The Ultimate South Park and Philosophy (4 page)

For all their faults, Kyle and Stan still debate and discuss whether certain actions are wrong. On his own, Stan sometimes just goes along with the crowd, though he develops a general refusal to do harm over the show’s history.
¹⁰
After the boys throw toilet paper all over the art teacher’s house, Kyle can’t live with what he’s done. Through their conversations they learn goodness and engage in the “thinking” Arendt describes. Friendship, then, helps us to examine our lives. In the episode “Prehistoric Ice Man” Larry says that “living is about sharing our ups and downs with our friends,” and when we fail to do this we aren’t really living at all. If thinking and goodness only arise through real dialogue with others—through critically questioning and examining
our own
views—then we need more friendships like the one Kyle and Stan share.

If good friendships help us to critically examine our lives, then perhaps it’s no accident that the critical voice of
South Park
has been created by two friends—Trey Parker and Matt Stone. In the
Apology
Socrates likens himself to a gadfly, an annoying pest that goes around “stinging” people with his challenging questions and critical reflections to keep them intellectually awake and on their toes.
South Park
, too, serves as a gadfly, trying to wake American culture from its thoughtlessness and ignorance. The show generates discussion and debate and leads many people to discuss ethical issues that would otherwise be passed over in silence. For a show that supposedly corrupts, it has a more intense focus on religion, ethics, and democracy than its critics would like to admit. But, of course, we could still ask if the
way
that
South Park
presents these issues is really necessary. For example, is it philosophically wise and necessary to use the word “shit” 163 times in one show? Or have so much, farting, vomiting, and violence? What philosophical goal can such vulgarity serve?

The vulgarity and crudeness of
South Park
is often defended on the grounds of free speech. However, a different issue is also in play.
South Park
often says what is not socially or morally acceptable to say; that is, in terms established by Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), what must be
repressed
. According to Freud, our thoughts and actions are shaped by “drives,” including emotions, desires, and hostile or consumptive energy. (Freud would have a field day with Cartman’s twisted little mind!) These drives are part of our embodied being, yet, since they are dangerous and often violent, we try to control and even silence them. This control is a form of repression, but it can often have unintended consequences. Repression of a drive can lead to other sorts of unconscious, violent behavior, and suppressed wishes like these form the content of dreams, our “unconscious” life.
¹¹
Repression, or internal censorship, redirects but doesn’t diminish our aggression. In spite of our intentions, this unconscious aggression often shapes who we are, how we think, and what we do.

What Freud discovered with psychoanalysis was that talking about our dreams may serve as a way to address this repression and its associated violence. When we talk these ideas and feelings out, the repression is broken and, through the realization, we can come to terms with the desire and shape it through thinking. Representing desires lets them be expressed, and this helps us to integrate them into the structure of our lives.
¹²
By bringing to light what had been unconscious, dream interpretation lets us think through these aspects of ourselves.

Freud also thought that jokes work like dreams. When one person tells a joke, its spontaneous and unexpected word-form breaks through another person’s repression. Laughter is a “release of energy” that had been blocked; this is why many jokes have a vulgar or obscene dimension. As Freud points out, jokes only really work when the person telling them doesn’t laugh, so that the surprise can make others laugh.
¹³
There is pleasure in laughing at the joke, and in telling it, as well as pleasure in freeing others from their repression.

Through its vulgarity,
South Park
verbalizes the drives and desires that we often repress; and, it allows us to laugh so as to reveal these inhibitions. This is what makes the show’s crudeness essential. Showing us “Token” or the conjoined fetus nurse, or saying
shit
over and over brings out the aggression and desire that we can’t express on our own. And, for things that really
shouldn’t
be said, Kenny says them in a muffled way, and the other boys comment. By verbalizing these drives, the show lets us begin to think them through. It’s then possible to analyze them and, by doing this, distance ourselves from them. For instance, many episodes address how outsiders are berated and subjected to racist or xenophobic slander. By working through these incidents, the show demonstrates that such slander is used among friends as well. Verbal sparring, when so understood, needn’t lead to violence or exclusion. It doesn’t justify such speech, but it does create a space in which the hostility can be interpreted and analyzed.

Likewise, there’s a reason for all of the farting on
Terrance and Phillip
. At least two interpretations of this show-within-the-show are
possible. First, there is the issue of why the boys love such a stupid show so much. It’s not that they wish they could fart all the time. Rather, when they fart, Terrance and Phillip do what’s forbidden:
they transgress parents’ social prohibitions. This appeals to the boys because they wish they could be free from parental control and regulation too.

Second, regular viewers (some of them my students) have noted that
Terrance and Phillip
is self-referential, a way for
South Park
to comment on itself. The opening of
South Park
tells us that, like
Terrance and Phillip
, the show has no redeeming value and should be watched by no one. The stupidity and vulgarity of the cartoon is better understood, however, if we look beyond
South Park
. Is
Terrance and Phillip
really more vapid, crude, and pointless than
Jerry Springer
or
Wife Swap
? Is it more mindless than
Fox News
,
The 700 Club
, or
Law and Order
? When we see Kyle, Cartman, Kenny, and Stan watching
Terrance and Phillip
, this is a reflection of the fact that television fulfills our wish for mindlessness. What offends the parents in South Park—and the critics of
South Park
—is not that the show is vulgar and pointless, but that it highlights the imbecility of television in general.

