Countdown to Christmas
5 - Humor
- People who only take themselves too seriously are probably incapable of having a discourse with others that is characterized by openness. Yes, the world can be cruel and terrible, but probably only because there are too many people who are so humorless that they cannot tolerate things that make no sense to them. Thus, humor is one of the preconditions of a free mind.
- Humor in its purest form is based on nonsense.The dogmatic materialist and ideologue does not believe that nonsense can make sense. He thinks he can explain the world in a coherent and perfect system and in the end cannot accept anything that deviates from it even in a smallest degree. He will define people as mechanical figures from which one can create a perfect society. A person with a real sense of humor will always be aware of the incompleteness of human knowledge and consider the world to be unplannable – and probably full of wonderful nonsense. Good and nonsensical humor is the perfect antidote to illiberal ideologies.
Most people only know Gilbert Keith Chesterton as the author of the stories about Father Brown, the Catholic priest who is a master detective as a hobby. Because of this, Chesterton is not always recognized as the great thinker and writer that he was. His funny detective stories also turn out to be very profound upon closer inspection. For him, as he showed in his essay A Defense of Nonsense, humor was not a sign of lack of seriousness. The opposite of humor is not seriousness, but “no humor.” Nonsense is pure humor. Only through him can the world have a meaning that can be believed. Chesterton - a converted Catholic - related this to religion which always ends up being something "scientifically nonsensical", although one should still live by it seriously. This serious and undogmatical recognition of the place of nonsense in the world should not only be applied to religion. Anyone, especially the liberal, should from time to time, dream of the „idea of escape, of escape into a world where things are not fixed horribly in an eternal appropriateness, where apples grow on pear-trees, and any odd man you meet may have three legs“, as Chesterton recommends in his essay.
