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Monday, January 08, 2007
An ethico-theological question
It may be that The Onion isn’t as funny as it used to be. Or it may be that my sense of humour is calcifying. But either way there are still occasional nuggets. I enjoyed this Bush family infographic, for instance; although what I liked best of all was the question implied by its last cod-point:
George W. sold his soul to the devil, but can get it back if the national debt reaches $9 trillion.
The question entailed by this joke is: what if it were true? Would a US national debt of such proportions be a price worth paying for the return and saving of George W. Bush’s soul?
A couple of preliminary positions suggest themselves.
YES!. One single human soul, even the soul of an apparently worthless or wicked individual like George W., is worth uncountably more than any dollar sum. This, in other words, is a good deal; a national debt of $9 trillion may harm the US and world economy, and cause material hardship to many; but it cannot in and of itself result in anybody else losing their souls to the devil. The myriad individuals suffering economic downturn still have the free will to choose not to rob, kill and otherwise sin. So: by running up the national debt nothing spiritual is harmed; and since one soul is saved—sometihng worth incalculably more than a mere $9 trillion—it proves a worthwhile bargain overall.
NO! George W. should never have sold his soul to the devil in the first place; the responsibility for that action is his, not ours. Even if he negotiated a deal that included a get-your-soul-back clause (which is quite a neat trick) he has no right to inflict suffering and misery on millions of other people merely for his own selfish gain. Certainly he has no right secretly to pursue this agenda; that in itself is a crime against democracy.
STRONG-FORM NO! The issue, I think, is not whether we think ruining the economy is liable to kill people (of course it will: for instance the old and sick people who will die when they might otherwise live); but whether we think it will endanger anybody’s soul. This seems to me an interesting question. It touches on one of the premises of the recent Christopher Nolan Batman Begins: namely, that although Bruce Wayne’s parents are killed by a random mugger called Joe Chill (a man who, in Christian-theological terms, clearly puts his soul in danger by committing this terrible act), actual responsibility for the crime lies at the feet of the evil Ra’s al Ghul, for engineering the economic depression and social collapse that lead Chill to a life of crime in the first place. If the logic of this persuades us, then George W.’s $9 trillion deficit chase, though it will save his soul, will cost many other people theirs; and with the notional equivalence taken out of the realm of mere money it becomes much more clearly an intolerable bargain.
As a godless materialist this question, though involving, is of only academic interest for me. But it hardly needs pointing out that there have been, and continue to be, human cultures for whom variants of this question have been resolved into an ethico-theological imperative (roughly: any amount of merely economic or material suffering is justified if it, directly or indirectly, leads to quantifiable spiritual gain).
Comments
There’s nothing like the Valve to a kill a joke…
An additional question involves how much of a sin it would be to avoid high debt not merely for its putative economic benefits, but also because you actively wanted GWB’s soul to be damned. It’s that favorite of right-wingers, Bush Derangement Syndrome, with a theological gloss ("merely thinking about hating Bush is a sin!").
There’s nothing like the Valve to a kill a joke…
And here I was thinking we were the joke.
An additional item suggested: this implies that the devil is a more or less mainstream economist. (Yes, I know, not a surprise.) The devil presumably wouldn’t agree to such a clause without a firm belief that a U.S. national debt of $9 trillion would cause economic devastation that would cause many more souls to be lost, etc. But since the devil doesn’t have perfect foreknowledge, the debt reaching that level might instead bankrupt the upper classes, radicalize the lower ones, and usher in the anarcho-socialist utopia. In which case GWB’s soul would end up in Heaven, where other entities would perhaps very politely make fun of him for all eternity. But like many challenged people, he wouldn’t understand when people are joking, so this wouldn’t count as unHeavenly torture. Truly the best of all possible worlds.
In the immortal words of William S. Burroughs, “Every soul is worth saving, at least to a priest, but not every soul is worth buying.”
"There’s nothing like the Valve to a kill a joke… ...”
As Blake once said: those who kill jokes do so because the joke is weak enough to be killed in the first place.
Rich: your fantasy has become reality.
My question is, did The Onion stop being funny (with occasional exceptions, as Adam says) at the same time it was redesigned, or had it already stopped being funny and the redesign just made people realize it? (For myself, I don’t remember.)
I wonder what an “academic interest” in a question may be; either you’re really interested in something, or you’re not. Academic research is not an end in itself, but a means to deal with the (real) world around us.
A joke is a joke, I suppose, and should be considered such.
If you want to raise the question at all, I’d say that the money should be spent on the people suffering because of GWB. Bush’s soul simply doesn’t interest me.
This whole contribution is an extended (or academic) joke - whatever that may be. On a sad topic anyway.
The Onion is a cultural artifact of the 1990’s. Its continued existence is not far removed from the continued syndication of Seinfeld—since 2000, it has been basically vestigial. The one exception was the 9/11 issue, when The Onion transcended itself in a way that would have been impossible for Seinfeld.
The Daily Show and Colbert Report seem to me to represent a form of fake news more responsive to the particular exigencies of the new century.
On the other hand, toss one scrap of meat into the tank and watch the piranhas go at it. Nothing brings people out of the woodwork quite like the opportunity to declare something “not as good as it used to be” or, more simply, “dead”.