Stephen Colbert and Philosophy - Aaron Allen Schiller [77]
Socrates worried that Athenians were “swollen and festering” with feverish ambitions and a perverted standard of excellence. They measured their city’s power and well-being by the size of its navy and the strength of its economy (Gorgias 519a). For Socrates this was a tragic mistake. We should be more concerned, he said, with truth and wisdom and the care of our souls than we are with wealth, glory, and imperial conquest. He told his fellow Athenians they were attached to mere shadows on the wall of the cave—wealth and glory were fool’s gold compared to virtue and knowledge—but they couldn’t understand him and didn’t like the alternative lifestyle he recommended. In the end it cost them their empire. At the height of the thirty-year Peloponnesian War, instead of moderating their passions as Socrates recommended, Athenians overreached. Thucydides says Athenians greedily wanted everlasting pay from Sicilian slaves, and access to Sicily’s trees for their navy. When they failed to conquer Sicily in 415 B.C., they lost their resolve in the war and never recovered.
Socrates encouraged Athenians to adopt new ideals for their city because he hoped to change the mindset that led Athens into war with Sparta in the first place. Their failures in war, he thought, were a product of their excessive consumption at home. Part of what Socrates was up to, in other words, was the re-education of Athenian desire.
Writing on the Walls of the Cave
If Socrates started the philosophical tradition of critiquing and emancipating culture, and if Stephen Colbert is America’s Socrates, then we need to determine what Colbert is critiquing and what he is suggesting we change to make our lives better. Is Colbert, like Socrates, critiquing his country’s values and pointing beyond them toward higher ones? Is that how he shares in the Socratic tradition of philosophy? Provided we can trust the sincerity and accuracy of Colbert’s out of character remarks, then yes. Consider what he said out of character in a revealing interview with Charlie Rose.
Jon deconstructs the news, and he’s ironic and detached. I falsely construct the news and am ironically attached… . Jon may point out the hypocrisy of a particular thing happening in a news story or the behavior of somebody in the news. I illustrate the hypocrisy as a character. (Colbert on Charlie Rose, December 8th, 2006)
This tells us a lot. Jon Stewart and Colbert share an interest in unveiling the hypocrisy of the media and the culture that the media helps create. Their notorious downplaying and suggestions to the contrary are just ironic posturing. If we put this in terms of Plato’s cave allegory, Jon Stewart is among the cave dwellers talking about the shadows on the cave wall and inviting everyone to look beyond the charade, while Colbert is on the wall, as a shadow, trying to cause the charade to come unraveled by undermining it from within.
If Colbert is “ironically attached” to the “false” news he constructs, and “illustrating” the hypocrisy of American culture as a character, doesn’t that suggest he is critiquing all things American by embracing them? He is America, after all. If he’s an ironist, embodying the hypocrisy he wants to expose and undermine, doesn’t that mean his professed loves are a direct but inverted reflection of his true loves? And if so, doesn’t that mean he secretly hates America? Could it be? Could it be that Stephen Colbert, America’s favorite son, actually hates America?
If so, new questions arise here. Colbert says he illustrates hypocrisies as a character. But which hypocrisies, and how does he illustrate them?
Let’s watch Colbert in action and take a closer look at how his character “illustrations” work. In his interview with Caitlin Flanagan, the anti-feminist author of To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife, Colbert employs one of the ironist’s most piercing argumentative tools—the mirror.