Of Pranks and Pride and Malicious Mischief (11 Dec. 2012)

             I want to look at a line in the Associated Press's coverage of the December 2012 telephone prank by Australian DJs Mel Greig and Michael Christian, a prank that seems to be at least the occasion of the suicide of Jacintha Saldanha, the nurse who received and forwarded the call: "Whatever pride there had been over" the success of "the hoax was obliterated by worldwide public outrage […]."

            In that sentence, Kristen Gelineau, the author of the AP story, hints at something important.

            In the prank, Greig and Christian impersonated — probably badly — the United Kingdom's Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Phillip and successfully sought information about the condition of the royal granddaughter-in-law, the pregnant Kate Middleton Windsor (so to speak), Duchess of Cambridge, who was hospitalized for acute morning sickness.

            The prank has been called "sophomoric"; Gelineau is more instructive in her use of "pride."

            I'll object to "sophomoric" because college students as well as US high school students go through a sophomore year, and "College is for grownups," or should be, and some maturity should be expected of at least college sophomores.

            "Pride" is more like it because pranks are at the relatively harmless end of practical jokes, and practical jokes pushed far enough get to what's called, significantly, "malicious mischief."

            Shakespeare's tragedy Othello — SPOILER coming up … — ends in a bloodbath (although a restrained one as Jacobean tragedies go), and Greig and Christian, much to the contrary, intended no serious harm. Still, why prank someone at all? Why do people pull practical jokes or go further and do malicious mischief.

            The villain of Othello, the treacherous Iago, speaks about slander, his major method of operation for doing evil in this play. " Good name in man and woman, dear my lord," Iago says to Othello,

Is the immediate jewel of their souls.Who steals my purse steals trash; 'tis something, nothing;'Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands;But he that filches from me my good nameRobs me of that which not enriches him, And makes me poor indeed. (3.3.155-61)

Why would someone slander someone else? Why would any do that "which not enriches him" but "makes me poor indeed"?

            Revenge might be one intelligible reason, and Shakespeare's villainous Shylock is easier to understand than Iago: Shylock bears a grudge and tries to exact bloody, as we say, repayment.

            A revenge explanation doesn't work well for Iago: he's third in command under Othello, probably the greatest general in Europe, and he's reached this position at age twenty-eight. Iago may've hit a pewter ceiling, but for a guy who can't do the math required in the (Early) Modern military, he's doing very well, a hell of a lot better than, say, I was doing at age twenty-eight, and probably a whole lot better than you did or will do. However much Iago may feel slighted now and again, he owes Othello, big.

            Now Iago says he thinks Othello has cuckolded him, but that is really, really unlikely to have happened, and Iago doesn't dwell on that accusation. As the great Shakespearean critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge put it — he wrote some poems, also — as Coleridge put it, Iago's bringing up the idea seems like "the motive-hunting of motiveless Malignity."

            Iago, I think, and have taught, is ticked off at subordination — which we good democrats should sympathize with — and has, let's say, issues with love and with ideals that don't fit into his anti-romantic views of the world (with which we should also sympathize). As dramatic characters go, Shakespeare's included, Iago is one twisted puppy and a complicated guy.

            Relevant here, though, is that he's a trickster, or Trickster-figure, with a capital "T": a prankster with a sense of humor who goes way, way, too far. He's an instructive case at the extreme end of a continuum that's starts near those two unlucky, dumb-ass Aussie DJs.

            Iago's mischief is truly malicious: it stems from malice, which in the old Christian psychology is precisely doing evil without any obvious gain.

            So if you want to seriously condemn the call from the merry Australian pranksters, don't call it sophomoric or immature but say that it begins to border on malice.

            And if you follow through on an analysis of malice, you can at least reach to something basic that we can understand, and that Kristen Gelineau points us at: pride.

            Pride may not be the worst of all sins or the source of all evils (Radix malorum Superbia est), but neither is it the virtue we've made it into today.

            We pull pranks to show how clever we are, to have that moment of trivial glory over other people.

            And sometimes the other people feel serious hurt.

            It may be that Jacintha Saldanha death can't, finally, be attributed to the prank phone call. OK, then we could go back to the suicide of Tyler Clementi and note that in addition to whatever hatred of gays was involved — and that could be minimal — there was much glorying in the embarrassing of another human being.

