Stephen Colbert and Philosophy - Aaron Allen Schiller [12]
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Formidable Opponent and the Necessity of Moral Doubt
STEVEN GIMBEL
Life imitates art. Sometimes that’s a good thing and sometimes it’s not. In the case of Stephen Colbert’s “Formidable Opponent,” it would be a wonderful thing, if only it would happen. But, alas!
In the last decade, we have seen the criminalization of moral doubt. You have “character” in some ethically important way, the line goes, only if you are resolutely and absolutely determined in every possible moral inclination, that is, only if you are so black and white in your internal deliberations that, in Colbert’s words, you “believe on Wednesday the same thing you believed on Monday, no matter what happened on Tuesday.” Your mind must be closed off to rational arguments from those whose points of view differ from yours in even the most minute fashion if you want to be considered to be serious about your values. Today, nothing worse can be said of you than “He has more flip flops than Jimmy Buffett’s closet.” Ralph Waldo Emerson famously said that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” and these days we are condemned as morally damaged if we don’t resort to having little minds.
And the result is that we’re becoming morally retarded, unable to engage in the real debates that we must have as a functioning democracy. We occupy a place in the world at a time in history where hard questions continually confront us. The only way we can make good decisions is to weigh different approaches. But this is exactly what we don’t do when we retreat to our intellectual fox-holes, only to lob sound bite grenades at our strawman “enemies.”
Indeed, the basic premise of The Colbert Report is to lampoon this lack of authentic consideration of different viewpoints in today’s punditry. Colbert’s character is the essence of the denial of alternate perspectives. “George Bush: great President or the greatest President?” is a flippant way of putting on a bumper sticker the replacement of open-minded, passionate, fair conversation with trite, partisan jingoism. By parodying such narrowness with Colbert’s incredible precision, perhaps they can be shamed into changing. If we take creating a better pundit class as a social goal of the Report, we’re not only shown how bad it is now, but we’re also given a glimpse of how good it could be, a look behind the mask in that one small, occasional segment, Formidable Opponent.
For Colbert, the only opponent he could possibly find formidable, of course, is yet another Stephen Colbert. The shtick consists of two different camera angles such that a blue-tie-wearing Colbert debates a red-tie wearing Colbert. For the joke to work, the dueling Stephens must actually lay out strong arguments for both sides of a contemporary political or ethical issue. We therefore get to see someone confronting his own conflicting moral intuitions. We get to see internal wrestling instead of the sort of faux-certainty that comes from ideology instead of contemplation. We capture a short glance of authentic ethical deliberation the way it really happens in our own minds. There it is on the screen, the thing we need and the thing they are trying to beat out of us. To save America and the world, more of us need to emulate the dueling Stephen Colbert’s in Formidable Opponent.
Moral Doubt
It’s the birthright of every new generation to utter the words, “I remember when Saturday Night Live was funny.” Of course, I actually do remember when Saturday Night Live was funny. “Weekend Update” featured a regular Point-Counterpoint segment with Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtain which was a spoof of the end of 60 Minutes back in the pre-Andy Rooney days which concluded each Sunday with dueling commentaries by conservative James J. Kilpatrick and liberal Shana Alexander. In the Saturday Night Live version, Aykroyd would invariably begin his conservative response to Curtain’s liberal discussion with the famous line “Jane, you ignorant slut.” It was funny. It was outrageous. Surely, no one trying to discuss politics