Authors: John Stonestreet
Friday was the 331st birthday of Voltaire, the brilliant, sarcastic French philosopher and author of influential works of the Enlightenment, such as Candide. Voltaire is also well known for attacking Christianity, especially in his articulation of the problem of evil and suffering in his “Poem on the Lisbon Disaster.” However, according to the eminent historian Dr. John Woodbridge, what made Voltaire really dangerous was his ability to make his readers laugh at things that were not funny.
If Voltaire were a decade, he’d be the 90s. Let me explain.
Diane West opened her 2008 book, The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization, with this observation: “There was a time, literally, when there were no teenagers.” Of course, West was not arguing that there was a time when there was no one teen-aged. Her argument was that adolescence as a stage of life was an invention of mid-twentieth century psychology, pop-culture, and mass-marketing, and that adolescence had replaced historic “rites of passage” into adulthood with “Peter Pan Syndrome.”
In most cultures in the history of the world, teenagers were expected to act more like adults. We now know how this facilitated maturity and ensured that essential neural connections were made. Increasingly, West observed, adults were acting like teenagers, in dress, behavior, and spending habits. This, in turn, lowered our expectations of 17- and 18-year-olds. “Well, after all, they’re just kids,” we now say.
Originally, The Death of the Grownup was to be published in late 2001. After the attacks of 9/11, West rewrote the book with an expanded thesis. “We are a civilization of adolescents” became “because we are a civilization of adolescents, we are unable to respond to the rise of militant, radical Islam.” In other words, just as the civilizational stakes were getting higher, we had become juveniles.
A telling mark of adolescence, whether in a culture or a teenager, is irreverence. The 90s was the decade of irreverence, when postmodern film and television celebrated meaninglessness. Gone were the family-centric sitcoms of the 80s in which every episode ended with a lesson learned. Gone was the teenage rebel of the 70s, who hated your rules. In its place were Beavis and Butthead, who didn’t care enough to hate anything. The sitcoms and Saturday Night Live movies of the 90s portrayed everything, including sexuality, as a big joke. Not a “ha ha” laugh-out-loud joke, but a mindless, “hehehehehehe” snarky and snickering kind of joke.
A lot can be learned about a person or a society by what they laugh at. If everything is a joke, nothing is sacred. If nothing is sacred, nothing is worth fighting for. If nothing is worth fighting for, nothing is worth dying for. If nothing is worth dying for, nothing is worth living for.
To be clear, the problem isn’t humor or laughter. The problem is the kind of humor and what we laugh at. We do not suffer from too much joy. We suffer from too little meaning.
In Shows about Nothing: Nihilism in Popular Culture from The Exorcist to Seinfeld, a book published at the end of the 90s, philosophy professor Thomas Hibbs described the nihilism infecting American culture as “a state of spiritual impoverishment and shrunken aspirations.” The nihilism that dominated the popular entertainment of the time had, he thought, shaped a generation. As one Harvard student wrote at the time in a Harvard Crimson article entitled “The Beavis Generation,”: “[T]here is a whole new generation out there that completely understands all of this society’s foibles. And can only laugh at them.”
But it was the 90s. The shows were funny, and the “foibles” were tame, comparatively speaking. The Cold War was over. The world was at peace. Samuel Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations” was only a prediction at the time, and questioned by other tenured, comfortable scholars. Clinton was president; Americans were wealthy and safe (we thought); so, we entertained ourselves with angsty anthems by Nirvana and Alanis Morissette about how life was miserable despite all the evidence to the contrary. The stakes are higher today.
Of course, “entertainment about nothing” is not a sufficient explanation for the current epidemic of thinking life is about nothing. Mocking men and women is not the same as pretending men and women don’t exist and then removing perfectly healthy body parts. Objectifying women’s bodies with camera close-ups, MTV style, is always offensive but seems quaint compared to women objectifying their own bodies on OnlyFans.
There may not be a straight line from the irreverence of the 90s to what Carl Trueman has called the “desecration” of modern life, but it would be foolish to ignore any connection. And it would be insufficient to describe the connection as mere de-sensitization. Just as Voltaire’s skill in making readers irreligiously laugh at things sacred contributed to his reader’s irreligion, so too irreverence, when normalized, hampers our ability to recognize the sacred and order our lives and societies accordingly.
Voltaire’s legacy can still be seen, not just in 90s reruns, but in the woke Left and the woke Right of today, in Nikki Glaser and Nick Fuentes, in the loss of the sacred and the desecration of the holy, in the mocking and name-calling that replaces reason and argument, and in the loss of real humor, the kind the human heart really needs.