Monty Python and Philosophy, Gary Hardcastle [portable ebook reader TXT] 📗

filter out about these matters. We are reluctant to see our own behaviors as systematically wrong, and, like it or not, we have a tendency to normalize the values of our own social framework. For example, a world in which women are systematically barred from using certain occupational skills is one in which they will tend to be seen both by men and women as less capable of exercising those skills. We all, now, see what was wrong with slavery or witch-burning, but when these practices were in force they were seen as normal by nearly all involved. So reflective equilibrium, when conducted as a variant of personal meditation, gets us only so far. Getting to the full truth requires that we have an array of interlocutors: people with different perspectives who can challenge our biases and help us to transcend the limits of our own efforts. When women entered the debate about women’s status in society they presented arguments and perspectives that were not previously in play, and which the men involved in the debate may not have been able, or at least may not have bothered, to imagine. The wider the participation in reflective equilibrium, the more likely the process is, other things being equal, to lead us toward the truth.

This brings us back to the Argument Clinic. One’s own perspective on moral, and other, matters is necessarily limited. This doesn’t mean that one is completely stuck in one’s own perspective; one can, and should, think as far beyond it as one can. But often, one needs help: someone or, preferably, many people, to present alternatives, with whom one can then uncover agreement and disagreement. Mere contradiction, entertaining as it is to a pantomime audience, simply does not serve this purpose.

This philosophical point also tells us something about Monty Python’s humor and why many people find both Monty Python and thought-experiments ludicrous when they first encounter them. Good thought experiments have a great deal in common with good absurd sketches, of the kind the Python team excels in (and, I think, the kind of creativity required to produce them is very similar). They both depend on an internal logic, which may look absurd from the outside. So the Pet Shop owner in the Parrot Sketch (Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Episode 8, “Full Frontal Nudity”) has at his fingertips a huge array of alternative possibilities to the Norwegian Blue being dead; and the customer has an equally rich array of ways of making the point that the parrot is, in fact, dead. The structure of the sketch depends on this contrast, and the pieces of the sketch have to fit together. Thought experiments and Python sketches also both depend on a connection with the world. The thought experiment has to be connected in a way that isolates the intuitive judgments that are at issue; the absurdist sketch has to connect with some aspect of the audience’s experience enough so that it is possible to suspend disbelief for the duration of the sketch. And, in fact, some sketches are themselves rather like thought experiments; they say “Of course, this couldn’t happen or isn’t going to happen. But let’s ask what would make sense if it did happen.” The “Argument Clinic” works better than it otherwise would precisely because, as I am arguing, argument—much more than mere contradiction or abuse—engages us aesthetically as well as intellectually.

Far from being absurd, then, it is entirely sensible to go to an argument clinic (as the client understands it). If one has strong ideas about parrots, it may even make sense to go to Michael Palin’s pet shop. If we are committed to uncovering the truth about matters of human value or other matters of great complexity, we usually need other smart, good-willed, and intellectually serious people to alert us to perspectives and reasons we would not have been able to conjure up on our own. If more people sought argument clinics the world would be a better place, and not only because philosophers would be richer.

6

A Very Naughty Boy: Getting Right with Brian

RANDALL E. AUXIER

How I Was Saved

Let’s start by just facing it. We’re all sinners—not me so much as you, because I’ve actually done pretty well, but I could stand a bit of regeneration and I can see that you are in real trouble with you-know-Who. He told me so Himself, last night, over a bottle of Two-Buck-Chuck. He likes cheap wine because, well, He loves a bargain. Here is the point. I have a message for you from Him, so listen up: “You are to regard the following essay as revealed, on peril of your eternal soul” (and if you are reading this, I’m sure the peril is quite real). I don’t ask any more of you than would any other inspired being.

How came I to possess such particular favor with He-Who-cannot-be-named? I was a delinquent of fourteen, wandering down a street in Memphis, when a small band of renegade Baptists sidled up to me, sincerely inquiring as to the likely destination of my soul.27 I said I was late to meet my dealer. They were undeterred. I told them he would be armed and dangerous, and that he was a Methodist. That just encouraged them. They said that if I would pray a simple prayer with them and ask Brian into my heart, my life would be changed, Brian would take away my sins and save me a seat on that Great Greyhound to Chicago (you can’t go to hell or heaven without a layover in Chicago). I could see these were no ordinary Baptists. These fellows had something. That was long ago, and many things have been revealed to me since, including the actual code for the Microsoft Operating System, which I now know to have come directly from Satan. I stand before you today an altered man, yes, some of it was surgical, but some came by direct action of the Almighty.