The Politics of Wit II

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

The Politics of Wit II

This panel is the second of two featuring papers that have been solicited as part of a symposium on the virtue of wit, invited for submission to the Political Science Reviewer at the end of 2019. The contributions on this panel focus on sources from early modern thought and the Anglo-American tradition.

The inspiration for the symposium derives from the observation that our current political situation is one in which there seems to be an absence of the virtue of wit of the kind that would be exhibited among free citizens within a healthy polity. As Aristotle tells us in the Eudemian Ethics, where and when a virtue is absent, one should expect to find its related deficiencies and excesses alike simultaneously in abundance. To be sure, we find much humorlessness in public discourse today. Joking is portrayed as an affront, evidence of complicity with a perpetuation of injustice on the part of malicious and ignorant persons. At the same time, what remains of what passes for humor often takes the form of thinly veiled hostility. Politicians and entertainers alike seem mostly concerned with deploying wit as part of a strategy for proving how right they are and how contemptuous those with whom they disagree happen to be. The technological orientation of modern society may well be partly to blame for setting the conditions under which this situation arises. When there is an expectation that the establishment of systemic justice is a real possibility, and the job of politics is to find solutions for all of our problems—which is to say, when people believe that tragedy can be abolished and it is reasonable to expect comical outcomes if only ignorant and malevolent persons are overcome—humor becomes acceptable and useful only insofar as it may be weaponized by one’s own side, to serve as another force with which to defeat one’s enemies. Increasingly democratic conditions combined with the perception of mounting oligarchical threats may further contribute to the deterioration of wit.

The contributions to this panel are not asked to subscribe to the views above that inspired this symposium, but they have been tasked with revisiting the history of political thought in order to retrieve and articulate an understanding of the role of the virtue of within political society and as a quality that belongs to admirable or happy persons.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 1: Political Thought and Philosophy: Historical Approaches

Cosponsor

• Related Groups / Eric Voegelin Society

Individual Presentations

• Francis Bacon and Wit as Political Virtue - Kimberly Hurd Hale, Coastal Carolina University; Erin A Dolgoy, Rhodes College

• The Mundane Comedy of Thomas Hobbes - Travis D. Smith, Concordia University

• Benjamin Franklin’s Comical Religious Skepticism - Geoffrey Kellow, Carleton University

• A Discriminating Irreverence: Arnold and Twain on Democratic Culture and Humor - Joel A. Johnson, Augustana University

Chair

• John Michael Parrish Loyola Marymount University

Discussant

• Bernard J. Dobski Assumption College