You may have noticed that animals have a sense of fun, but not a sense of humor.  James V. Schall, S.J., explains why:

“Humor arises because we are rational beings who can and do delight in the things that we know, in the things of the mind.  We are amused in the comparisons we make, either in speech or in reality, between what we expect and what is said or what happens.  The correction of mind by mind is one of the greatest of human enterprises.  We do not want, as Plato said, a lie in our souls about the things that are.  In things of the intellect too, a brother is helped by a brother.  Indeed, this correction is one of the great divine enterprises.  God, in revelation, undertook to do so Himself.”

(The image is from the famous 1957 spaghetti hoax.)

Interviewer:  “Universally and necessarily we cannot affirm and deny the same thing at the same time and in the same way.  What is wrong with that?”

Cornelius Van Til:  “My concern is that the demand for non-contradiction when carried to its logical conclusion reduces God's truth to man's truth.”

“Now, some claim that these poets and philosophers, and especially Plato, did not understand these matters in the way their words sound on the surface, but wished to conceal their wisdom under certain fables and enigmatic statements.  Moreover, they claim that Aristotle's custom in many cases was not to object against their understanding, which was sound, but against their words, lest anyone should fall into error on account of their way of speaking.  So says Simplicius in his Commentary.  But Alexander held that Plato and the other early philosophers understood the matter just as the words sound literally, and that Aristotle undertook to argue not only against their words but against their understanding as well.

“Whichever of these may be the case, it is of little concern to us, because the study of philosophy is directed not toward knowing what men may have thought but toward knowing what is true.”

-- Thomas Aquinas, On the Heavens

NBC has suspended nightly news chief anchor and managing editor Brian Williams for six months without pay for falsifying what happened when he was reporting in Iraq.  Does the punishment fit the offense?

Well, there may be more punishment.  NBC is still investigating other alleged fictions by Williams.  But NBC concedes that at least he lied repeatedly about his experience in Iraq.  That is enough to settle the question of proper punishment.  It doesn’t matter what other fabrications may turn up.

Offenses can be wrong for reasons either internal or external to the enterprise.  Historian Quinn is arrested for drunken driving; historian Smith is caught intentionally falsifying the historical record.  Quinn’s offense discredits his character, but Smith’s discredits the very enterprise of historiography.  Lying about history may not be the worse offense; after all, drunk driving can kill.  But it is a worse historical offense – the worst that a historian can commit against his vocation.  Perhaps Quinn shouldn’t be fired.  Smith has to be.

Plainly, Williams’ offense is more like Smith’s than like Quinn’s.  It demonstrates contempt for the very principle of honest news reporting.  It is not the sort of thing for which you “lead someone to the exit door,” as one pundit put it.  It is the sort of thing for which you hoist him by his suspenders and kick him out of it.

NBC’s failure to recognize this fact suggests that the management of the organization is confused about the virtues essential to its calling.  If so, then there is no reason to think that the fabulist Williams is an isolated case.

The natural law is not just a philosophical theory; it expresses the common sense of plain people everywhere.  This being the case, one would expect it to shine with particular brightness today, for the modern age is supposed to be the age of the common man.  This is a myth.  The modern age is not the age of the common man; it is the age of the expert.

The dominion of experts is understandable in specialized fields like computers and open heart surgery, but we make it the rule in every department of life.  No one understands law but the lawyer, no one understands policy but the bureaucrat, no one understands ethics (supposedly) but the ethicist.  There are no wise men any more, but only therapists.  When all of life is dissolved into specialized fields, something is wrong.

Why has this happened?  How has it come about that the common man has lost his place in the "age of the common man"?  Perhaps the chief reason is philosophical.

Modern thought is much more elitist than ancient thought, though it talks a less elitist line.  In both eras the great philosophers recognized that some men have greater understanding than others.  The difference is that in ancient thought the ideal is the man of wisdom, whereas in modern thought the ideal is the man of expertise.  Aristotle belonged to the old school.  Though he pursued wisdom, he began all of his ethical reflections by considering what ordinary people think in all times and places.  Even on those occasions when he considered the opinions of sages, they were the men whom ordinary people themselves recognized as sages.

Of course to begin with common sense is not the same as to end there.  Indeed, in particular times and places the common sense of plain people can be corrupted.  Even so, the wisdom of the philosopher lay mainly in his grasp of the deep presuppositions and remote implications of our universal common sense, not in something completely alien to it; what he tried to understand is what the common sense is getting at.  Even when he offered corrections to common opinion, they were based on considerations that common opinion accepted; the correction was from within.  The ideal was that when the philosopher had finished his work, the common man would say "Yes, that is what I wanted to say, but I didn't know how."  This is also the deepest goal of medieval reflections on the Natural Law, and it is biblical too.  There is, to be sure, a direct divine revelation which we cannot do without.  And yet as St. Paul said, a law is written even on the hearts of the gentiles, however it may be suppressed.

By contrast, in the modern period the thread connecting the highest thoughts of the philosopher with the plain sense of the common man is stretched so thin that it finally breaks.  The ancients thought common folk knew something, even if only in a general and confused sort of way.  But in an incredible passion of hubris, Descartes thought that in the strict sense the common folk have no knowledge whatsoever, and that before himself, all philosophers have been in the same boat.  The reason for this, he says, is that true knowledge is something certain, and no one before him has had certainty about anything; what they had was not knowledge, but merely opinion.  To attain certainty, he proposes that all opinion be passed through a sort of certification engine of his own devising.  The engine he devised was systematic doubt.  Whatever can be doubted, should be doubted; no starting point should be accepted unless it literally cannot be doubted.  This was the point of his celebrated line, "I think, therefore I am."  In his own existence, he believed that he had finally found something that could survive his own intellectual meat grinder, for he could not doubt his own existence; if he was thinking, he existed!  Starting there, he believed he could find other certainties.

Alas, his certification engine didn't work.  I can doubt that there is thought; I can doubt that thinking requires a thinker; I can doubt anything whatsoever.  So if certainty requires something that literally cannot be doubted, then the certification engine devised by Descartes has failed.

But even though his engine failed, his precedent stood.  What the modern era decided that it had learned from Descartes is simply this:  Nothing counts as real knowledge until certified by experts who have passed it through a certification engine -- be they lawyers, bioethicists, educational psychologists, or government bureaucrats.  Which certification engine the experts use (and there are many) is no longer considered particularly important.  What counts is that there is a certification engine, which no one but the experts understands.