Philosophy in The Simpsons
Friday, May 26, 2006
Via Arts and Letters Daily, I have encountered an interesting analysis of the popular cartoon series, The Simpsons called, "The Simpsons as Philosophy". Julian Baggini, its author, makes several very good points in his essay, but his overall picture is fundamentally flawed.
I have always been ambivalent about The Simpsons. On the one hand, the cartoon is often brilliant satire. On the other, I have always found its portrayal of the Simpsons insulting because the family is clearly meant to portray the fundamental nature of its audience. The general feel I get from this is not even the occasionally appropriate message, "Don't take yourself too seriously." Instead, it's "Never take yourself seriously at all." Why? Because we're all a bunch of incompetent boobs, and our ideals are nothing better than rationalizations for our true, and very banal, motives. Sorry, but I refuse to think of myself as Homer Simpson.
On the points that the Simpsons is sometimes brilliant philosophical satire, and that its message is that we are an absurd species living in an absurd world, Baggini fully agrees with me. He states these points in reverse order early in his essay, because he is hoping to make the latter point himself.
We now know we're just a bunch of naked apes trying to get on as best we can, usually messing things up, but somehow finding life can be sweet all the same. All delusions of a significance that we do not really have need to be stripped away, and nothing can do this better that the great deflater: comedy.Where Baggini and I differ is on this point: He agrees that life and humanity are absurd to the point of reveling in the absurdity, whereas I disagree.
The Simpsons does this brilliantly, especially when it comes to religion. It's not that the Simpsons is atheist propaganda; its main target is not belief in God or the supernatural, but the arrogance of particular organised religions that they, amazingly, know the will of the creator.
For example, in the episode Homer the Heretic, Homer gives up church and decides to follow God in his own way: by watching the TV, slobbing about and dancing in his underpants. [bold added]
The origin of this difference of opinion lies in the fundamentally different philosophical outlooks Baggini and I hold. And while I have never heard of Baggini before, and would not have been able to say anything at all about his philosophical views off the top of my head, his essay is unusually frank for something from the popular press. Baggini very conveniently spells out his epistemological beliefs for us!
Baggini's views on epistemology become apparent when he attempts to explain what he calls a "rich philosophical worldview":
Revealing simple truths about simplistic falsehoods is not just a minor philosophical task, like doing the washing up at Descartes' Diner while the real geniuses cook up the main courses.This will sound very reasonable to most readers because it assumes and alludes to the inductive nature of human knowledge, that we can neither just make baseless, arbitrary statements to the effect that we know the will of God (or that there is one), nor deduce the whole of an objective worldview from first principles. (These are the two most common fundamental philosophical errors out there, and many, including perhaps Baggini, seem convinced that we are forced to choose between these two false alternatives.)
For when it comes to the relevance of philosophy to real life, all the commitments we make on the big issues are determined by considerations which are ultimately quite straightforward.
Pointillist paintings, such as this by Seurat, use thousands of tiny dots. A rich philosophical worldview is in this sense like a pointillist picture - one of those pieces of art in which a big image is made up of thousands of tiny dots (see Seurat image, right). Its building blocks are no more than simple dots, but the overall picture which builds up from this is much more complicated.
Yet we need reminding that the dots are just dots, and that errors are made more often not by those who fail to examine the dots carefully enough, but those who become fixated by the brilliance or defects of one or two and who fail to see how they fit into the big picture. [bold added]
However, "commitments" on "big issues" are not insignificant parts of a greater whole, like the dots on a Seurat painting. A consistent thinker will see that the implications of any such "commitment" will affect his notions on other things. An inconsistent thinker will not -- but he has already decided a fundamental issue for himself: that he does not have to think in order to live. The rest of his life will be lived on the whim of the moment or based on premises absorbed passively from those around him (really the same thing, in effect). The pieties he mouths, consistent or not, will not really count as parts of a "worldview" since he will not really understand what they mean.
The butchers of September 11, 2001 made a "commitment" on the "big issue" of whether there is a God, and on what he thought they should do. They were consistent and they acted on it because the answers they reached on fundamental issues affected the whole picture for them. On the other hand, slothful bumblers like Homer Simpson appear to be inconsistent. They muddle through on whim and on premises absorbed passively from others. Fundamentally, the murder-bombers and Homer Simpson represent two fundamental types: someone who seeks knowledge through faith, and someone who views knowledge as unattainable at all. Both fail to ground their worldviews on objective reality. And both see the entire course of their lives affected by their "commitment" on the "big issue" of epistemology! Some dot.
