John Mahaffie

On an October 2011 visit to a college dorm hallway in Colorado, we saw a spot where a water fountain had been removed, and the wall cavity patched with cinderblock. The dorm residents had put up a sign: “Occupy Water Fountain”. It was during the height of the Occupy Wall Street protests.

Also during the Fall of 2011, scattered across the Internet were pictures of funny (really funny) protest signs from the Occupy Wall Street protest and its affiliated protests across the US.

And each weeknight, the Daily Show and the Colbert Report hysterically slay hypocrisy and make fun of politicians. I am a huge fan. This past few weeks, Stephen Colbert’s elaborate satirization of American campaign finance, notably the new mechanism of the SuperPAC, has intensified, gaining all kinds of attention, support, and condemnation.

Do irony or satire or humor have a place in changing our society for the better? I think there’s enormous power in them to do so, but I also think that there is risk that they take us off task, and actually weaken resolve. Satire, in effect, can diffuse or divert anger, even as it may educate more people about hypocrisy, injustice, and government foolishness.

I am concerned that the United States has become a mockutocracy–a place where mockery is the standard behavior and where it may often supplant the sequence of anger, organization, and action that we need to drive needed change. Does mockutocracy work?

The jury is still out. What is satire accomplishing in the current wave of events, including the problems in US electoral politics and the US Congress. It can feel good and entertain us, but does the satire just create an alternative to a political party–a club of cynics? The participants of that “party” participate mainly by endorsing the mocking, and expecting not much to change. Are many even motivated to vote and take other political action?

It’s not that the fans of satire don’t want things to change, but more that they succumb to the sense that the mockable will always be that way. That, I think is the risk. Can we learn to go more reliably from satire to political action? I think we must.

The video linked here is a spoof of several things: TV documentaries, cultural and historical analysis, archaeology, and “experts” generally. It’s silly and fun, using a view of the Beatles from 1000 years hence, to poke its fun.

The satire here can help us think about what we are doing when we study the past or the future. In either case, we have lots of information and insights to draw on, and lots of ways to get things wrong. The view backward of the Beatles, from 1,000 years out, leads to funny mistakes, but plenty of truth too. This is what we are doing whether we study history or the future. We cannot get everything right, but we can understand something.

The mistakes we are likely to make include:

Collapsing time: from a distance, a decade or two “goes away” but at the time those decades separated things enough that one phenomena (opera) and another (early Rock) can get mixed up.

Misinterpreting material things: showing how easy it is to attach different meaning, or impute different motives to something, based on what we think or feel, or based on a different understanding of what is significant. Similar to this is David MacCauley’s book, Motel of Mysteries, in which a future archaeological team discovers the “throne room” in the hotel, centering on the commode.

Getting the emphasis wrong: What mattered more seen as less important, and vice versa. The clues we find about the past can unbalance our thinking, and so can the incomplete view we will always have of the future.

So, how funny are our forecasts? How laughably wrong are we? Are we creating satire and we don’t know it? We can’t know that now, but most importantly, we are better off for exploring the future, and getting things wrong, than not exploring it at all.

Thanks to my son, for sharing this with me. He knew it would be at least a lot of fun for me, and that I’d be interested as a futurist and a former archaeologist.

Note: yes, that's NBA player Scottie Pippin pictured as one of the Fab Four. They get songwriter credit for Battle Hymn of the Republic, too!

Can irony change the world?

Beatles 3000: Looking forward, looking backward