No Laughing Matter

Is anything “sacred”? Is anything “not to be laughed at”? Is anything no laughing matter? Because we live in a pluralist world does that mean “anything goes”? We all know the terror that lurks behind laughter.

Do we draw a line somewhere and if so where? Is it funny that Islamic Jihadists massacred 10 defenseless people in Charlie Hebdo going about their daily lives making fun of anything and everything? Outrage is our response. Should we find it funny? Cartoonist Steve Bell looks at it his way…

What makes humour sick? I can take you down, but can I pull you up?

Is baby rape funny? Is perpetuating the oppression or neglect of the ‘other’ or other group such as women or blacks or paraplegics through humour funny? Are the massacres by Boko Haram funny?

Can “free speech” draw the line simply because it is no laughing matter. If we do not resort to violence, how does one say enough is enough, loud enough? What “images,” words and action will stop people in their tracks. If none do, what then? Can images and words be a punishable offense? And if so why? And how does one judge? And who judges? Well I do, right?

And I am just one person versus all of you. So is it OK for you to laugh at me even if I don’t see the joke or cannot laugh with you. What makes you right and me wrong? There is no end to “fighting” talk. The language of war is the same as the language of terrorism. We can only change the pattern of our lives from an “other” level than the one at which the problem occurs.

And what does your laughter mean? Fundamentally it may mean lack of respect; lack of empathy; lack of kindness.

That’s where the line is drawn. Your state of consciousness when you laugh or make fun of me. And how do I know that? Well by your reaction when I say “NO,” it’s not funny!

But why am I angry? What has affronted me? What insult is there to my being? Depends what I take my being to be. Is my identity threatened? So we are back to a state of consciousness. Why would I want to belong to a murderous cult? What has made me so, so, so, so very angry! Clearly it is not the religion you belong to, or your ethnicity or anything at all. I just co-opt anything and everything as grist for the mill, grist for my hatred because I feel so powerless and want to blow the whole world up if possible!

We must be very clear and not resort to false premises that tar everyone – perpetrators and the groups they belong to – with the same brush: All Jews, Muslims, Women, Blacks, etc. This is to resort to the same level we are trying to deal with. No, our anger and pain are camouflaged behind these smokescreens. See Jonathan Freeland.

There is no solution but resort to a higher level of “judgement.” To recognise that both you and I, as we are right now, are infinitely precious (whether Jihadist or not) and we are different. Anything less than that HURTS: It hurts you and it hurts me and it hurts us. How to do that is a long journey. It’s called evolution – for us all. To be human is to be made of the same “stuff” – the stuff that hurts, that wants, that loves. We’re all in It to-get-Her!

Let us love an “other” for love is the highest Judge and those who know not love cannot have true judgement.

Kindness, by Naomi Shihab Nye

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in the white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.

You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I who you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

4 Responses to "No Laughing Matter"

Rosemary Kearney says:

January 12, 2015 at 8:47 am

Dear Chris, Thank you so much for sending me the article in the New Yorker: Unmournable Bodies. [Link here.] I think that the writer and I are saying a similar thing.

Perhaps being South African sensitizes us to the nuances of a pluralist society of all races, creeds, levels of education and cultural backgrounds. (From rural Xhosa to living Khoisan, Scientists, almost illiterate twittering teens, theologically sophisticated Imams and black female CEOs to name but a few). And I do think that at some level we feel our fate is irrevocably tied up with each other – the forces in play require us to engage with the ‘other’. And the whole world is getting more and more that way.