The notion that the various and mutually contradictory views the Homers spout represent a rich -- much less coherent -- picture is wishful thinking at best. As Ayn Rand pointed out in Philosophy: Who Needs It, whether one chooses to be consistent or not, he will live in accordance with a philosophy -- and whether he can explicitly name his fundamental premises or not.
And so, in stating the point that answers to major philosophical issues are irrelevant, Baggini has stated his allegiance to a subjectivist viewpoint, and to the notion that systematically considering ideas is irrelevant. Unsurprisingly, this leads him to the following nihilistic conclusion.
Another reason why cartoons are the best form in which to do philosophy is that they are non-realistic in the same way that philosophy is.Note that Baggini "richly" contradicts himself in the first two sentences of this quote. According to him, this should not make us doubt that his philosophical conclusions about reality, even though he himself regards philosophy as "non-realistic". And what does he regard as "non-realistic"? Abstraction, which is what man's conceptual faculty does. If you wanted a more explicit rejection of man's ability to reach the truth through reason, you just about couldn't ask for one.
Philosophy needs to be real in the sense that it has to make sense of the world as it is, not as we imagine or want it to be. But philosophy deals with issues on a general level. It is concerned with a whole series of grand abstract nouns: truth, justice, the good, identity, consciousness, mind, meaning and so on.
Cartoons abstract from real life in much the same way philosophers do. Homer is not realistic in the way a film or novel character is, but he is recognisable as a kind of American Everyman. His reality is the reality of an abstraction from real life that captures its essence, not as a real particular human who we see ourselves reflected in. [bold added]
But Baggini is on to something when he says the following.
The satirical cartoon world is essentially a philosophical one because to work it needs to reflect reality accurately by abstracting it, distilling it and then presenting it back to us, illuminating it more brightly than realist fiction can.This is, in fact why Ayn Rand presented much of her philosophy in the form of novels. Man's mind does not exist in a vacuum, nor does he live in one. To reach objective truth, even -- the adverb is for Bagginis's benefit -- in philosophy, requires a process of abstraction, integration, and the formation and testing of further conclusions against reality -- of induction. And so, as a presenter of a philosophy, Rand did not merely present arguments. She provided examples in support of these arguments.
So Baggini is correct that this cartoon is good at presenting philosophical ideas to an audience by concretizing them. But then, it is a cartoon, where each episode is independent of the others, and the long-range and real-world consequences of much of what goes on do not obtain. Instead, we "reset" with each new episode, just as Wile E. Coyote would get up every time he fell off a cliff or blew himself up chasing the Roadrunner every Saturday morning when I grew up.
In other words, if you want to convince someone that they can't think, make fun of brazen mistakes day in and day out -- to generalize the notion that all "commitments" on "big issues" are absurd -- but magically bring the Simpsons back as they were before on the next week to keep your viewer from wondering how these boobs manage to remain alive at all -- to see why they must think. Compare this to the time scale of years in another work of art, Atlas Shrugged.
And so art can be used to make a philosophy easier or harder to understand (to the extent that it does or does not name principles honestly and explicitly), and easier or harder to absorb (via induction) for its audience. Ayn Rand's novels explain and make it easier for their readers to understand and absorb Objectivism, a philosophy that champions reason as a means of truly understanding the world and of leading one's life. Matt Groening's The Simpsons foists nihilism on its audience by explicitly lampooning specific beliefs, but implicitly lampooning man's rational faculty.
I found Baggini's essay both thought-provoking for its insight into the ability of art to communicate abstract principles and fundamentally flawed for its own support of the incorrect ideas implicitly advanced by The Simpsons. Baggini seems to argue that philosophical ideas should not be evaluated like points ripped out of context, but yet this is precisely what he argues we should do, as evidenced by his anaology of Pointilism.
A more accurate analogy would be that certain "big issues" are not single points, but the materials -- like canvas, paint, and the artist's own effort -- that make the art possible at all, and that a bad decision about any of these can ruin the whole picture. Indeed, Baggini's own decision to use this analogy, far from being a little dot in an otherwise good essay, trandforms his essay into a monstrous attack on reason disguised as a puff piece on a popular show. In the process, he has inadvertently demonstrated that his overall point is completely wrong.
The bigger lesson is that in the marketplace of ideas, as in any other, Caveat emptor.
