing
FEMINISM
Here is a riddle that has baffled people for decades:
A man witnesses his son in a terrible bicycle accident. He scoops up his boy, puts him in the back of his car, and races to the emergency room. As the boy is rolled into surgery, the surgeon says, “Oh, my God! It’s my son!”
How is this possible?
Du-uh! The surgeon is his mother.
Today, not even Rush Limbaugh would be puzzled by this riddle; the number of female M.D.s in this country is rapidly approaching the number of male M.D.s. And that is a result of the power of late-twentieth-century feminist philosophy.
When the BBC ran a listener poll for the world’s greatest philosopher, nary a woman philosopher made the cut of the top twenty. (Karl Marx won.) Women scholars around the world were infuriated. Where was the neo-Platonist Greek philosopher Hypatia? Or the medieval essayist Hildegard of Bingen? Why is the twelfth century’s Heloise excluded, while Abelard, who learned as much from her as she did from him, racks up votes (although he didn’t make the top twenty either)? How about the seventeenth century’s Mary Astell, a proto-feminist? And where are the modern era’s Hannah Arendt, Iris Murdoch, and Ayn Rand?
Is academia hopelessly chauvinistic, resulting in the educated public’s ignorance of these great philosophers? Or were the pigs of their day to blame for not taking these women seriously enough at the time?
The real dawn of feminist philosophy dates to the eighteenth century and Mary Wollstonecraft’s seminal (or should we say ovarian?) work, A Vindication of the Rights of Women. In that treatise, she takes on none other than Jean-Jacques Rousseau for proposing an inferior education system for women.
Feminism got an existentialist reinterpretation in the twentieth century with the publication of The Second Sex by philosopher (and paramour of Jean-Paul Sartre) Simone de Beauvoir. She declared that there is no such thing as essential womanhood, which she thought was a straitjacket imposed on women by men. Rather, women are free to create their own version of what it is to be a woman.
But how elastic is the concept of womanhood? Does the reproductive equipment we are born with have nothing to do with our gender identity? Some post–de Beauvoir feminists think so. They claim we are all born a blank slate sexually; our gender identity is something we gain later from society and our parents. And these days learning gender roles has become trickier than ever.
Two gay men are standing on a street corner when a gorgeous and shapely blonde strolls by in a low-cut, clingy chiffon dress.
Says one of the men to the other, “At times like this, I wish I were a lesbian!”
Are traditional gender roles a mere social construct, invented by men to keep women subservient? Or are those roles biologically determined? This enigma continues to divide philosophers and psychologists alike. Some deep thinkers land firmly on the side of biologically determined differences. For example, when Freud declared that “anatomy is destiny,” he was employing a teleological argument to make the case that the way the female body is constructed determines women’s role in society. It is unclear what anatomical attributes he was referring to when he concluded that women should do the ironing. Or consider another biological determinist, Dave Barry, who has pointed out that if a woman has to choose between catching a fly ball and saving a child’s life, she will choose to save the child’s life without even checking to see if there’s a man on base.
There’s also the question of whether men are biologically determined too. For example, as a result of their anatomy are men predisposed to use primitive criteria in choosing a spouse?
A man is dating three women and is trying to decide which to marry. He gives each of them $5,000 to see what they do with the money.
The first has a total makeover. She goes to a fancy salon, gets her hair, nails, and face done, and buys several new outfits. She tells him she has done this to be more attractive to him because she loves him so much.
The second buys the man a number of gifts. She gets him a new set of golf clubs, some accessories for his computer, and some expensive clothes. She tells him that she has spent all the money on him because she loves him so much.
The third woman invests the money in the stock market. She earns several times the $5,000. She gives him back his $5,000 and reinvests the remainder in a joint account. She tells him she wants to invest in their future because she loves him so much.
Which one does he choose?
Answer: the one with the biggest boobs.
QUIZ
Is this an anti-feminist joke or an anti-chauvinist-pig joke? Discuss.
Here’s another text that argues for an essential difference between men and women. It’s got to be essential because the First Man was free of social constructs and his impulsiveness was therefore innate.