            Iago sings, ironically, "'Tis pride that pulls the country down" (2.3.90), and that, too, is an exaggeration. But pride is a problem when it moves us to mess over other people for kicks; it is a worse problem when we get into the habit of doing so. A habit of mischief is a serious problem when it overcomes empathy and moves us to find serious joy in embarrassing — thereby hurting — others.

            It's rare that practical jokes lead to tragedy; but far too often they lead to more pain than cheap laughs and tackier thrills can justify.

Poetry and Push-pin, Satire and Sailing (14 March 2014)

[Q]uantities of pleasure being equal, push-pin is as good as poetry.
—Attributed by John Stuart Mill to Jeremy Bentham 

                                                                                                                               Prejudice apart, the game of push-pin is of equal value with […] 

                                                                                                                            music and poetry. If the game of push-pin furnish more pleasure, 

                                                                                                                                it is more valuable than either. Everybody can play at push-pin; 

                                                                                                                                                                 poetry and music are relished only by a few. — 

                                                                                                                                       Jeremy Bentham, The Rationale of Reward (1825) [III.i]  

            
            Push-pin is apparently some sort of kids' game noted for being particularly mindless, perhaps comparable to "Marco Polo" as played by Stewie Griffin on Family Guy; or, to keep John Stuart Mill's brevity and alliteration — although losing his gender-neutrality — we might say, "poetry is no better than pud-pulling."

            "Different strokes / For different folks" ….

            I've been thinking of such matters since retiring from having taught for forty years the largely poetic scripts of William Shakespeare, and such other works as Shakespeare film, the original Buck Rogers stories, Animal House, Blazing Saddles, and South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut.

            And, having a retirement income to live on — younger readers should study up on the concept of "pensions," out of which you have been screwed — having a retirement income to live on, I have entered the film biz and have, among other things, provided fairly extensive Notes to improve a brief scene of a nice young Canadian having his stomach punctured repeatedly by a pick axe. Not coming soon to your local theaters but available on Amazon.com: PSYCHOTICA! (2010), and if the bit about a pick axe would be a spoiler for you for the movie, you really don't watch many slicer-dicers and probably shouldn't watch this one.

            Since retiring I've also had to put up with my annoying best friend Dan's habit of periodically asking me why anyone nowadays should study Shakespeare. Dan, of course, is a serious reader of serious fiction, and, as Captain Dan, teaches the problematically practical art of sailing. If the south-central coast of California is ever attacked by poorly-equipped 17^th-century pirates, Dan can be out there leading the naval attack on them; or, in a somewhat more likely scenario, after a secular Apocalypse, Dan could be running supplies out to the wretched survivors on the Channel Islands, depending only on the winds for power, and the aversion to water of both robots and zombies.

            "Quantities of pleasure being equal," poetry is indeed no better than push-pin or Marco Polo or masturbation or sailing — if, but only if, all we're concerned about is quantity of pleasure.

            That's one standard response to Jeremy Bentham's bit of philistinism, but note that the formulation is "if all one is concerned about" is pleasure. Pleasure counts. Utile et dulce and all that: good art is supposed "to please and instruct," to have some utility — a good word for a Utilitarian like Jeremy Bentham — and give pleasure. If pleasure didn't count, people would do better to just read history or philosophy or self-help books or instruction manuals or, God help us, theology or law books.

            But why give university course credit for studying Shakespeare or Blazing Saddles, usually even more credit than for studying sailing?

            The answer I gave Dan: 'cause it kept me working and getting paid, (schmuck!). The more interesting question, that one out of the way — it costs money to sail with Captain Dan, and he wasn't about to push me on that argument — the more interesting question is what literature and drama and film might be good for, period. Granting that harmless fun needs no excuse, what's useful about plays or movies, or — for most of what I taught — non-technical reading?

            In The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Steven Pinker has recycled an old and unfashionable argument defending literature, but, if it holds up, a very powerful argument. A major part of Pinker's analysis concerns "The Rise of Empathy and the Regard for Human Rights" from the 18^th century on in the West, a crucial phenomenon for what he calls "The Humanitarian Revolution" (ch. 4). And Pinker holds that this phenomenon didn't just follow substantial increases in literacy and the reading of fiction, but to a significant degree was caused by that reading — and, I will add to Pinker's list, by watching and listening to some drama and later film.

