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There is an award-winning French film called "Ridicule," directed by Patrice Leconte, about the aristocracy in 18th century Versaille. In the movie, a person's social status in the court of Versaille depends on his or her ability to entertain the company by cleverly ridiculing others while avoiding ridicule. A viewer may, at first, think that all these aristocrats are garden-variety sadists. While they don't torture anyone, they take pleasure in causing pain, at least so long as the words used to inflict it are sufficiently witty. The question that interests me here is: Are the rest of us any different?
Consider a notorious app called "Figure One," which some have called "Instagram for doctors." It allows physicians to upload photos of unusual or striking cancers, wounds, cuts, and so on. The official purpose of the app is to allow doctors to crowdsource. However, it appears that what medical professionals actually use the app for is to ridicule patients. E.g., a doctor posted a comment about a finger punctured by a nail that went something like, "He nailed it, lol." Or (meaning this to be funny), "Male diabetic patient that was asleep at his home and woke up to his toe being chewed off by a rat.” On another occasion, a patient accidentally recorded the conversation a team of physicians were having while he was anesthetized. The recording shows the doctors mocking the patient repeatedly. (The patient subsequently sued and received half a million dollars.) I wish to suggest here that it is unlikely this patient happened to record the one medical team out there prone to mocking patients. What is more likely is that medical staff laugh at patients not infrequently, but patients don't find out about it.
One might think, perhaps, that there is something wrong with the culture of the medical profession, and that doctors are, for some reason, as inclined to take pleasure in ridicule as the aristocrats in the movie Ridicule.
That too seems unlikely. While medical professionals may not be more compassionate than the rest of us, they are hardly more cruel either. The fact is that professionals in various fields make fun of their clientele: flight attendants mock passengers (a flight attendant got in trouble some time ago for posting a photo taken from the back of the plane, showing passengers' heads with a derisive comment, something to the effect that the heads looked like broccoli), IT staff deride the users they are supposed to help and have such abbreviations for user errors as ID-10T (idiot) error and PICNIC (problem in chair, not in computer). The situation may look worse in the case of physicians because laughing at painful, debilitating conditions is worse than poking fun at ignorance or haircuts, but the difference appears to be mainly situational: doctors seem motivated by the same desire that motivates professionals in other fields who engage in similar behavior, it is just that they deal with sick people rather than healthy people.
What, exactly, is that desire? What do we, humans, get out of ridicule?
My best guess is that we have a dark side that seeks an outlet. We like to feel good about ourselves at the expense of others. We also feel connected to others when we laugh together, and jointly engaging in ridicule — however distasteful upon reflection — connects us to the company, in much the way gossip behind another’s back connects gossipers to each other, with a thread of terrible intimacy.
We, humans, no doubt, have a much better side. We are capable of selflessness and altruism, we admire noble actions, we enjoy feeling transported by powerful art. But we also like to laugh, and not just in a good-natured way, but laugh at others. While different people have different psychological boundaries, and some are much less inclined to be mean-spirited than others are, I am yet to meet a person who has never laughed at another under any circumstances. I suspect that there are more people in the world who can do something heroic — like risk their lives for strangers — than there are people who can go through life without ever partaking in ridicule, at least passively. The better angels of our nature can bring us to extraordinary heights, but they seem unable to annihilate the little fiends in the human soul.
What conclusion are we to draw from all this? Most of us are hurt when we find ourselves on the receiving end of ridicule. What I wish to suggest, however, is that when others laugh at us, it is likely not personal. They get something out of ridicule — a release for their darker impulses — much as we do.
Note that this point cannot be countered by saying, "But I only laugh at what is really laughable." Even if you suppose that when you laugh at others, there is really something about them worthy of ridicule while when they laugh at you, that's pure malice on their part, nothing much follows. It is true that what people are inclined to laugh at says something about their capacities for discernment. The problem is that this is largely irrelevant to the moral evaluation of ridicule. The motives for laughter that targets other people — whether a particular person or a group — are similar regardless of whether the laughter is of the discerning or the ignorant kind. An intelligent person's propensity to deride stupidity is not morally different from an ignorant person's tendency to ridicule nobler aspirations. While some kinds of laughter — such as those that take as their object sickness or disability — are particularly unsavory, no ridicule of others is morally good. To a moral saint, no person would seem worthy of derision.
It was once suggested that redemption is reconciliation with life. If that is so, there would be a sort of redemption in accepting and reconciling ourselves to the deep-seated human desire for ridicule. This is not to suggest that humans are incapable of freeing themselves of that desire (it is said certain long-term meditation practitioners are free from it) much less that they shouldn't try. It is only to say that cleansing culture of all ridicule is unlikely. In fact, it is unlikely that we would so much as make an attempt to achieve such a thing.
We can make moral progress, of course. It is already a sign of progress that most ridicule takes place without the knowledge of the object of mockery. In this respect, we are more civilized that the 18th century aristocrats from Ridicule, who jeer at people standing right in front of them, the way children might. We can also declare certain kinds of extremely unsavory ridicule unacceptable in polite society. But we probably won't extinguish our darker impulses any time soon.
What we can do, however, is accept that side of the human psyche. Not celebrate it or resign ourselves to it, but reconcile. There is, I think, a redemption of sort in this — in reconciling ourselves if not to life, then to our own shortcomings and from here, to those of others.
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