I will laugh at the world

ON THE PUZZLE OF BEING RIGHT,

AND ON LAUGHTER AS THE BRIDGE BETWEEN

THE NEAR ERROR AND THE FARTHER TRUTH

Life presents itself to us not as a finished account, but as a puzzle whose pieces are continually rearranged by time, appetite, and fear. We take it in hand as if we were meant to solve it, and we grow impatient when the picture will not hold. In the short term we feel that we must be right. We resist whatever tells us we are wrong, even when the heart, that quiet and uncourtly witness, already suspects that something is amiss. We cannot always see the fault, nor name it, nor prove it. We only sense it. The body, older than our arguments, speaks first.

It is a curious thing that reason, which boasts of ruling us, so often arrives late to the scene. Before we have assembled a case, the chest tightens, the stomach turns, the face grows warm. Something, we say, is not right. And because we cannot yet point to it, we defend the very posture that the body has already begun to doubt. Pride is never so busy as when evidence is scarce. We would rather keep a mistaken peace with ourselves than suffer the brief disgrace of amendment.

Whence comes this hunger to be right? It may well be that nature herself planted it. Those who felt no sting when the world contradicted them may have taken too little care to survive. The creature that does not mind being mistaken about the path, the season, the enemy, or the friend is soon removed from the contest. Feeling, then, is not a luxury added to life. It is one of life’s instruments. When we lose at cards, we feel poorly, as if the world had given a verdict against us. When we win, we feel glad, as if we had guessed the order of things correctly. The game is small; the sensation is large. The body treats a lost trick as it once treated a lost chance at food or shelter: as news that our reading of the world was incomplete.

If this is so, then the need to feel right is not a vice invented by philosophers. It is a inheritance. Those who did not feel these things may not have taken the labor required to remain among the living. Yet here a conflict opens, and it is no small one. Short term, we need to feel that we are right. Long term, we need in truth to be right, or as near to it as a mortal may come. Both claims wear the same face. Both demand allegiance. But they do not always agree. The comfort that keeps us steady for an hour may ruin us for a year. The correction that would save us later feels, in the present, like an insult.

How then shall we decide? How shall a person pass from the short-term error to the long-term truth without tearing himself in two? The stern moralists would answer: by will, by discipline, by the cold knife of principle. There is honor in that answer, and I would not mock it. But it is incomplete. Will alone is a poor physician for a wound that pride has dressed as dignity. A man commanded to abandon his present rightness often clings to it the more, as a drowning man clings to the timber that is pulling him under.

There is a gentler and, I think, a wiser passage. We laugh. Very simply, we laugh: at ourselves, and at the world that has placed us in this ridiculous office, requiring us to repudiate our short-term self in order to save and keep the long-term one. Laughter is the courtesy by which the soul admits error without declaring war upon itself. It does not deny that we wished to be right. It only notices that we were, for a time, a little absurd in the wishing.

Consider how laughter works. It does not first prove the case. It loosens the fist. The man who can smile at his own stubbornness has already taken one step out of it. He has granted that he is two persons in one skin: the advocate of this hour, and the trustee of many years. Between those two a treaty is needed. Mockery of others will not serve, for that only fortifies the short-term self by giving it an enemy. The laugh that heals is the laugh that includes the laugher. It says: I, too, am a puzzle; I, too, have mistaken a feeling for a fact; I, too, must be revised.

Nor is this a small or merely private art. A commonwealth of people who cannot laugh at their own certainty will make a religion of every passing conviction. They will call the body’s first alarm a revelation, and the later correction a betrayal. They will confuse the need to feel right with the duty to be true. History is crowded with such confusions, dressed as zeal. The opposite error is no better: to treat every feeling as a lie, and so to become a stranger to one’s own warning signals. The body is not an oracle. Neither is it a fool. It is an old servant, faithful and imperfect, speaking a language older than our schools.

Evolution, if we may use that later word for an older observation, may explain why the servant speaks so loudly. Feeling right helped our kind persist. But persistence is not the same as wisdom. What preserved the tribe in hunger and danger may mislead the citizen in argument and self-love. Nature fitted us to care intensely about outcomes. She did not equally fit us to distinguish a wounded pride from a wounded truth. That distinction is the work of judgment, and judgment is slow. Laughter hurries nothing, yet it makes slowness bearable. It gives pride a way to step down without being executed.

I do not say that laughter settles every dispute between the near and the far. Some errors are tragic, and no smile will lift them. Some truths cost more than humor can pay. Still, even then, the capacity to regard oneself as slightly comic is a preservative. It keeps the long-term self from becoming a tyrant over the short-term one, and the short-term self from becoming a rebel against all amendment. We are not asked to despise the creature who wants to win the card game. We are asked to remember that the game is not the whole of the world, and that the flush of victory is not the same thing as understanding.

The puzzle, then, is not merely how the pieces fit. It is how we live with the fitting and the unfitting at once. We feel we must be right, because feeling so once kept us alive. We must sometimes consent to be wrong, because only so do we remain capable of truth. Between those necessities stands a humble and human gate. We pass through it laughing: not in scorn of the world, nor in surrender to it, but in recognition that the same nature which taught us to defend our present rightness also left us this strange mercy—that we may, for a moment, see ourselves as the world sees a man who has played his card too soon, and may yet, by that sight, play more honestly the longer game.

Finis