Stephen Colbert and Philosophy - Aaron Allen Schiller [32]
What is most remarkable is not simply that Colbert affirms law and order over flexibility, play and independent thought. Rather it’s the zeal with which he plays at the contemporary culture wars, the absolute delight he takes opposing “The War on Christmas,” “The War on Easter,” and all other things threatened by “Big Secularism” (I Am America, p. 62). Or to be more precise: because Colbert plays so well at the puritan/fundamentalist vice of “hating sin more than loving the good,” he proves the importance of play to political culture.
Because Colbert is playing rather than actually fighting, the humanity underlying both sides of conflict is affirmed. In a sense (surely lost on Bill O’Reilly), Colbert’s character is the best friend the blustering pundits on Fox News could have; he reveals their folly, but in a way that is not hateful. Colbert appears a “well-intentioned … idiot,” but surely not one deserving of hellfire. Even as he spews faux ill-will, we in the “Nation” love Colbert and are thus humanized. In playing we overcome our sinful lack of friendliness and learn to love the good more than we hate sin.
In this sense the Report proves Erasmus’s radical claim that there’s virtue in play itself. We might even say that Colbert “saves” in a manner similar to that of Erasmus’s Christ. Neither literally “takes away” our sin, but rather, by playing at sin, the character Colbert embodies a fallen nature and helps us to identify our own shortcomings. Playing at sin he demonstrates the all too human preference for one’s own self and the all too common confusion of one’s own particularity with wider universality and/or the common good.
When Colbert’s character undertakes a beneficent project of eugenics, boldly promoting the sale of his own “man-seed,” it is so ridiculous it is impossible to hate him. When he claims “not to see race” and simultaneously boasts about his one “black friend,” the “Nation” pauses to mark the unwarranted self-congratulations offered to a country many of whose citizens are incapable of empathizing with or even perceiving a reality impacting millions.69 Perhaps the example which best captures the psychological, political, and philosophical implications of Colbert’s characteristic embodiment of the sin of self-related myopia occurred on February 1st, 2007, when Colbert worried out loud that he might be attracted to Ellen DeGeneres’s dancing at the Oscars.70 He inspired the “Nation” to investigate and report on Wikiality, the online “truthiness” encyclopedia, regarding the “scientific phenomenon” of the “The Ellen DeGeneres Parodox”: “the confused state arising when a heterosexual man (with repressed homosexual tendencies) feels attracted to a lesbian, but only when she dances”71 With a brilliant riff on Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, the Wikiality entry characteristically engages the subjectivity of truth in a manner that speaks to the dangers of fundamentalist prejudice. As observation itself necessary alters our perception of phenomena, it is difficult to make precise calculation of one’s location on the “gaydar spectrum” (“delusions of gaydeur” or “ubergay”?). This is certainly true and a politically relevant and psychologically astute intervention into the culture wars in the spirit of Erasmus’s humanism. It reminds us that we need not give our freedom up to a fixed system or dogmatic