Stephen Colbert as a Religious Icon

A few months ago, I found myself at the American Physical Society March Meeting in Baltimore. The week was a bit insane: I arrived late Monday night due to a delay in the arrival of my baggage, and I was entirely unable to fall asleep that night. I was then treated to three and a half days of technical talks: more than nine hours of talks a day with no scheduled lunch break. (To be fair, almost no one actually attends three entire three-hour sessions in a day, though I went to more than most.) The point of interest, however, comes at the very end of the conference, when I decided to attend a session oriented on the teaching of physics.

One of the speakers during this session made a very interesting comment, which I paraphrase as follows: Most (college undergraduate) students are very good at criticizing ideas, but much less good at arriving at and accepting ideas as truth. Although the speaker apparently meant only to say that students seem reluctant, unwilling, or unable to accept the best scientific theories as stable ground for reasoning about nature, her comment intrigued me in a broader sense. It has struck me that one of the defining characteristics of our culture is that it has tested the old structures and ideas which once gave purpose to our lives and defined our roles in society, and found them wanting. Having tested enough of these schemas and found them all deficient in some way, it has moreover become largely unwilling to settle on any new overaching system (since such a system would certainly have its own flaws). This movement is due in part to the fragmented nature of society (or, at least, Western or American society) with its increasingly diverse cultural influences, but it seems to me that it is also in large part due to an inherent suspicion of “systems.”

Science is an interesting bird. In some ways, it is the grandest system of them all, purporting to explain—at least in principle, at least in light of potential future discoveries, and at least on a material level—the whole of the universe. The motions of some fundamental particles give rise to energy and matter; specific arrangements of matter give rise to chemicals, which in some cases organize into living things; and so on all the way to Paris Hilton, the Apollo space program, and the 1985 Chicago Bears. In my opinion, science has “saved face” in an atmosphere of skepticism and multiculturalism for two reasons: 1. Its basic precepts—that we exist in the universe, that our senses deliver reliable information, and that we can use inductive and deductive reasoning to determine truth about the universe—are essentially universally agreed upon, as to disagree upon them is in some ways to deny oneself the ability to interact in society. 2. Its scope is limited to material explanations of material events; it does not without extrapolation provide any answers to the questions of who we are, what purpose (if any) we have, how we ought to behave, or what we ought to value.

Yet, I believe that there is a general tendency in the human mind to desire to use as uniform a set of criteria as possible when seeking truth. (Incidentally, I believe that this is one of, but certainly not the only, reason why scientists seem to be a bit more likely to become atheists. Religions are not in general testable or defeasible things, and it is easy for the scientist to become dissatisfied with such merits as a religion might have in light of this perceived lack of intellectual rigor.) I wonder, then, whether the observation of the Physical Society speaker was not betraying just this: that we (meaning at least the bulk of my generation) have become so suspicious of “systems” as such that we approach them (even science) not as possible sources of insight, however imperfect, but as targets for criticism, and little more. This holds particularly for systems which have historically been embraced by our culture—Christianity, patriotism, and “the American dream,” for instance. It is important for me to point out here that this is simply what I perceive to be the movement of our times from the media and from the (more or less) well-educated; the old ideas still hold much of their sway.

All this has led me recently to ponder the question of whether today’s society (so far as I can meaningfully speak of society as a single entity) actually wants to embrace any sort of system. Against this conclusion are all the reasons cited above, plus perhaps some observations about the past results of widespread cultural acceptance of or debate over “systems”—for instance, the Crusades and wars between Catholics and Protestants, Nazi Germany and Communist Russia, and so on. On the other hand, many in modern culture cling onto religion, and it is not hard to perceive that many others aim to fill the void left by religion via astrology, political activism, work for social justice, etc.

This latter point was driven home for me recently as I watched an episode of “The Colbert Report” while preparing my lunch for the next day. For those who are somehow not familiar, Jon Stewart (full name Jon Stuart Leibowitz) and Stephen Colbert host half-hour shows on Comedy Central during which they humorously recount recent news and generally make fun of everyone involved. Stewart is unabashedly quite liberal, whereas Colbert satirically assumes a ridiculously conservative persona. A final point to note is that the base audience of these shows has sometimes been made out to be a bunch of pot-smoking hippies (notably by—drumroll, please—Fox News).

If I wanted evidence that our culture was moving towards a universal criticism of “systems,” where better to look than at the well-educated (I presume), liberal, pot-smoking audience of a TV show on which everyone and everything who purport to be anyone or anything are subjected to criticism? (Sure, Obama being a Democrat may earn him less criticism than Bush, but I certainly don’t think he’s excluded from criticism.) But then I considered in a new way the meaning of a ritual that goes on at the beginning of each episode of The Colbert Report: a relentless chant of “Stephen! Stephen! Stephen!” by the audience until the host thanks and quiets them repeatedly. One could argue that this is solely mock-worship of a mocking figure, but this does not seem to me to be the best explanation of the lengths to which “Colbert nation” is willing to go to support the causes of its sponsor, from raising 300,000 to support U.S.Speedskating to prodding his viewers to bump his book “AMERICA AGAIN:Re-Becoming the Greatness We Never Weren’t” back to #1 on the bestseller list (after some weeks out of that position) in response to antagonism from Bill O’Reilly, then above Colbert on the list.

After some reflection, I concluded that Stephen Colbert is, in a limited capacity, a modern religious figure. Or, to say that a different way, the audience of his show was not just jokingly cheering him, but in some respect worshipping him. My speculation is that this is a fundamental tension in our time: We long to be a part of something bigger, and we long to worship, but many of us have become skeptical of everything that might take that role in our lives. So we try to fill it with things that simply can’t be the answer—because our destinies aren’t really written in the motions of the stars and planets, because smoking weed doesn’t actually make our problems go away, and because Stephen Colbert cannot save us from our sins (from our boredom, perhaps, but not our sins). In such ironical turns, we aim to fill the void left by traditional structures, while retaining our skepticism of anything that might really and truly fill that void. It’s OK to worship Colbert, because we can be certain that Colbert isn’t a proper object of worship. True religion is more dangerous—we might actually buy into it.