THE REVOLT OF NATURE respect,
modern man
is
not very different from his medieval
forerunner, except in his choice of victims. casts, eccentric religious sects like the
and and
Political out-
German Bibelforscher,
have taken the place of witches, sorcerers, and there are still the Jews. Anyone who ever attended a National-Socialist meeting in Germany knows that speakers and audience got their chief thrill in acting out socially repressed mimetic drives, even if only in ridiculing and attacking racial enemies accused of impudently flaunt'zoot-suiters*
heretics;
ing their own mimetic habits. The high spot of such a meeting was the moment when the speaker impersonated a Jew.
He imitated those he would see destroyed. His impersonations aroused raucous hilarity, because a forbidden natural urge was permitted to assert itself without fear of reprimand.
No
one has more ingeniously portrayed the deep anthropological affinity between hilarity, fury, and imitation than Victor
Hugo
in
I/Homme quf rit. The
scene in the British
House
of Lords in which laughter triumphs over truth is a masterful lecture on social psychology. The passage is entitled 'Human Storms Are More Malign than Storms of the
Sea/ According to Hugo, laughter always contains an element of cruelty, and the laughter of crowds is the hilarity 7
of madness. In our days of 'strength through joy there are writers who leave those lords far behind. Max Eastman de-
fends hilarity as a principle. Speaking of the concept of absolute, he declares: 'One of our chief virtues is that when
we
hear people say things like that ['the absolute']
we
feel
inclined to laugh. Laughter actually plays among us the role ' pkyed in Germany by this same "absolute/' In the eight-
eenth century, philosophy's laughter at big words sounded