-- CAV
17 comments:
This reminds me...have you ever seen the episode of The Simpsons where they portray Rand in a more than negative light? Its almost depressing.
http://www.answers.com/topic/a-streetcar-named-marge
-Daniel
Daniel,
No, but I had once heard of it and even thought of it while writing this, but since I was in a hurry, I didn't look for the link. Thanks for pointing that out.
GJ,
South Park is similar, although less nihilistic. Its creators are (mostly) secular conservatives and will occasionally make positive points in their cartoons, which is something I really never see in the Simpsons.
To view your link, I'm going to have to upgrade my Flash player, which I don't have time to fool with at the moment....
My past experience has been that whether a reference to Rand is positive or negative is anyone's guess. (Incidentally, two negative examples come to mind. Both South Park and Dirty Dancing flashed covers of Rand novels briefly in order to slam Objectivism.)
Gus
Sorry, but I refuse to think of myself as Homer Simpson.
Ah, but Homer Simpson doesn't think of himself as Homer Simpson.
Curtis,
Well! What else can I say to that but, "D'oh!"
Gus
Yo, Gus, you write: "On the other, I have always found its portrayal of the Simpsons insulting because the family is clearly meant to portray the fundamental nature of its audience." Odd, I never got that impression. Rather, Springfield always struck me as many of the most common tropes or stereotypical characters in American pop culture sharpened to an extreme; the satire is helped by the fact that if the audience (and Americans generally) really were like the stereotypes, we'd all be doomed. It's not that we're expected to identify with the denizens of Springfield so much as recognize them as fixtures of our culture; they're models for whom you might have a great deal of sympathy or none at all (which can have a great effect on how funny you find a given episode), but only rarely and then only to a certain extent are they real characters. Of course, since The Simpsons restricts itself to taking stereotypes to the absurd extreme rather than (for the most part) humor growing out of distinctive characters, there's not much of a way to present a positive alternative. And really, would you want to see one from Matt Groening?
Adrian,
I'm not sure we're asked to identify with the characters anyway, nor that it matters. There are no positive characters there, and so a viewer can dismiss it as only satire, which is where I am when I do watch it, accept its only plausible message (as Baggini does), or assume the rather Homeric posture of "Boy, everyone is stupid except me."
This is not to denigrate your points as to why the satire works. Evil is, ultimately, impotent. For the Simpsons to have become as successful as it has, it has to have done something right, and the satire would be it.
And as to whether Groening intends (as I said) to use his show to convey his audience as he sees them, I was likely off the mark there. Certainly, someone so incapable of portraying the positive probably is something of a misanthrope. On further reflection, we have somewhere between the extremes of a man with a dim view of humanity mocking the whole lot of them and a man so philosophically muddled as to be incapable of formulating a positive alternative. I lean towards the former, and if you thought the former to be true, you'd see no need to do anything but mock.
In any case, whether we have bitterness showing through or a "merely" complete lack of the positive, the only "lesson" one can draw from the Simpsons is the one Baggini draws -- that we're a race of buffoons.
Does Groening intend to portray us all as a bunch of idiots? Who knows? But I don't think it unreasonable to conclude that he thinks we are, or that he is, in the main, a nihilist. And, just as the work of any artist will reflect elements of his philosophical convictions, so do Groening's cartoons reflect his nihilism. And this is pretty much why I watch the Simpsons only once in a blue moon.
-- CAV
I watch Simpsons more than once in a blue moon -- but usually only the syndicated broadcasts rather than eagerly awaiting Sunday evenings!
In fact, along with Seinfeld, I think it is one of two of the best television shows our culture has produced. Their logic is similar, and, Gus, I wouldn't be at all surprised if you were to present a critique of Seinfeld reminiscent of this critique. Interestingly enough, Seinfeld presents an almost (but of course not quite, or not direct) Objectivist slant, since the characters are so motivated for "selfish" reasons. Just like the Simpsons, of course. Their problem is that they do not act with a clear understanding of objective reality -- and that's where the humor comes.
SO. Incidentally, I think that the great appeal of Simpsons may be its message of "family matters." Whatever queer things beset the family, and whatever dumb things they do, they almost always draw together in the end, and the "real" characterizations Adrian mentions almost always come through at those points. Even Homer recognizes his Homerness from time to time, after accidentally hurting his family.
SO. It's that crazy world of Springfield, and all its absurdities and absurd characters, that are ultimately rejected when the Simpsons come together as a family: the family remains the same (A=A), is resilient, throughout the ordeals which occur when crazy Springfield intrudes on the family dynamic to lead one of them astray.