Both interpretations show that censorship can be questioned at multiple levels. On the one hand, censorship looks at vulgarity, choosing what can and can’t afford to be seen based on social norms.
South Park
questions this sort of censorship, saying what can’t be said and challenging social forms of repression. But, if part of
South Park
’s message is the need for thinking, then it also questions how television, by fulfilling our wish for mindlessness, represses active thinking. Of course, brainlessness can’t simply be blamed on parents or television corporations or two doofusses from Colorado who can’t draw straight. Like the mindless Athenians who were to blame for their own ignorance, or Eichmann’s responsibility when he thought he was just obeying the law, if we really hold a mirror up to ourselves, we’ll find that our own mindlessness is the heart of Wal-Mart. Like Socrates,
South Park
—and Kyle and Stan specifically—present us with a way to reflect on what
we think
we really know, and through reflection move beyond our mindlessness.

By ceaselessly testing the limits of our tolerance,
South Park
asks us to examine the things we think we know, why certain words and actions are prohibited, what we desire, and what we’re teaching our children. It provocatively asks us to think about what’s truly harmful, and what issues we really should be outraged about. Breaking the silence of our culture’s repressions could be the starting point for a Socratic dialogue that helps us to think, analyze our desires and aggression, and become better people. If we take the opportunity to discuss the show, why it’s funny, and what it tells us about our culture and our own desires, then
South Park
need not be seen as mindless, vulgar, or corrupting, but rather as a path to thinking that helps us to live with one another, and with ourselves.
¹⁴

1
. Plato,
Apology
, in
Five Dialogues: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Phaedo
, trans. G.M.A. Grube (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1981). Also see Xenophon,
Recollections of Socrates, and Socrates’ Defense Before the Jury
, trans. Anna Benjamin (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965).

2
. Plato,
Apology
, 30.

3
. Ibid., 28–29.

4
. Hannah Arendt,
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
(New York: Viking Press, 1964), 135–150.

5
. Plato,
Apology
, 49.

6
. See Plato,
The Republic of Plato
, trans. David Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1991); Aristotle,
Nicomachean Ethics
, trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1999).

7
. Plato,
Apology
, 41.

8
. Hannah Arendt, “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship,” in
Responsibility and Judgment
(New York: Schocken, 2003), 40–41.

9
. Arendt, “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy,”
Responsibility and Judgment
, 6–7.

10
. I owe this insight to Kyle Giroux.

11
. See Sigmund Freud,
The Interpretation of Dreams
(New York: Avon Books, 1965), 156–166.

12
. For more on this issue, see Jonathan Lear,
Love and Its Place in Nature: A Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian Psychoanalysis
(New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1990).

13
. Freud,
Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious
, trans. A.A. Brill (New York: Dover, 1993), 261–273.

14
. My thanks to Kyle Giroux for his work as a “
South Park
consultant” and his suggestions for ways to update this version. Additional thanks to Keith Wilde and Nicole Merola for their comments and suggestions on this chapter, and to numerous students from Endicott College for their discussions of an earlier version of it. Errors remain my own.

Henry Jacoby

A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence.

—David Hume

People believe all sorts of things for all sorts of reasons; sadly, few people pay attention to reasons based on logic, rules of ­argumentation, theory, or evidence. And the inhabitants of South Park are no ­different. But why should we think critically and rationally? Why does it matter? What harm is there in believing something if it makes you feel good, provides you with comfort, or gives you hope? If evidence is lacking, so what?

In his essay “The Ethics of Belief,” W.K. Clifford (1845–1879), an English mathematician and philosopher, explained the potential harm of believing just anything. “Every time we let ourselves believe for unworthy reasons, we weaken our powers of self-control, of doubting, of judicially and fairly weighing evidence,” he wrote, concluding that it’s “wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.”
¹

Amid the exaggerated craziness and illogic of the citizens of South Park, we’re sometimes treated to flashes of insight and well thought-out ideas that surprise us. Stan shows off his critical thinking skills as he takes on TV psychics, various cults, and unsupported religious beliefs in a way that would’ve made Clifford proud. In this chapter, we’ll examine how Stan exposes the frauds and the harms they bring, while defending scientific thinking and a healthy skepticism.

We acquire our beliefs in various ways, most notably by observation and authority. The kids believe that Mr. Hankey exists because they see him, but what we see isn’t always trustworthy. Cartman, after all, sees pink Christina Aguilera creatures floating around, but they aren’t real. Often, our beliefs come on the authority or the testimony of others. The parents believe the children have ADD because that’s the conclusion reached by school psychologists. Such a belief may ­sometimes be a ­reliable one, but not when it comes from the South Park testers, who are fools. Further, we must be careful when relying on authority ­figures. Maybe Scientologists believe that there were once frozen alien bodies put in the volcanoes in Hawaii because their leaders say so. But this is nonsense that should be rejected by any sane person.

We see, then, that rational belief requires evidence. The more outrageous the belief, the more evidence is required. As Stan told the Mormon family in “All About Mormons,” “If you’re going to say things that have been proven wrong, like the first man and woman lived in Missouri and Native Americans came from Jerusalem, then you better have something to back it up!” Stan’s pointing out here that Mormon beliefs should be rejected unless they can be defended, since they’re implausible in the face of accepted facts. The Mormons have
the burden of proof
; that is, the obligation is on them to provide the evidence to back up their claims.