God appears to Adam and Eve in the Garden and announces that he has two gifts, one for each of them, and he would like them to decide who gets which gift. He says, “The first gift is the ability to pee standing up.”
Impulsively, Adam yells out, “Pee standing up? Hot dog! That sounds really cool! I want that one.”
“Okay,” says God, “that one’s yours, Adam. Eve, you get the other one—multiple orgasms.”
The social and political results of feminism are legion: voting rights, rape-victim-protection laws, better treatment and compensation in the workplace. Recently, another social fallout of feminism has been male backlash. From this a new category has arisen: the politically incorrect joke.
Calling any joke that pokes fun at feminism politically incorrect adds a new dimension to the joke—“I know this joke goes against accepted liberal philosophy, but hey, can’t you have fun anymore?” By bracketing a joke in this way, the joker makes a claim for irreverence, a quality that can make a joke even funnier, and more socially perilous to the joker, as seen in this over-the-top joke:
On a transatlantic flight, a plane passes through a severe storm. The turbulence is awful, and things go from bad to worse when one wing is struck by lightning.
One woman in particular loses it. She stands up in the front of the plane screaming, “I’m too young to die!” Then she yells, “Well, if I’m going to die, I want my last minutes on earth to be memorable! No one has ever made me really feel like a woman! Well, I’ve had it! Is there anyone on this plane who can make me feel like a woman?”
For a moment there is silence. Everyone has forgotten his own peril, and they all stare, riveted, at the desperate woman in the front of the plane. Then a man stands up in the rear. He’s a tall, tanned hunk with jet-black hair, and he starts to walk slowly up the aisle, unbuttoning his shirt. “I can make you feel like a woman,” he says.
No one moves. As the man approaches, the woman begins to get excited. He removes his shirt. Muscles ripple across his chest as he reaches her, extends the arm holding his shirt to the trembling woman, and says, “Iron this.”
In response to the onslaught of politically incorrect jokes came another new breed—stories that start out like the typical, chauvinist jokes of yore, but with an added twist in which the woman prevails.
Two bored male casino dealers are waiting at the craps table. A very attractive blond woman arrives and bets $20,000 on a single roll of the dice. She says, “I hope you don’t mind, but I feel much luckier when I’m completely nude.” With that, she strips down, rolls the dice, and yells, “Come on, baby, Mama needs new clothes!” As the dice come to a stop she jumps up and down and squeals, “YES! YES! I WON, I WON!” She hugs each of the d
ealers, picks up her winnings and her clothes, and quickly departs. The dealers stare at each other dumbfounded. Finally, one of them asks, “What did she roll?” The other answers, “I don’t know—I thought you were watching.”
The moral: Not all blondes are dumb, but all men are men.
Here’s another example from this neofeminist genre:
A blonde is sitting next to a lawyer on an airplane. The lawyer keeps bugging her to play a game with him by which they will see who has more general knowledge. Finally, he says he will offer her ten-to-one odds. Every time she doesn’t know the answer to one of his questions, she will pay him five dollars. Every time he doesn’t know the answer to one of her questions, he will pay her fifty dollars.
She agrees to play, and he asks her, “What is the distance from the earth to the nearest star?”
She says nothing, just hands him a five-dollar bill.
She asks him, “What goes up a hill with three legs and comes back down with four legs?”
He thinks for a long time but in the end has to concede that he has no idea. He hands her fifty dollars.
The blonde puts the money in her purse without comment.
The lawyer says, “Wait a minute. What’s the answer to your question?”
Without a word she hands him five dollars.
ECONOMIC PHILOSOPHIES
In the first sentence of Robert Heilbroner’s classic book about economic theoreticians, The Worldly Philosophers, the author admits that “this is a book about a few men with a curious claim to fame.” Yes, even economics has its own philosophers.
Scottish economics philosopher Adam Smith wrote his ovarian (or should we say seminal?) work An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations in the same year that America declared its independence. This work established the blueprint for free-market capitalism.
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