Monty Python and Philosophy (24 page)

What about King Arthur himself? Arthur displays numerous virtues throughout the film. In addition, he does not appear to be misguided in the way that Galahad is, and he shows sound judgment in numerous instances. However, Arthur fails to obtain the Grail. In fact, he is arrested and taken into custody as the two timelines of the movie (the medieval and the contemporary) collapse into one another. What went wrong?

The problem, I would suggest, is one of legitimacy. King Arthur’s quest for the Grail is only legitimate if his claim to leadership is legitimate. We are given reason to doubt that claim early in the film. A peasant woman asks how he came to be king. Arthur explains: “The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water signifying by Divine Providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. That is why I am your king!” Another peasant argues, reasonably enough, that “strange women lying in ponds handing out swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.”

A hero, in short, can only serve as a model for us to emulate if his cause is justified. While Arthur claims divine support, the basis for his claim is, on reflection, disturbingly mythical in character. Tyrants who do not posses genuine grounds for their power often appeal to such mythic claims to maintain their power. The troublesome character of Arthur’s ambitions is starkly demonstrated
by his decision to declare war on the French in an effort to take “his” grail from them by force.

If genuine divine support could serve as the basis for a good life, perhaps we should consider religion as the source of guidelines for this purpose. Religion appears to provide absolute rules that we can follow in our effort to be moral. The appeal to rules rather than overall happiness or virtuous character is associated with yet another basic approach to morality, one called
deontology
. Deontology asserts that what makes an action right or wrong is solely whether it conforms, or fits, to one’s duty. One challenging aspect of deontology is determining what duties we have. Religion supplies a possible answer to this question.

Monty Python’s Life of Brian
has religion as a central topic, so it is not surprising that it can provide us with illustrations of the difficulties involved in drawing on religious rules. It’s worth noting that, while this film is certainly critical of religion, several scenes suggest that we are not to understand Brian as Christ—for example, when Brian is born, the three wise men leave his cradle to visit another newly born child. In contrast to Brian’s stable, this other child’s stable is lit by a holy light. The primary target of the movie is religious dogmatism rather than the figure of Christ.

Early in the film, Brian and his mother are at the back of a crowd listening to a sermon. It is reasonable to assume that this sermon is being given by Christ (another clear case of separation between Christ and Brian). At this great distance, it’s difficult to hear, and a member of the crowd reports that the speaker has just said, “blessed are the cheesemakers.” This example brings out the fact that before we can apply a moral rule we must have the right rule in mind. Even if a moral rule has a divine source, there is room for error right from the beginning—there are many ways for the text to be corrupted. Moreover, trying to fix a corrupted text can lead to its own problems. One of the crowd members confidently clarifies the rule by saying, “Well, obviously it’s not meant to be taken literally; it refers to any manufacturers of dairy products.”
We cannot simply rely on the words, even if we do not take them literally. We have to develop an interpretation of the words.

Later in the film, Brian needs to escape from the Roman guards and literally drops into a group of prophets. To disguise himself, he needs to pretend to be a prophet. With this goal in mind, Brian attempts to reproduce a parable we assume he has heard from Christ. The crowd does not respond well.

Even if we have the right rule and are attempting to interpret it, we can still go awry. Brian’s failure to communicate a meaningful message to the crowd reflects his limited understanding of the parable. Interpretation is a challenging process, and simplistic understandings of the rule will not be sufficient to provide us with guidance. It is worth noting that the problem of interpretation is not restricted to parables or metaphors—even the most straightforward rules pose challenges, as the priest supervising the stoning of the blasphemer discovers. The blasphemer chants ‘Jehovah’ repeatedly, leading the priest to say “If you say ‘Jehovah’ once more . . .” at which point the priest himself is stoned by the crowd. The priest and the crowd have different interpretations of
just what the rule against blasphemy entails, and there is no obvious way to adjudicate between them.

The dangers of blind obedience to authority are illustrated when Brian unintentionally gains a collection of followers. He tries to convince them that he is not the Messiah, but they do not listen. “Only the true Messiah denies his divinity,” a woman explains, typifying the way that the crowd reinterprets everything he says to support the conclusion they want to hear. This response reaches its peak when, in frustration, Brian says, “All right. I am the Messiah.” The crowd is relieved. “Now, fuck off !” says Brian. The crowd is quiet. Finally, one man asks, “How shall we fuck off, O Lord?” Their desperate desire to have rules to follow prevents them from critically assessing the commands they receive.

Brian highlights this point in a later scene where his followers have grown tremendously in numbers. After accidentally exposing himself (in one of the best uses of male full-frontal nudity in film history), Brian tells the huge crowd “Look, you’ve got it all wrong! You don’t need to follow me! You don’t need to follow anybody! You’ve got to think for yourselves! You’re all individuals!” The crowd replies, reverently, “Yes, we’re all individuals!” The one rule we cannot follow blindly is the rule that requires us to think for ourselves. The influential eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), a devout Christian, made the injunction to think for ourselves—autonomy—the basis of his version of deontology. Even a divinely inspired set of rules must be thought through carefully and critically to serve as an appropriate guideline for living our lives.

