Stephen Colbert and Philosophy - Aaron Allen Schiller [3]
From his bully pulpit behind his C-shaped desk, faux-pundit and right-wing-blowhard Stephen Colbert fights four nights a week for the American way. He doesn’t just report the news to us—he feels the news at us. He opines on the issues of the day in the WØRD segment, talks to politicians in Better Know a District, tells us what we should fear in The ThreatDown, speaks directly to his own in Colbert Platinum, and nails guests nightly against the backdrop of his own portrait. Yet despite it all, though Colbert may speak the language of truthiness, his fans see through it to the penetrating truth.
And speaking of fans, Stephen Colbert has a rabid following: The Colbert Nation. Like an army of holy warriors ready to take up arms at a moment’s notice, members of The Nation—otherwise known as the “Heroes”—faithfully answer Colbert’s calls to action. Whether it’s to complete one of Colbert’s Green Screen Challenges, or to make things a bit more “truthy” on some Wikipedia entry, the dedication that the Nation shows their fearless leader would make any dictator jealous.
But Colbert isn’t just a pop culture phenomenon. Philosophers love him, too. This isn’t just because philosophers, like all academics, are a bunch of left-wing elitists. (I’m looking at you, Noam Chomsky.) It’s because Colbert regularly plays around with concepts that are near and dear to the philosopher’s heart, concepts such as Truth and Reality. In fact, let me hazard a prediction here and say that from this day forth no philosophical tract on the nature of Truth will be complete without some consideration to the concept of Truthiness. And who cares about Reality now that we have Wikiality?
Not only that, but for a philosopher, who so prides him or herself on clear, logical thinking, trying to follow Colbert’s reasoning can be a bit like watching a train wreck. But a beautiful train wreck. Colbert tortures logic like Mozart writes symphonies: with seemingly effortless grace and charm. I guess what I’m saying is that Colbert is the Mozart of bad arguments.
Now just as you don’t need to be a musician to appreciate Mozart, you don’t need to be a philosopher to appreciate Stephen Colbert, as the sheer size of Colbert’s fan base will attest. If you too find grace and charm in Colbert’s tortured logic, or if the concepts of truthiness or wikiality get under your skin but you’re not quite sure why, this book was written for you.
FIRST SEGMENT
The WØRD: First Principles of Colbertian Philosophy
1
Colbert, Truthiness, and Thinking from the Gut
DAVID KYLE JOHNSON
Every night on my show, the Colbert Report, I speak straight from the gut… . I give people the truth, unfiltered by rational argument.
—Stephen Colbert, White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, April 29th, 2006
As we all know (and love), during the opening moments of his first show, Colbert coined the word “Truthiness.” In doing so, he captured his entire intellectual philosophy. Something is truthy for me if that thing feels true to me. Someone who is satisfied believing something based on its truthiness thinks with his gut. This is what Colbert does. And, according to Colbert, he is not alone. George W. Bush is a gut-thinker. As Colbert said on his first show:
If you think about Harriet Miers, of course her nomination is absurd. But the president didn’t say he “thought” about his selection. He said this: “I know her heart.” Notice how he said nothing about her brain? He didn’t have to. He feels the truth about Harriet Miers. And what about Iraq? If you think about it, maybe there are a few missing pieces to the rationale for war. But doesn’t taking Saddam out feel like the right thing—right here, right here in the gut?1
Colbert identifies Bush as a gut-thinker, but he owes his own combative personality and extreme opinions to the gut-thinking conservative pundit class, to cable TV news hosts like Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, and the countless AM radio talk show hosts who keep the