Monty Python and Philosophy (16 page)

“Makes you feel so sort of insignificant, doesn’t it?” Cleese and Chapman ask. “Can we have your liver then?” She gives in—“Yeah. All right, you talked me into it”—and the two doctors set upon her with their knives.

Just as Mr. Creosote succumbs to sensual overindulgence, this housewife opts for a groundless underindulgence. Just because she realizes she lives in an almost infinitely large universe, that is no reason for her to think that her life is worthless in itself and not worth continuing. This is what the extreme nihilist does (indeed, this is what nihilism is all about), and the Python crew is showing us the absurdity of it. Life does not become meaningless once you give up the idea that you are playing a role in a transcendentally planned drama. The values of family, work, love, understanding, simple pleasures, and peace, don’t go away once you reject transcendent meaning. Nor does the woman’s natural desire for self-preservation and the avoidance of suffering evaporate once she realizes her own finitude.

Transcendental dogmatism is dehumanizing, but so are the opposing extremes of hedonism and nihilistic skepticism. The Buddha made this point explicitly when he argued for a Middle Way between all opposing extremes. Just as one should find a middle way between the slaveries of excessive indulgence and excessive asceticism (self-denial), so too one must avoid embracing both absolutist worldviews (like Palin’s toadying transcendentalist chaplain) and relativist worldviews (where all values and meanings are leveled or negated). The Buddha’s Middle Way doctrine seeks to reclaim human values and meaning by avoiding overly rigid blind faith and also avoiding distracting speculations about matters that are remote from lived experience.

So, what are these more down-to-earth human values that must be rescued from transcendental flights-of-fancy and nihilistic negativity? In light of the film’s critique of transcendentalism, the extremely modest list of values offered at the end as final “answers” to the meaning of life make good sense. They are introduced by Palin (in drag) as he interrupts the Vegas-style celebration of perpetual Christmas. “Well, that’s the end of the film,”
she announces. “Now here’s the Meaning of Life.” She opens an envelope and reads, “Well, it’s nothing special. Try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations.”

This rather modest sounding list makes perfect sense if we no longer pine for some more grand transcendental meaning. Once we dispatch both the otherworldly values (toadying to God and conserving our sperm, for example) and the otherworldly “realities” which ground those values (soul, heaven, God), then matters of meaning become markedly more pragmatic and demystified. Like Buddha’s philosophy, the essential goals in life become attempts to realize moderation, actualize one’s potential, and reduce suffering. When we try to make issues of ultimate meaning more melodramatic than this, we end up with the distracting and dehumanizing edifices of transcendentalism.

The Buddha offers us Four Noble Truths that can be used to fight these temptations and distractions. First, he says “All life is suffering, or all life is unsatisfactory (dukkha).” This seems pessimistic at first, but he’s simply pointing out that to have a biological body is to be subject to pain, illness, and eventually death. To have family and friends means that we are open to inevitable loss, disappointment, and also betrayal. But more importantly, even when we feel joy and happiness, these too are transient experiences that will fade because all things are impermanent.

Second, the Buddha says “Suffering is caused by craving or attachment.” When we have a pleasurable experience we try to repeat it over and over or try to hang on to it and turn it into a permanent thing. Sensual experiences are not themselves the causes of suffering—they are inherently neutral phenomena. It is the psychological state of craving that rises up in the wake of sensations which causes us to have unrealistic expectations of those feelings—sending us chasing after fleeting experiences that cannot be possessed.

The Third Noble Truth states that the cure for suffering is non-attachment or the cessation of craving. In the
Samyutta Nikaya
text, the Buddha says that the wise person “regards the delightful and pleasurable things of this world as impermanent, unsatisfactory and without atman (any permanent essence), as a disease and sorrow—it is he who overcomes the craving” (12:66).

And the Fourth Noble Truth is an eight-fold path that helps the follower to steer a Middle Way of ethical moderation. Following the simple eight-fold path, which contains simple recommendations similar those listed at the end of
Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life
, allows the follower to overcome egoistic craving. Perhaps the most important craving that must be overcome, according to Buddha, is the craving for immortality. The Buddha claimed that giving up transcendental tendencies would help us to better see the people all around us who need our help. We would become more compassionate, he argued, because we would not be distracted by cravings for the “other world.”

As the Pythons suggest, however, not all dehumanizing distraction comes from “above.” Often, we lose sight of compassion and humane living by drowning ourselves in a sea of trivial diversions. In existential terms, we lose our “authentic self ” in the unimportant hustle and bustle of everyday matters. Consider again the executives of the Very Big Corporation of America. Later in the film, we learn that just before they were attacked by the mutineers sailing the Crimson Permanent Assurance they were having a meeting about “Item Six on the Agenda, the Meaning of Life.” The board chairman, Graham Chapman, turns things over to Michael Palin: “Now Harry, you’ve had some thoughts on this.” “That’s right, yeah. I’ve had a team working on this over the past few weeks,” Palin explains in his best American accent:

The other Board members sit quietly through Palin’s impressive and important report. But, they need clarification about one of the more important points: “What was that about hats again?” one of them asks.