One afternoon a Cultural Institute here in Cape Town hosted a discussion around the uproar that a painting depicting Jacob Zuma (the President of SA) with his genitals exposed with all the symbolism that it represented in our Society of multi-everything, had caused! The threat of violence had forced the Gallery had to close. One of the speakers was Albi Sachs (A constitutional Court Judge – highly respected internationally – who as a ‘terrorist’ in the apartheid era had his eye and arm blown away. While a sophisticated Jew he is also an atheist). On the ‘other’ side were very vociferous and equally sophisticated artists, journalists etc. Of course the latter were outraged by the thought of a curtailment of ‘freedom’ but Albi’s point (which enraged them) was that there are ‘limits’ which in a pluralist society need to be negotiated with respect, understanding even. Not ‘anything goes’. I think that he is such a humanist that people come first, not ideas. And if people can’t or won’t ‘get it’ then one has to work with that – it is a process, not a foregone conclusion of right and wrong.

Albi has written a wonderful book called ‘The Strange Alchemy of Life and Law’ which is a classic of some Legal Judgements he has had to make in that it shows the inner workings of his mind and heart. (So exceptional that he has included insight into the ‘heart’ dimension of THE LAW!) If I were giving a course on a Spiritual Paradigm for human evolution I would use his book as one of the texts!

So as the New Yorker article and I hope mine too suggest, the complexity of these issues at all levels is not a foregone conclusion. Might is not right. We have to work it out, now and now and now with this particular person or these particular people – over and over.

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Christopher Pramuk says:

January 12, 2015 at 12:58 pm

Even the title of the New Yorker article, “Unmournable Bodies,” evokes for me an essential problem at the core of faith and its relationship to social justice, peacemaking, love – i.e. our shared life in the mystery of God beyond all “identity” groupings. What is the relationship between the living and the dead? Whose dead count? Whose dead do we remember? Whose dead do we forget?

Johann Metz calls this the “mystical-political” dimension of Christianity, rising from the dangerous memory of Jesus’ suffering and by extension the authority of all who suffer unjustly, and not just our own: “Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for the universal justice of God that applies to everyone, to the living and dead, to suffering present and past. Passionate interest in this undivided justice of God is a constitutive part of witnessing to God. It is at the same time mystical and political: mystical, because it does not give up its interest in the salvation of past, unreconciled suffering; political, because it is precisely this interest in universal justice that continually commits it to justice among the living.”

The questions you raise in your piece, Rosemary, throw me into the realm of eschatology – life behind the veil of death. Paradoxically, how we envision the realm of the dead seems crucially linked to how we envision relationships among the living. Jesus asks us to build the reign of God “on Earth as it is in Heaven.” How shocked will we all be (“eye has not seen”) to behold what God has in store beyond the veil?

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Rosemary Kearney says:

January 13, 2015 at 11:48 am

Yes, lovely and true. Thank you Chris.

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Charles Martel says:

January 24, 2015 at 9:11 am

I, too, appreciate the link to the article in the New Yorker. It proves once again the almost Pavlovian response liberals have every time Islamofascism spills more blood, which is to defend, deflect, and mitigate. Naturally, the New Yorker “journalist” has to remind us that evil exists outside of radical Islam, particularly in the West. It’s also very helpful to remind us of antiquated Western atrocities like The Inquisition. Instead of focusing on the unique malignancy of radical Islam, let’s say everyone is evil and call it a day. That way no one’s feelings get hurt and no one feels different.

I especially love the duplicitous swipe at Israel in which the the author states “hundreds of children (and more than a dozen journalists) were killed in Gaza by Israel last year.” Holy no context Batman! Yes, in a vacuum, the IDF decided to simply execute hundreds of innocent people just for the hell of it. Oh, never mind they were fighting a defensive war against bloodthirsty Hamas, which routinely threatens journalists for telling the truth and uses children as human shields. Never mind that Israel takes great pains to limit civilian casualties while Hamas stores weapons in schools and hospitals. Nope. Israel kills children. Sounds almost like a good, old fashioned blood libel. Journalists weren’t simply killed in the crossfire of a war. Nope. Israel killed them. In conclusion, the author you linked is a mendacious hypocrite. Context is absolutely necessary to understand the Paris massacre, but not the Hamas-Israel conflict.

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