            "Reading is a technology for perspective-taking. When someone else's thoughts are in your head" — especially when reading a novel — "you are observing the world from that person's point of view. Not only are you taking in sights and sounds that you could not experience firsthand, but you have stepped inside that person's mind and are temporarily sharing his or her attitudes and reactions" (Penguin pb, 2011: 175). That is, while reading many novels, you are automatically engaging in a kind of empathy; and Pinker argues cogently that a rise of empathy was significant for the elimination or radical reduction — usually and so far! — of most of the casual brutality woven into the fabric of everyday life for almost all of recorded human history.

            And there's more involved than just empathy.

            As an admirer of satirists like Jonathan Swift, Pinker also recognizes that "Exposure to worlds that can be seen only through the eyes of a foreigner, an explorer, or a historian can turn an unquestioned norm ('That's the way it's done') into an explicit observation ('That's what our tribe happens to do now'). This self-consciousness is the first step toward asking whether the practice could be done in some other way" (175).

            As a student of satire and science fiction, I'll add that such "S&SF" works, when they're earning their keep, can be highly effective in an audience's world expansion. As Pinker says, most of us, most of the time accept the world we live in as the world, the only possible world. A study of history or anthropology would disabuse us of that delusion quickly: our ways are far from the only way. History however, often comes with quizzes where the proper little "bubble" to fill in gives "1492" for the Fall of Granada or Christopher Columbus's sailing off and doesn't get you picturing life in a besieged city or what was going through the head of a complex world-changer, and major criminal like Admiral-Governor Columbus. And you may remember from your anthro courses mostly factoids on kinship relations among the clans, phratries, moieties, demes, and what-all of the Tlingit peoples of wherever.

            Good satires and science fictions are fun, and they sucker us into seeing our world from alien points of view and seeing the weirdness of everyday life — or seeing worlds radically different from our own. How would Early Modern European history look to a humane, civilized giant of high intelligence, or to a horse-like creature who was truly a rational animal, a rational animal who had never seen an ill-natured quarrel, much less a war? How would we view human relations after several chapters inside the mind of a highly intelligent creature whose species has always come in three sexes?

            Admittedly, a bad teacher can make Swift's Gulliver's Travel's or Isaac Asimov's The God's Themselves every bit as boring, tedious, and unpleasant as bad teachers can make history or anthropology; but for their original audiences, Gulliver and Asimov were somewhat guilty pleasures, and still can be discovered with delight by curious young readers. Or some young nerds can discover to another kind of delight that there are adults willing to take Asimov and Swift and Animal House and South Park seriously.

            Pinker may be more wrong than right, of course, and the esthetes' and puritans' doctrine may be correct that poetry — and art more generally — accomplishes nothing and/or wastes time better devoted to useful things.

            I don't think so.

            Robert Browning's disreputable monk and great painter Fra Lippo Lippi gives us a look into his world in a dramatic monolog justifying himself and his painting to the Italian Renaissance equivalent of a cop on a late-night beat.

                                  we're made so that we love
First when we see them painted, things we have passed
Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see;
And so they are better, painted — better to us,
Which is the same thing. Art was given for that;
God uses us to help each other so,
Lending our minds out. (lines 300-06)

Art, when it's working, "defamiliarizes" our world and opens up other worlds: "making the familiar strange, and the strange familiar" to paraphrase several lines in S. T. Coleridge's Biographia Literaria (1817: ch. 14). If Pinker and an old tradition are right; if Browning's Lippo is right, and Browning as well, as an author of dramatic monologs — then some forms of art can get us to see the world through other's eyes. That's empathy by definition, which can lead to sympathy; and it offers visions of alternatives.

            So it might be useful to watch and listen to Shakespeare, and perhaps study his scripts, and study and enjoy satire and SF and other arts.

            And, if you're into it, go sailing: quantities of pleasure being equal, sailing is as good as satire reading, plus it's a good way to learn some math and meteorology and the somewhat foreign language of utterly pedantic ways to talk about parts of a boat.