Distraction reigns again in Part IV,
Middle Age
, when the hyper-pleasant, smiley, and vapid American couple (Palin and, in drag, Idle) are served up a “philosophy conversation” in the form of flashcard prompts. The waiter (Cleese) tries to get the insipid couple started on their philosophy conversation by asking, “Did you ever wonder why we’re here?” They fail utterly to stay on topic. “Oh! I never knew that Schopenhauer was a philosopher,” Idle exclaims. Palin responds, “Yeah. . . . He’s the one that begins with an S.

If we combine this tedious conversation and the Boardroom’s fascination with hats, the results of Palin’s research begins to make sense. Human beings must “create” their “souls” day-by-day (rather than simply discover them, ready made) through “a process of guided self-observation.” The great enemy of this process, these sketches show, is distraction.

This is a conception of the soul that the Buddha could agree with. It embraces impermanence, avoids transcendentalist metaphysics, and accepts the view that we must actively cultivate our
“souls.” This is the point of Buddhist “mindfulness” (
sati
)—a powerful meditation that cuts through the dehumanizing distractions. There’s nothing mystical or particularly fancy about it. You can do it in your daily activities as well as in isolated contemplation. It just requires you to focus your mind and senses in the present moment, and to resist the mind’s natural tendency to wander off into the past or future, to replay events or imagine scenarios that fill our minds with worries, regrets, hopes or cravings. Mindfulness is a state of awareness that comes from training and discipline, a state that shuts out the drifting distractions of life and reveals the uniqueness of each present moment. In doing this careful attending, one can become more present in his or her own life. Mindfulness helps to rehumanize a person by taking their head out of the clouds. And according to Buddhism it reconnects us better with our compassionate hearts by revealing other human beings as just human beings. Once the distractions of trivia, or theoretical, transcendental, or ideological overlays are removed, we may become better able to know ourselves and compassionately recognize ourselves in others. We may even come to learn that, in fact, we should all wear more hats. But we will only know for sure if we are less distracted and more mindful.

STEPHEN A. ERICKSON

 

 

Q
uestions regarding the meaning of life have haunted humanity, for these sorts of questions yield little in the way of sustainable answers. Little, that is, unless we answer them by way of belief systems that are quickly taken for granted, becoming merely conventional and soon thereafter artificial: in short, through doctrines that are seldom satisfying.

It is therefore no surprise that the script of
Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life
proved to be enormously frustrating for the Pythons, so much so that it was their last major project together. Like religions themselves, the questions surrounding the meaning of life separated them, rather than brought them together. In the words of John Cleese, “The script lacked a central idea.”

But what would a central idea have looked like? Might it have been a specific one, like the idea that eating—or not eating—fish reveals life’s meaning? And to whom? The fish? Their consumers? Not very likely in either case. Something more general then? Perhaps a vantage point from which to understand competing accounts of life’s meaning? This sounds more promising, but also quite abstract and not at all comical. One doubts the Pythons would have pursued this. But we could pursue it, especially if the Pythons’ failure to do so may have been part of what flawed
Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life
. So let us look at some competing accounts of life’s meaning, accompanied, naturally, by Monty Python.

Especially in the West, life has been understood as a journey—from bondage to liberation, appearance to reality, confusion to insight, or darkness to light. Liberation, reality, enlightenment, or light are the destination, the goal. Our purpose in going there is to
be liberated
, to be made fully
real
and
enlightened
. According to many religions, the
meaning
of life is to get to this place. This kind of thinking is identified in philosophy as
axial
thinking, and we can talk in this context about the axial journey and about axial time, the temporal dimension of this journey. The German philosopher Karl Jaspers (1883-1969) coined this term in the twentieth century, construing the last 2,500 years or so as the playing out of the Axial Age and its picture of human life.
⁵⁴

This all sounds like very serious stuff. One can’t help but wonder how to go about making such a journey. And here the Python humor has its bite. As it turns out, the undertaking of “salvation” has, it seems, been handed over to institutions, chief among them organized religions, that have laid down rules and regulations to guide people to the “place of light.” As the Pythons were aware, institutions tend to institutionalize, rather than serve, their customers. They engaged especially the Christian way of approaching the meaning of life, within which earnestness, sacrifice, and suffering are the pious pathways to premium seats at the “Heavenly Concert,” the greatest show off earth. The Pythons saw this Christian approach as not only numbing, but misdirected, and their humor helped dislodge it from its place in human life. Even if it
were
true, they felt, it needn’t be so priggish and pious.

As with much Python humor, the Pythons made the point by juxtaposing desperately high stakes—life’s very meaning—against the silly, narrow-minded, squalid people purporting to institutionalize this meaning and dispense it to the assembled membership. So we have for example the British headmaster in
Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life
, John Cleese’s Humphrey Williams, making the following announcement to his young male students in a late-nineteenth-century British (and, correspondingly, Christian) boarding school: