Just gurus enough to make us hate one another

Writing elsewhere
I wrote about Why Growth Matters for The Critic.

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Satire is moral criticism of content; parody is mockery of form or style. When parody becomes a homage we call it pastiche. Satire can never be done in homage. Satire is condemnation; parody is conversation. Satire might use parody as a technique, the way it uses irony or sarcasm but parody cannot use satire. Parody is a mode; satire an attitude. Parody entertains. Satire seeks to improve the world.

I say all this partly because Rohit made me think about it, partly because I was ill for the twelve days of Christmas and took the opportunity to listen to Helen Lewis’s splendid podcast series The New Gurus. Helen has documented the cultural trend of people flocking to gurus. Cranks and morons like Russell Brand have gathered themselves large followings of people who are dedicated to their “wisdom”. As Helen notes, there is a bizarre parodic religiosity to this behaviour.

As I listened to the extraordinary things recorded in Gurus (it really is very entertaining) I kept thinking about the Great Man Theory of History. One essential element of that theory is the importance of hero worship. Look around, Helen seems to be saying, hero worship is everywhere. It is not just the Trump and Bernie voters. People are finding gurus to worship on topics ranging from global conspiracy theories to why you ought to drink your own urine. I shan’t disclose the conclusion. You’ll have to listen for yourself. Needless to say, I was hooked.

What do “rational” people do in the face of this rising culture of people worshipping inadequate heroes? They resort to satire—or they think they do. This is not the satire of Jonathan Swift, mind you. The best we can muster is Stephen Colbert. And in one sense it is not strictly satire at all. Swift’s rage was inspired by people’s opposition to the establish tenets of the Anglican church. The moral core of modern satire seems to be that Stephen Colbert’s IQ is half-a-standard-deviation higher than the average Trump voter. (Not a position I necessarily endorse, by the way.)

What we think of as satire is in fact, in its reliance on gross exaggeration, some combination of sarcasm and parody. The wicked barbs of modern scorn are usually weak lampoons. (We need a new Dunciad — equal your merits; equal is your din.) Helen’s podcast series will do more to improve the world than a decade of late shows and Saturday Night Live. No, the solution is not in unmoored secular satire. We need to accept that hero worship is real and that the Great Man Theory of History is not incorrect. It’s not the only explanation of events. But it plays a significant role.

The answer is not to make half-hearted jokes about other people’s heroes — after all, aren’t the devotees of Stephen Colbert engaged in the same thing, just in a more respectable manner? The answer is for us to worship better heroes. What I took from Gurus is that we don’t need to get rid of the impulse to follow, we need to upgrade the quality of whose disciples we become. And to make sure we are worshipping several people, somewhat sceptically, rather than fixating on one particular person. It was the single-minded devotion of the people in Gurus that shocked me most of all. (One reason it’s such a good series is that it is full of marmalade droppers.) That single-mindedness causes so much of the partisanship of the culture wars. It is still true that “we have just Religion enough to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another,” as Swift said.

Or should that be just gurus enough?

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