Monty Python and Philosophy (14 page)

Cleese then turns to his chaplain (Michael Palin) who rises to lead the congregation in prayer:

Headmaster Cleese then addresses the schoolboys with a series of general announcements, including the importance of “Empire Day, when we try to remember the names of all those from the
Sudbury area who gave their lives to keep China British.” Almost forgetting, and clearly resenting its intrusion on these more important matters, Cleese turns to one boy, Jenkins, for just enough time to deliver a message from home: “Oh . . . and Jenkins . . . apparently your mother died this morning.” Over Jenkins’s tears, Palin briskly resumes business by leading a hymn to match his earlier prayer: “Oh Lord, please don’t burn us,” it goes. “Don’t grill or toast your flock, Don’t put us on the barbecue, Or simmer us in stock. . . .”

This sketch is emblematic of a philosophical mood that one finds throughout Monty Python’s work. But it sparkles in
Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life
. This movie is filled with
reductio ad absurdum
arguments that reduce traditional positions to absurdity by drawing out their logical conclusions or by juxtaposing them in the context of our deeper (usually ethical) convictions. Here, the complete insensitivity of the Headmaster and chaplain to one of the deepest injuries that can befall a young boy (the death of his mother) is compounded by the elaborately useless verbiage of religious orthodoxy. The thing that’s needed most in response to little Jenkins’s loss, some humane compassion, is completely truant in these rituals and authority figures. So it goes throughout
Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life
—not just the cruel humor but also the suggestion of a causal connection. The Headmaster and chaplain are not just insensitive people who happen to be running a religious boarding school. They are in fact insensitive
because
their religion has led them to lose perspective and compassion.

Much of
Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life
is a critique of ridiculous and dangerous distractions that dehumanize us. Among them are religious ideology, class distinction, science, medicine, education, and corporate greed. The film displays the myriad ways that humans alienate each other and also alienate themselves from their own happiness. In the section titled “Birth,” for example, we see the way that modern medicine objectifies and abstracts a patient into a meaningless afterthought that gets significantly less consideration than the expensive equipment that fills the “fetusfrightening room.” The “machine that goes ‘
ping
’”—as the Python-doctors call it—is more valuable than the mother and newborn child. Their humanity has been crowded out by profit-driven corporate healthcare and sterile technology. As the Pythons’ depiction of life’s cycle continues (into the section titled
“Growth and Learning”) we see institutional education deadening the spirit of young people. Even sex education, illustrated vividly by “teacher” Cleese and Patricia Quinn, becomes a dry pedantic exercise that simply affords the abusive tutor one more excuse to berate and scold his students. All these comments, moreover, come on the heels of the film’s surrealistic “short feature presentation” depicting a mutiny by the oppressed workers of the Crimson Permanent Assurance Corporation. Despite the transformation of their office building into a fierce, seaworthy battle-ship, and their swordfight victories over their corporate foes (including the Very Big Corporation of America), they meet an inglorious end as they sail off the edge of the earth into oblivion.

For all that, however, the film is not despairing. A thread of optimism runs through it and serves as an alternative to the portrayed estrangements. To see this, I’ll explain how the movie offers a sustained critique of transcendentalism, a way of looking at the world that connects and unifies the film’s sketches.

Transcendentalism is a theory embraced by thinkers as diverse as Plato, St. Augustine, and Vedantic Hindus. It posits the existence of two worlds instead of one. The physical world we live in is, according to the transcendentalist, a corrupt copy of a more perfect world. My slowly degenerating body, my material lap-top computer, my faltering democracy, and my entire sensory experience, to take a range of examples, are all just fleeting shadows when compared to the ideal and perfect realm believed to exist by transcendentalists. This ideal and perfect realm is populated by ideas (like “Justice”) and perfect beings (like “God,” “angels,” or even purified “souls”) that are higher and better—and serve as blueprints for—our usual, mundane realm of imperfect ideas and beings. This is not an obscure or uncommon theory. The vast majority of religious humans, both East and West, embrace some form of transcendentalism. If you believe that God is in his heaven, that He created the physical universe and is in some sense above and beyond his creation, then you are a transcendental thinker. Palin’s chaplain who gushes, “Oh Lord, oooh you are so
big. So absolutely huge. Gosh, we’re all really impressed down here I can tell you,” is a transcendentalist through and through.

In Hindu philosophy the transcendental being is called Brahman. Brahman is the permanent eternal reality that serves as the stable principle underlying the fluctuating world of material nature. The cosmos is always changing and becoming something new and different, but Brahman is the divine unity behind this veil of changing appearances. And in the same way that the cosmos has a persistent unchanging reality that is hidden from view, so too each human has a persistent unchanging reality hidden within. In the West we call the hidden reality within us the “soul” and in the East it is called “atman.” This view of humans as a combination of body and soul is frequently called “dualism.” My body may change its material composition from one year to the next (even one day to the next), but a soul or atman remains the same over the course of these changes and provides my source of personal identity (my self) over time. Hindu philosophers (especially in the
Svetesvatara
and
Katha
Upanishads) recognize the common metaphysical functions of these permanent realities, Brahman and atman, by claiming that they are actually one and the same substance or being. In other word, the permanent hidden soul or atman inside me is actually a piece of God or Brahman itself. A bit of Brahman is living inside me as my divine soul and through moral perfection and wisdom I can release this soul (my true self) after death to rejoin its transcendent origin. According to Hindu orthodoxy, my own moral weakness and persistent stupidity prevents the estranged bit of Brahman within me from reaching its “home,” and damns my soul to return again and again in subsequent lifetimes (reincarnation). Hindu scriptures liken the eventual metaphysical reunion (after countless lifetimes) to a drop of water returning to the ocean or a tiny spark returning to the eternal conflagration. And this final communion will be eternal bliss.