If we want to think critically, we may be tempted to turn to science to provide answers. However, unlike the other institutions that we have considered, science does not provide any particular advice for living a good life. The great power of science is that it aims simply to describe the world, not to determine what ought to be. Scientific work, unfortunately, often threatens to undermine traditional sources of meaning and value. The result is nihilism,
the destruction of all values. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), famous for declaring that “God is dead,” put it this way in Book 1, Section 1 of his
Will to Power
: “What does nihilism mean? That the highest values devaluate themselves. The aim is lacking; ‘why?’ finds no answer.” The challenge that science poses for value is an important theme in
Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life
. Some of the most powerful points are made, in typical Python fashion, in song.

Consider our sense that our individual lives are significant, that the projects we engage in are meaningful. Listen to “The Galaxy Song,” following along in your imagination. We start on earth, looking down at a revolving planet, then back away and to see our sun, then our galaxy, the Milky Way (with its “hundred billion stars”). We aren’t even in the center of our own galaxy—“We’re thirty thousand light years from galactic central point.” Our entire galaxy itself is just part of a much larger universe (though “millions of billions” of galaxies is probably excessive.) Our best understanding of the universe, in short, is that it is unimaginably vast in both space and time, and we play a role in it that is beneath trivial.

In some ways, however, the picture is even worse. The song that begins the film (also called “The Meaning of Life”) poses a question that has troubled many people since the modern synthesis combined Darwin’s evolutionary theory with the understanding of our genetic code: “[A]re we just simply spiraling coils of self-replicating DNA?” Our drives and goals and hopes and dreams may all just be products of evolution. Our very sense of purposiveness—our sense that there is something worth pursuing—may itself be a product of evolution. An animal that is not driven to pursue goals will not reproduce, and so will not leave descendents. But the goals themselves have no greater significance.

The threat of nihilism, then, is quite real, and is perhaps the most pervasive theme in the work of the Pythons. Part of their response is to revel in the absurdity—think of the scene in the middle of
Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life
, in which several bizarre characters try to “Find the Fish,” with shouts of encouragement from the audience. Throughout all stages of their work, the Pythons take a gleeful pleasure in the collapse of meaning and the limitations of human institutions.

But the Pythons have another response to the challenge of nihilism as well. At the end of the film, suddenly and unexpectedly, the meaning of life is revealed: “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.” While this line is presented in a very nonchalant fashion and is immediately buried in a series of jokes about censors and modern audiences, it bears closer scrutiny. This is pretty sound advice for living a good life. Take care of yourself, be sure to continue learning and growing, be decent to other people as individuals and be tolerant of others as members of groups.

A person following this advice could recognize the limitations of the marketplace while also recognizing the contributions it can make for overall happiness. While she might not find a glorious quest to participate in, she would have appropriate grounds for developing a virtuous character in the context of her cultural tradition. Although her religion cannot provide her with simple rules to follow blindly, she can draw on it reflectively to develop a set of rules that she can autonomously endorse. Finally, and above all, by keeping a sense of humor, she can cope with the threat of nihilism and the challenges of the scientific picture of the world while leading a worthwhile and meaningful life.

EDWARD SLOWIK

 

 

U
nlike any other comedy troupe, Monty Python presents its viewers with a bizarre, unpredictable, and seemingly meaningless world. If one were to try and locate a philosophical message in the shows, recordings, and movies of Monty Python, one might come to the conclusion that the world is incoherent or absurd, such that one can find no meaning or values in it.

In their last movie,
Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life
, this possibility is mentioned explicitly in the infamous “Live Organ Transplants” skit: reflecting on Eric Idle’s song about the vastness of the universe, Mrs. Bloke (Terry Jones) comments, “Makes you feel so sort of insignificant, doesn’t it?”

One might wonder, since this movie is their final group effort, whether Mrs. Bloke’s line represents the final judgment of Monty Python concerning the “meaning of life.” Do they really believe that life is insignificant? In short, are the Pythons a band of nihilists who believe in nothing, perhaps simply making a joke at the expense of the average, non-philosophical viewer, who believes that life does have a meaning? Are they really, deep-down, a bunch of skeptical, left-leaning, intellectual agitators who enjoy undermining the common beliefs and values of ordinary, law-abiding citizens? Are they just a horde of snooty, namby-pamby,
pinot noir
sipping, Foucault-reading, moral anarchists?! A depraved pack of pseudo-intellectuals who would rather sit on their pampered posteriors while engaging in pretentious, limp-wristed, academically-questionable pursuits, taking time off only to hurl insults at decent hard-working folk?!

Oh, excuse me! I got carried away there for a bit. Actually, though some of these last accusations might be true (at least the wine drinking, in John Cleese’s case), Monty Python does, in fact, have a positive message about the meaning of life. Well, sort of: the message is existentialist. And, in order to better understand the existentialist content of Monty Python, we will need to examine some of the major ideas of existentialist philosophy.

Although its origins can be traced to the nineteenth century, existentialism is principally a twentieth-century philosophy. And, like the twentieth century itself, existentialist philosophy is a strange mix of diverse views, trends, and attitudes. One often finds, for instance, a dictionary definition of existentialism that simply groups a host of themes: “the individual, the experience of choice, and the absence of rational understanding of the universe with a consequent dread or sense of absurdity in human life.”
⁷¹
Given such a broad description, the problem of relating Monty Python to existentialism is not the shortage of analogies or similarities between the two, but the exact opposite; what Monty Python skit does not bring up the individual, our experience of choice, and, in particular, the absurdity of human life?