Stephen Colbert and Philosophy - Aaron Allen Schiller [55]
The regular segment, The WØRD, shows that every concept has an equal and opposite (and hilarious) counter-concept. This makes our concepts unstable and allows the audience to either suspend judgment or deny the coherence of such concepts. As fans of The Report know, The WØRD features Stephen’s usual pundit-style monologue on one side of the screen with a written commentary, usually satirizing Stephen’s monologue, on the other. Consider The WØRD segment on “wikiality.”109 Stephen asks, “Who is Britannica to tell me that George Washington had slaves?” and the commentary reads, “Wikipedia can tell a lie.” This opposes a rhetorical question meant to establish wikiality with a satirical comment meant to undermine the whole idea of wikiality. According to wikiality, Wikipedia can’t possibly tell a lie, since Wikipedia is itself the standard of truth. To suggest that Wikipedia can tell a lie is to undermine wikiality.
A more blatant example of this skeptical opposition occurs when Stephen claims that Africa has more elephants today than it did ten years ago (the commentary reads, “Babar getting busy”). Stephen says, “I don’t know if that’s actually true” while the commentary simply reads, “It isn’t.” In another example, Stephen says, “What we’re doing is bringing democracy to knowledge” and the commentary claims, “Definitions will greet us as liberators.” Here the skeptical intent is a bit more subtle, but the idea is the same: to deflate the concept investigated in The WØRD by removing the hot air pumped into it by talking heads such as, well, Stephen Colbert. Sometimes Stephen means to make us suspend judgment in a Pyrrhonian fashion, but most of the time I think he has in mind something more akin to Indian skepticism in showing the incoherence of the concept in question.
But, some astute reader might object, doesn’t this just show that Stephen is a smart-ass rather than any kind of dour philosophical skeptic? Could anything so serious really be happening at Comedy Central? Wouldn’t the network executives be mad if they found out that viewers were exposed to philosophy during prime time? The ratings would plummet!
As a comedian, Stephen’s “real” motives are hard to pin down, because his first loyalty is to what makes us laugh rather than any program of philosophical insight or philosophically induced happiness. But then the motives of philosophical skeptics—especially of Pyrrhonists and Indian skeptics—are not always so easy to pinpoint either. Sometimes they deliberately contradict themselves and don’t seem to put forward any real positions on anything. To make matters more complicated, it seems that Stephen Colbert the person has different motives than Stephen Colbert the host of The Colbert Report. But whether he’s a skeptic or not, Stephen (both as a person and as a character) is surely a smart-ass, and a damn funny one at that. Perhaps I will simply take Pyrrhonian advice for now and suspend judgment about the philosophical motives of Stephen’s shenanigans.
Skeptical Politics: Where’s the Commitment?
Recall that political skepticism denies that we can have knowledge on political matters and often leads to cynicism and inaction. It’s hard to see how other kinds of skeptics could have much in the way of full-blooded knowledge about politics either. If we don’t know, for example, that our political outlook is the right one, how could we possibly be committed to any form of political ideals or have a basis for political action? If thousands of South Carolinians didn’t know that Stephen deserved to be on the ballot for the 2008 Presidential Primary, why would they bother signing the petition to get him on the ballot? If the majority of the South Carolina Democratic executive council members didn’t know that Stephen wasn’t “a serious candidate” then why would they have refused to add his name to the ballot?
This basic problem of skepticism and political commitment isn’t new. Pyrrhonian skeptics