Is nonsense underrated?

You may seek it with thimbles—and seek it with care;
You may hunt it with forks and hope;
You may threaten its life with a railway-share;
You may charm it with smiles and soap—

Lewis Carroll - The Hunting of the Snark (1876)

Who hasn't watched Dr Who or a James Bond film, Harry Potter, Jurassic Park or any one of thousands of other improbable entertainments? There is nothing wrong with any of them but many films require the suspension of disbelief because otherwise they don’t work. This does not seem to detract from their entertainment value but it raises a question about nonsense and the way we use it. We are entertained by nonsense and a huge number of people make a living from it.

Suppose we use nonsense as a handy word for all those myriad dishonesties so widely use to evade reality or simply keep it at bay until something turns up. For convenience that would be nonsense, partial nonsense, nonsense diluted with reality and many other evasions lumped together. We may as well begin with relatively undiluted nonsense found in political speeches.

Leader strides confidently towards the rostrum. An expectant hush descends on the arena because that is the primary role of expectant hushes. Leader casts a keen, laser-like glance over the audience. The hush deepens, lifts as a heckler is ejected then deepens again. Leader pauses for dramatic effect then launches into a speech the faithful are waiting for. Wow –what a build up. Dramatic nonsense it may be but what a build up. I almost wish I were there.

To attract applause, even from the most infatuated supporter, any political speech needs a fair amount of nonsense to pad it out, spice it up and feed some headlines into the following day’s news. Nonsense is politically crucial, it is what followers expect, what they demand. It is a key ingredient in their political beliefs, their social standpoint. Not only is nonsense a vital aspect of entertainment, it is equally vital in politics. Hardly surprising though – the two are joined at the hip.

Tony Blair and Barack Obama were grandmasters at blending nonsense into their political art. At their best they soared above the prickly restraints of reality, giving only the faintest nod towards real life. Even that they did graciously, as if unbending for a brief democratic moment to depart from their airy art. Nonsense sustained them but not everyone has such a finely honed aptitude, for their sublime ability to float above the real world and crap on it from on high without the faithful noticing a thing.

Theresa May and Donald Trump are nowhere near that level of skill and this seems to be one reason why they are attacked so relentlessly. People need the feelgood nurturing of political nonsense and in their turn pundits need to feed on it. Blair and Obama delivered, May and Trump don't.

Even so and in spite of its familiarity, isn’t it strange how much nonsense there is in the world, how much of we need to keep things going? We pretend that nonsense is a wholly negative aspect of debate used by the other side but it isn’t. Surely the pervasive and intractable nature of it suggests how important it is to all sides. Not only that, but nonsense has always permeated the human condition, from tales of the supernatural to – well you name it. We are all familiar with nonsense, almost as if it is –

Useful? Essential?

Indeed. Perhaps nonsense really is important and maybe even essential to what we are, how we make progress, how ideas compete for our allegiance. Perhaps we need nonsense to leap o’er the intellectual chasms and knowledge gaps. Perhaps we need it to feed the imagination, stir the pulse and justify accepting whatever is wrong but necessary if we are to move on from where we are. For political reasons, where we are must always be where we never wanted to be in the first place. It’s nonsense of course, but that’s political progress for you.

A real advantage of nonsense can be seen when our ignorance of reality does not lead to damaging uncertainties. In such cases nonsense can be sustaining and lead to social coherence, keeping at bay the dread spectres of complexity and uncertainty and the grim chore of admitting we don’t know. Always a difficult one that. Sometimes it may even be the case that complexity and uncertainty are more damaging than the nonsense we use as a substitute for knowing. Often we’d rather not know anyway. Often we actually prefer nonsense.

Organised religion seems to have been a major source of nonsense during recent centuries, but not the only one. However, within the nonsense of religious superstition there is that core of moral value, something that perhaps we should have held on to when we thought we were merely ditching the nonsense. The trouble is we did not ditch nonsense, we merely switched our allegiance from religious nonsense to secular nonsense and the secular nonsense turned out to be worse.

Unfortunately our modern world has wandered into an arena of pseudo-technical nonsense without the moral core and the intellectual coherence of organised religion. Coherence partly based on nonsense is still coherence and may be enormously valuable in spite of the nonsense. Our need for nonsense and the inept way we swap one form for another, the way we build competing forms of nonsense all have the potential to be extremely damaging – simply because they are nonsense and nonsense has to be used wisely. As it often was when organised Christianity held sway.

Tackling nonsense is a real problem because when we tackle nonsense we have this innate tendency to look around for a dollop of more nonsense to do the job. Somehow, and this may be overly pessimistic, but somehow I can’t see that approach turning out well.