Venustas Litterarum: The preferability of satire.
Omnibus in terris, quae sunt a Gadibus usque
Auroram et Gangen, pauci dinoscere possunt
vera bona atque illis multum diversa, remota
erroris nebula…
In all the lands, from Cadiz to the Ganges and the rising sun, few can discern true (and to them very much two-faced) benefits from the tenuous fog of error...
Juvenal, Satire X.
We all discriminate, admire, cherish, value some things above others. In fact, getting on with life would be impossible without value judgements. We carry our judgements around with us like a bag of coins, and we identify others of like judgement, who traffic in this common currency. Trading our coins, we cement our social bonds.
But coins are two sided. While we are admiring their gleaming obverse portraits—often esteemed as sacred icons—along comes the satirist who, humorously or otherwise, flips them over. This sudden double vision causes us to feel a little ironical frisson. Perhaps we would rather not see them reverted; perhaps their opposite sides are scratched or tarnished. What’s this? Maybe the coin of the realm isn’t as valuable as we thought!
The satirist flips over the coins, but goes no further. Even if he wants to make a very critical point, he stops at the act of revealing, and then leaves it to us to form our own judgements. His art would not work otherwise; he has to leave it to us to see both sides at once. He needs irony. In this way, he differs profoundly from the propagandist and the preacher. There is no ironical propaganda; there are no ironical sermons. Rather than twirling our coins mischievously, the propagandist and the preacher would issue us their own currency of choice, dictating its proper use.
The satirist is often comical or farcical, a natural consequence of irony. But irony and humour undermine the programme of the propagandist and the preacher, and therefore they cannot tolerate them. The satirist is a sophistical trickster; the propagandist and the preacher are deadly serious.
We can either trade in our own currency, accepting the risk of occasionally being disabused of its perceived market value, or we can have our currency issued to us, its market value set from on high.
Preferring a free choice over which coins I trade, I will always opt for satire.