Sheep and Goats

Tag: Voltaire

  • Elon Musk does the Babylon Bee: Part 3–Ben Franklin

    To begin the entire thread, start here.

    One of those ten squirrelly questions 8F888CB8-524A-452A-AE1A-697E85D251F8the Babylon Bee guys ask Elon Musk  before getting to their main one was: ‘Were you able to meet anyone you want, living or dead, who would it be?’ Musk thinks a moment, and then suggests, well—maybe Ben Franklin.

    Way to go, Elon. Good choice. Among the American ‘forefathers,’ it was Ben who was the Renaissance man—mastering myriad activities, just like Musk. It is he who came closest to grabbing the spot of first USA resident philosopher. He never sought public office but also never turned it down. They would draft him as a compromise candidate— a capable workhorse that would get the job done rather than the hotheads or milquetoasts in the wings that would screw things up.

    His visit as diplomat was a sensation in French society—his visit to the dying Voltaire the grand climax, as though the too-long-delayed meeting of corresponding national philosophic titans. ‘Look how he lets his grey hair falls unadorned upon his head!’ the French society women swooned, so different from her accustomed French heroes who coiffed themselves up to high heaven.

    Franklin mused on theological things too in a quirky sort of way. He wrote a short story on a resurrection snafu, and called it ‘A Proposal to Madame Helvetius.’ She did exist. She was a widow and Ben proposed to her. She turned him down. Did he work out his heartbreak though storytelling?

    Here is a source that claims the proposal was just good-natured fun, but I seem to recall the Great Courses professor in his series of lectures on Ben Franklin claiming the statesman truly was smitten with her. Maybe I have it wrong. I’ll have to check it out someday and the material is not now at my fingertips. At any rate:

    In the story, he wrote how he had courted the widow of his good friend, but the woman turned him down flat, saying how she could never be untrue to her husband even though deceased. Then, in a dream, Ben went to heaven and meets the husband, an old friend. They exchange pleasantries and friend says: “You must meet my new wife. She’ll be along soon.”

    Ben Franklin is dismayed! ‘Your earthly wife is more loyal than you!’ he rebuked. ‘She turned me down cold on your account!’ ‘That’s too bad for you,’ the friend says. ‘She is an excellent woman and I missed her terribly at first, but now I am in a new place and it is time to move on.’

    As Ben Franklin grumbles, the ‘new’ wife shows up—and it is Ben’s own deceased wife! Ben now turns to scolding her, but she will have none of it. “I was a good and loyal wife to you for 50 years,” she says. “Let that be enough for you!”

    Franklin was anything but a pious guy. But that doesn’t mean he didn’t have plenty of respect for Christianity. To the Constitutional Convention that would forge a replacement for the Articles of Confederation, he pleaded for a return to the “prayer piety” that had helped inspire the revolution:

    “I have lived a long time, and the longer I live the more convincing proofs I see of this truth: that God governs in the affairs of men. We have been assured, sir, in the sacred writings that except the Lord build the house they labor in vain that build it. I firmly believe this, and I also believe that without his concurring aid we shall succeed in this political building no better than the builders of Babel. We shall be divided by our little partial local interests. Our projects will be confounded, and we ourselves shall become a reproach and byword down into future ages. And what is worse, mankind may here thereafter from this unfortunate instance despair of establishing governments by human wisdom and leave it to chance, war, and conquest.”

    Okay, so it’s not a ‘quick and solid acceptance of Jesus as his Lord and Savior,’ as the Babylon Bee sought from Elon Musk. But it does hold Christian principles in high esteem, much like Elon’s own answer to the missionary Babylon Bee host. He’s not very religious, he says, but “if Jesus is saving people, I mean, I won't stand in His way. Sure, I’ll be saved. Why not?” Allowing for a 200+ year gap between the two Renaissance men, it works well enough.

    Now, what can be said of the Babylon Bee itself?

    To be continued:

     

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  • The Power of a Joke—Soviet Times and Now

    Russians under communism used to blow off steam with jokes—thousands of jokes against the regime, against the shortage of goods, against the secret police—says Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, narrating his History of Eastern Europe course for the Great Courses teaching company.