Sure, the satire no doubt inspires nihilists and leftists who are anti-everything; but it is this family resiliency that may appeal even to anti-nihilists of a more conservative (but open-minded) bent. Perhaps it is even the conservative deep within the leftist that is enamored of the family dynamics, ultimately.
Curtis,
I have to start by stating that I disagree that either of these series has an "Objectivist slant".
I wouldn't say that the characters in either the Simpsons or Seinfeld have selfish motivations because this would require exactly what you admit is missing on their part: a clear understanding of reality, which would include understanding their nature as human beings and the requirements of their lives. Meaning: They have to act in accordance with certain principles, discoverable by reason, to qualify as acting selfishly. (And by "selfish", I emphatically do NOT mean the popular meanings of "sacrificing others to self" or of "acting hedonistically", but in the sense of the term espoused by Ayn Rand, as you should know.)
The short-range pursuit of pleasure at the expense of more important long-range values is *not* selfish in this sense, but self-sacrificial. And if a sacrifice is a renunciation of one value (one's life in this case) for another, lesser value, that point should be nearly obvious.
I have often heard people assert something to the effect of, "Doesn't everyone ultimately behave selfishly?" (And I am almost certain that an Objectivist (if not Ayn Rand herself) wrote an essay with something like "Isn't everyone selfish" as a title. The answer is NO. This is why Ayn Rand wrote an entire book on the *Virtue of Selfishness*. Ethical behavior geared towards self-preservation (a necessary reduandancy on my part) is not some sort of automatic default because man has no instincts.
Having said all of that, the reilience of the family makes as little sense in the Simpsons as Wile E. Coyote getting up and walking after he falls from a cliff. A healthier reaction to a relative repeatedly causing harm is to strike out on one's own. In both cases, it's a deus ex machina that allows the empty fun of the cartoon series to go on.
The Simpsons is often good satire, but offering nothing that makes any sense as positive, it is very unsatisfying at its best.
Gus
Yo, Gus, you write: "And as to whether Groening intends (as I said) to use his show to convey his audience as he sees them, I was likely off the mark there. Certainly, someone so incapable of portraying the positive probably is something of a misanthrope." True, but one thing about The Simpsons is that it's not all Groening's bailiwick; the writers and voice actors have a lot of influence on the final product. The script is put in something like a final form, mailed to the actors for practice, then vetted around a table by the actors, writing staff, and producers, who hammer out what's funniest to the entire staff, not just Groening. Also, the actors have a lot of influence over what they say, in the name of keeping a coherent character, or at least as coherent as a bundle of incoherent or contradictory stereotypes like Homer Simpson can be. (I'm going by what I read in My Life as a Ten-Year-Old Boy by Nancy Cartwright, the voice of Bart Simpson and several of the other kids. She's a charming, funny, light-hearted, and apparently quite talented woman whose view of life is vastly different from Groening's, or such was my impression from the book.) If the show were just Groening's doing, it'd be an animated Life in Hell, which would be truly hellish. After all, as you say, "Does Groening intend to portray us all as a bunch of idiots? Who knows? But I don't think it unreasonable to conclude that he thinks we are, or that he is, in the main, a nihilist." Quite so.
Adrian,
Thanks for writing in with that further information about the production of the show.
Aside from highlighting how this confounds attempts to divine Groening's philosophy from the show alone, it also raises the interesting possibility that his staff may have saved his show from his own philosohical errors!
Gus
Curtis Gale Weeks writes: "In fact, along with Seinfeld, I think it is one of two of the best television shows our culture has produced. Their logic is similar, and, Gus, I wouldn't be at all surprised if you were to present a critique of Seinfeld reminiscent of this critique." Heh. There's irony for you. I don't know how it stands with Gus now, but I remember that in the past he watched Seinfeld regularly, whereas I've never gotten into that show. He appreciated the humor of the main characters making fools of themselves, I think, because they were driven by a fear of embarrassment and social
disapproval, which is a source of humor that just doesn't do much for me. My impression is that Seinfeld was for him what The Simpsons is for me, a fun time in a stupid place I wouldn't want to spend too much more time in.
Yo, Gus, you write: "Aside from highlighting how this confounds attempts to divine Groening's philosophy from the show alone, it also raises the interesting possibility that his staff may have saved his show from his own philosohical errors!" Exactly! And I should add that I haven't seem very many episodes after the 8th season or so, after about the time Conan O'Brien left as one of the writers and producers. Apparently many fans consider that the beginning of a real decline in the quality of the show, and say that at that time Homer started getting dumbed down far too much for most people's tastes. Could be; I'm not in a position to say.
