On a sofa in the corner of the room, a cat is purring. It seems obvious that the cat is an example of life, whereas the sofa itself is not. But should we trust our intuition? Consider this: Isaac Newton assumed a universal time flowing without external influence, and relative time measured by clocks – just as our perception tells us. Two centuries later, Albert Einstein dropped the concept of universal time, and instead introduced a concept of time measured only locally by clocks. Who before Einstein would have thought that time on the Sun, the Moon, and even on each of our watches runs at slightly different rates – that time is not a universal absolute? And yet today our cellphones must take this into account for a GPS to function.
Science has made amazing strides, uncovering a deep and often counterintuitive understanding of physical reality. We understand a lot about the atoms in the human body and the stars in the night sky: much more than we do about the individual human as an example of life. In fact, life scientists continue to debate the exact definition of life. It was Aristotle who first said that life is something that grows and reproduces. He was fascinated by the mule, a cross between a horse and donkey that is always sterile. But just because the mule was sterile, you couldn’t call it dead. The debate is endless: some say that life must metabolise, that is, take in compounds, turn them to energy, and release some waste. But do jet engines qualify? In short, there is no theory and therefore no measuring apparatus that can confirm or refute our assumption that the cat is alive and the sofa is not, nor even that you are alive as you read this.
“How Many Psychologists Does It Take ... to Explain a Joke?”
Many, it turns out. As psychologist Christian Jarrett noted in a 2013 article featuring that riddle as its title, scientists still struggle to explain exactly what makes people laugh. Indeed, the concept of humor is itself elusive. Although everyone understands intuitively what humor is, and dictionaries may define it simply as “the quality of being amusing,” it is difficult to define in a way that encompasses all its aspects. It may evoke the merest smile or explosive laughter; it can be conveyed by words, images or actions and through photos, films, skits or plays; and it can take a wide range of forms, from innocent jokes to biting sarcasm and from physical gags and slapstick to a cerebral double entendre.
Even so, progress has been made. And some of the research has come out of the lab to investigate humor in its natural habitat: everyday life.
In the introduction to Three Women, Lisa Taddeo writes that to find the three characters whose sexual lives she portrays in detail she drove across the country six times. The country is the United States, the time the second decade of the new century. It is an era of new language and technology in American sexuality, but this is not a book that tries to map higher order narratives. Instead it is a minute journalistic account of the defining sexual relationships in three people’s lives. Taddeo chose her subjects for their honesty and openness, and perhaps for what she perceives as their ordinariness.
Under handbag economics, states are required to restrict their expenditure to what the taxpayer is deemed to be able to afford. States must not try to increase their spending by borrowing from the (private) financial sector or by “printing money” (although the banks were rescued by doing so by another name – quantitative easing, the creation of electronic money).
The ideology of handbag economics claims that money is to be generated only through market activity and that it is always in short supply. Request for increased public expenditure is almost invariably met with the response “where’s the money to come from?” When confronted by low pay in the NHS, the British prime minister, Theresa May, famously declared, “there is no magic money tree”.
So where does money come from? And what is money anyway?
Suppose you were to mash up three of the greatest of all children’s fantasies: J.M. Barrie’s “Peter Pan,” J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” and T.H. White’s “The Sword in the Stone.” This may be hard to imagine, especially for an adult, but something like E.A. Wyke-Smith’s “The Marvellous Land of Snergs” would be the result. Deliciously irreverent in its narration, silly and spooky throughout, and charmingly illustrated by Punch artist George Morrow, this neglected masterpiece remains as winning today as when it was first published in 1927.