    “A man stops by the office of the secret police for help in locating his parrot. They chase him away—they have more important things to do—but as the man leaves he lays great stress on how if the parrot is found, they must not think that its political opinions are his.”

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    Decades later, Paul Goble keeps up with current jokes: “A man formally applies to the government for a position in the Inquisition. He is told he is either 1000 years too late or 3 years too early”—this is a joke that will resonate with Jehovah’s Witnesses who are officially classified as “extremist”—a designation shared only with ISIS.

    Some of the old Russian jokes (the Russian term is ‘anekdoti’) are timeless:

    “What’s the difference between capitalism and communism? Capitalism is man’s exploitation of man but communism is the exact opposite!”

    The joke is versatile enough that it can be applied to any contrasting forms of government, much as Betty McClure was able to redeem a (possible) ethnic jokes simply by applying it to her circuit overseer husband:

    “Dave comes from a town so backward that it’s greatest tragedy was the time the town library burned to the ground. Both books were destroyed! One wasn’t even colored in yet!”

    Versatility is a good thing. Maybe the Russian joke itself from Ecclesiastes 8:9, the verse of how “man has dominated man to his harm.” It is attribute of human rule itself, and can be fit to any specific type, recalculating only the new winners and losers. All human governments drop the ball. Usually it is a bowling ball. As people contemplate the vulnerability of their right and left toes, thus is decided their politics.

    Professor Liulevicius goes on to state: “Scholars are still debating whether such jokes undermined the whole system by mocking it or whether on the contrary they stabilized the system by allowing people to vent some of their frustrations without ever openly challenging the regime. There’s no consensus on this,” and then he goes on to explore “the power of a joke.”

    I’d say the power of a joke is that of a double-edged sword. Almost like the Word itself, it “is alive and exerts power and is sharper than any two-edged sword and pierces even to the dividing of soul and spirit, and of joints from the marrow, and is able to discern thoughts.” (Hebrews 4:12)

    A concluding chapter of Tom Irregardless and Me reads thus: “If we have poked some fun at Tom Irregardless, Oscar Oxgoad, and Tom Pearlsandswine, it is to establish the greater picture that God uses people like them to accomplish feats that their higher-ups, though they have far more education, can only dream of. There’s not much that God can do with independent people, and proud ones stop him dead in his tracks. With humble ones, conscious of their spiritual need, he can do a lot.”

    How can you not write this in view of Jesus’ words that the high-brow do not get the sense of the scriptures because their own vanity gets in the way? “At that time Jesus said in response: ‘I publicly praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and intellectual ones and have revealed them to young children.” That’s who responds in the main to the Christian message: “young children.” If you present them as though Rhodes Scholars, people visit the Kingdom Hall and discover in no time at all that they’re not—so why not present them with all the foibles that young children have as well as all that is appealing?

    Then, too, regarding the power of a joke, there is the Alfred P Doolittle factor: “They’re always throwing goodness at you, but with a little bit of luck a man can duck.” Humor lets you duck when you have to. Let’s face it—in any organized arrangement there will be things that don’t go your way. “Why on earth don’t they do it this way?” you’ll say, as they do it that way to thunderous applause—and use of judicious humor bails you out as a relief valve.

    Of course, you can also use humor to savage things, and this I do, too—with the blade pointed the proper way, of course. Vic Vomodog—watch out! Once you laugh at something, will you ever look at it again in the same way? “I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one,” wrote Voltaire. “Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. And God granted it.”

    ….

    For years, a man has been saving up in order to buy a new car. One day the party official summons him to say that his patience, hard work, and loyalty have been rewarded—he has worked his way up the list and he can now expect his car in but 10 years time. The man asks the party official if he knows on what day 10 years out his car will arrive, to which the official consults his records and tells him. The man then asks if it will come in the morning or afternoon, and at that the official frowns. “What kind of a question is that?” he demands.

    “It’s just that I hope it arrives in the afternoon,” the man says, “because the plumber is coming that morning.”