And as for this point of yours, "Having said all of that, the reilience of the family makes as little sense in the Simpsons as Wile E. Coyote getting up and walking after he falls from a cliff...In both cases, it's a deus ex machina that allows the empty fun of the cartoon series to go on." I quite agree, but just think of all the old TV shows for which that's true. It's hardly limited to cartoons--think of Gilligan's Island, for example. (I remember when I was very little, I tried to fit all the events of that show into a straightforward, linear chronology. It was fruitless.) Or The Dick Van Dyke Show or any of Bob Newhart's shows (the former was pretty good, but Bob Newhart is one of my idols since his dry wit and wry humor matches mine to a tee). Even in shows in which there was some sort of progression from season to season, such as Cheers (and at a stretch you could even say I Love Lucy showed some sort of progression), how much did the characters develop? Not so much. The humor derived from pretty much the same, unchanging characters being put in different situations; they'd be pretty much the same at the end of an episode as at the beginning. That's a trope The Simpsons relies on; it makes for some pointed satire on the TV world (think of Itchy and Scratchy), but it's ultimately quite unsatisfactory for just the reasons you gave.
Heh, I just reread this quote: "Having said all of that, the reilience of the family makes as little sense in the Simpsons as Wile E. Coyote getting up and walking after he falls from a cliff." Reminds me of the episode "Bart the Daredevil," where Bart became a skateboard daredevil and was about to jump Springfield Gorge when Homer stopped him...and ended up going off the ramp on the skateboard and almost making it across. His fall was like Wile E. Coyote's at extreme, painful length--I know in other episodes they actually made visual references to the poor canine (like with the trampoline of death), but I don't remember if there were any in that one; I think there were though.
Adrian,
You're right about Seinfeld, for which I incidentally own DVDs of several seasons' worth of episodes.
I have also finally gotten around to viewing all but the last season of Chef!, a much better series even than I remembered it. If I recall, the story arc gets gloomier in the third season. Overall, though, I find the humor quite benevolent.
Ugh. This is my first time back on the Internet since the new installation of SuSE 10.1. (My first since they were bought out by Novell) This was ugly. Until today, I'd been able to say that it is easier to install Linux than it is Windows, no exceptions. SuSE 10.1 was a huge step back in that respect, and I will be loathe to standardize on it without a substantial test drive to make sure they haven't cocked up antything else....
I understand that much of the difficulty stems from a new version of the administration tool having been rolled out. But boy, was this inexcusable! Another install like that and I switch distributions. If I wanted to suffer because of the incompetenece of some sclerotic corporation, I would have stuck with Microsoft...
Gus
Gus,
I think the major error in Mr. Pointilist's analysis of the Simpsons is the same one you fell into: "The Simpsons" isn't meant to portray a philosophy; a world-view. It is humor, and often satire. It serves its function of lampooning the absurd.
The Simpsons is candy; not food. It provides one of the simple pleasures of life, but it is neither meant to nor capable of substituting for more substantial "nourishment."
So beyond anything he might have messed up epistemologically, Mr. Pointilist has misconstrued the show as being some sort of thing upon which to contruct a philosophy. It isn't; it's just humor... it says: "here is the absurd, let us laugh at it."
If the characters aren't developed, or sane, or in posession of continuity, it's because they aren't really "characters" as such... not because the show is attacking sanity, development, or continuity. They are simply props in a series of jokes, gags and wit. Which is why the show was at its absolute best when it wasn't trying to show them as people, but just making with the nonstop jokes. (seasons 4-6... the best of the Simpsons)
Don't let the freaky pseudo-academic sour you on what is a pretty good show. (and once was a quite good show back in the day)
Oh, and that was a good demolition of his nonsense.
Inspector,
But Baggini never "soured" me on the show. I found it enjoyable in small doses at best from the get-go. Part pf that is doubtless my own sense of humor, but part lies in the implicit philosophy of the show, which is absurdist/nihilistic.
The only error I made in this post was (and maybe this is what you mean anyway) is that I slipped into discussing the show as if Groening was explcitly promoting his philosophical views. Clearly he is not. But just as clearly, his views have an effect on what gets produced, too.
Gus
Gus,
Yes, that is the error that I meant. As for the show, well, like I said: the best episodes are clearly behind us. It grates on my nerves nowadays more often than not.
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