    See: I Don’t Know Why We Persecute Jehovah’s Witnesses—Searching for the Why

  • Things Voltaire Didn’t Say

    Here is still another “Everything you thought you knew about such-and-such is wrong” revelation. Voltaire DID NOT say, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” He never said it! 

    In fact, it is a double “everything you thought you knew is wrong” revelation for me because I had somehow got it into my head that Patrick Henry was the one who said it. He who said “Give me liberty of give me death!” must surely have said the latter phrase as well—if you would say one, surely you would say the other—throw it on the stack! and somewhere in popular folklore someone did just that. But he didn’t say it. When I went to verify it on the internet, I was re-directed to Voltaire as the true source.

    Now I find out that he didn’t say it either! He said a lot of “enlightened” things, and so, here again, some revisionist thought: What is more enlightened than dying for free speech? Throw it on the stack! If he said other enlightened things, who’s not going to believe he said this one as well. He didn’t

    The Great Courses professor, (I am on a Great Courses kick these days) says it is the bane of Voltaire schlolars—everyone thinks he said it—it is practically the defining declaration of his to many—and he didn’t. 

    This is pretty common—to append statements to famous others whose backgrounds suggest they might have said it because they have said other things like it. Any acerbic, pretension-deflating statement about human nature you can attribute to Mark Twain, for example, since he said a lot of stuff like that. One of my favorites, on how he would relate that when he was 16 his father was so ignorant he could barely stand to have around, but was amazed at 21 on how much the old man had picked up in those few short years—he never said it! Or at least there is no record of him saying it. This a great hazard for me, because I love to quote Mark Twain. Check before you quote.

    It is similar to how David Splane said the Watchtower decided to no quote the Mahatma Gandhi line, supposedly made to British Viceroy to India Lord Irwin, that “when your country and mine shall get together on the teachings laid down by Christ in this Sermon on the Mount, we shall have solved the problems not only of our countries but those of the whole world.” It’s a great quote, says Brother Splane—we love it. But we can’t use it because there is no record that the two ever met.

    There’s a danger in attributing your lofty thoughts to someone else because you may find that they are not quite lofty enough to think that themselves. Alan Kors, the Great Courses professor, says Voltaire would never say something like that. He’s not going to fight to the death so someone else can say something stupid because he savored his life too much. It’s a pretentious statement—just a little too showy. I’ve always distrusted it. Who’s really going to do that? Let the merits of the fellow’s own argument cause him to rise or sink without dragging others down with him. Now—if you had a heads-up that what was going to be said was truly brilliant it might be another matter. But…

    Well, if he didn’t say it, who did? His biographer. Evelyn Beatrice Hall, writing under the pseudonym S. G Tallentyre. She wrote that line herself in ‘The Friends of Voltaire’ (1906) and served it up as an example of what Voltaire would have stood for. She’s drinking too much of her own Kool-Aid, apparently—no way would Voltaire have risked his neck to sponsor the cacaphonous mayhem of Twitter.

    The professor does not mention Sturgeon’s Law—that is me who mentions it—but it fits in nicely. “People who say that 90 percent of science fiction is crap are correct, but then 90 percent of anything is crap,” Theodore Sturgeon said. This has been truncated into: “Ninety percent of anything is crap,” but the original quote included a reference to his own profession—that of writing science fiction. I know this, because he was the guest speaker on campus once upon a time, and I heard him say it.

    Voltaire should throw his life away for 90 percent crap? I don’t think so. If a dolt can’t get his dopey message out, that’s his problem. I may not say: “Look, throw the idiot off the forum, won’t you?” but that’s a far cry from being willing to die so that the world may hear more 90 percent idiocy—there’s enough of it to go around as it is.

    Does not the Word celebrate the right of anyone to be heard? Alas, at times the it celebrates shutting people up. “It is necessary to shut their mouths,” Paul says of some, who “keep on subverting entire households by teaching things they should not for the sake of dishonest gain.” Sure. “They want to be teachers of law, but they do not understand either the things they are saying or the things they insist on so strongly,” he says of others. (Titus 1:11, 1 Timothy 1:7)

    Those 90 percent people cause a lot of trouble.

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