The belief in a soul, whether in its Eastern or Western version, is transcendentalist because it posits another reality beyond this mundane world of sensory experience. It suggests that my true self is some intangible undetectable being, having a similar metaphysical tint as God, that will eventually go to live in a world beyond.

In
Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life
the poor Yorkshire father (Palin) who explains to his abundant brood that “every sperm is
sacred” is also a transcendentalist. The father is forced to sell his fifty-some children to science for “medical experiments” because God, according to Roman Catholicism, commands that sexual intercourse be for the exclusive purpose of procreation. As a result, there are just too many mouths to feed. Explaining the reason for the family’s predicament, the Yorkshire father says of the Church “Oh they’ve done some wonderful things in their time, they preserved the might and majesty, even the mystery of the Church of Rome, the sanctity of the sacrament and the indivisible oneness of the Trinity. But if they’d let me wear one of those little rubber things on the end of my cock we wouldn’t be in the mess we are now.”

This is no mere critique of organized religion and its inflexible dogmatic positions. A deeper critique is lurking here, too. No one, whether Catholic, Hindu, or Muslim, or whatever, would submit themselves to the decrees and directives of organized religion if they did not already accept a transcendental commitment and further accept that an earthly institution is the trustworthy authority on or manifestation of those eternal transcendental truths. This is clear when the father concedes to his dejected children that the Church may not see his transgression of the rules (a transgression lobbied for by the jeopardized children), but God will see everything. There’s no escaping transcendental justice.

The father of this family (and the transcendental moralist, generally) is so focused on upholding the abstract intangible rule of God, that he causes immeasurable misery and suffering in
this
world—the world that contains his own flesh and blood, his children. The transcendental divine world beyond this mortal coil is so compelling that it takes priority over or
overrides
this world and its attendant values.

A similar example of this transcendental override can be seen in the classic Hindu epic the
Bhagavad Gita
. The
Gita
tells the story of a military leader named Arjuna who finds himself leading an army against an opposing legion of his kinsmen. On the battlefield, just before combat, Arjuna confides to his chariot driver (the divine being Krishna in disguise) that he is morally conflicted about the impending battle. Why should he kill his cousins? Indeed, why should he kill at all? These deep apprehensions plague Arjuna’s mind in the beginning of the text, and the remainder of the scripture is a series of arguments and revelations that
Krishna offers to inspire Arjuna into battle. First, Krishna explains, Arjuna should kill his enemies because God says so—on the grounds of simple, straightforward, divine authority. Like Abraham in the West, Arjuna must demonstrate his devotion to the sacred, transcendental powers.

The second explanation that Krishna offers involves the realities of the Hindu caste, or class, system. Arjuna was born into the ksatriya class, which means that it is his sacred
duty
to fulfill the actions of a warrior. Social caste was understood in cosmic terms, and the harmony of the universe itself was tied to the social harmony of each caste fulfilling its function or destiny. Without the execution of our sacred duties, the world itself slouches toward chaos.

Finally, Krishna attempts to assuage Arjuna’s guilt over murdering his kinsmen by pointing out that it is only the physical body that gets destroyed. The soul, or atman, of his kinsman is divine and eternal and will not perish on Arjuna’s sword. In fact, the atman will only be liberated by the killing of the body. The
Gita
explains: “This physical body is perishable. But the embodied soul is described as indestructible, eternal and immeasurable. Therefore do fight. Neither the one who thinks it kills nor the one who thinks it is killed knows the truth. The soul neither kills nor gets killed. The soul is never born nor does it die at any time. It has neither past nor future. It is unborn, ever existing, permanent and ancient. . . . Just as a man discards worn out clothes and puts on new clothes, the soul discards worn out bodies and wears new ones” (
Bhagavad Gita
[Bantam Classics, reissued 1986], pp. 18-22).

Under this transcendental override, common sense, human compassion, peaceful diplomacy, and even the evidence of one’s senses are all overridden by Arjuna’s eventual acceptance of a transcendental God whose unfathomable commands require Arjuna to kill the enemy. The transcendental position here actually claims in essence that killing someone is doing them a favor (because it releases their transcendental self). If we put John Cleese in the role of Krishna and Michael Palin in the role of Arjuna, we’d have a classic Python sketch. Instead of trying to convince a fellow that
his dead parrot is still alive or that his empty cheese shop really has cheese, we’d have God convincing a warrior to see killing as an act of helpfulness.

The meaning of life for the transcendentalist is hidden from the perceptions of common sense. Sometimes it is not just hidden but seemingly contradictory to life itself. As Monty Python often reminds us, transcendental values and the overrides they require can be comical, dangerous, or both. In the section of the film titled “Death,” the Pythons skewer the traditional idea of a transcendental soul that travels after death to a transcendental place (heaven) to enjoy eternal, transcendental bliss. The sketch shows the absurdity of the idea by simply imagining this heaven in concrete detail. After dying from a bad dish of salmon mousse, a group of souls enter a reception area in paradise. “Welcome to Heaven,” a hostess says as she greets them. “There’s a table for you through there in the restaurant.” She then wishes them “Happy Christmas” and explains that “it’s Christmas every day in Heaven.” For the transcendentalist (of both East and West), the return home of the transcendental soul to its transcendental realm is the very zenith and purpose of all life—it is the true meaning of life. Yet here, the Pythons lampoon it as a nauseating Vegas-style dinner-theater. Soon, an unctuous, overly tanned, sequin-tuxedo-wearing Graham Chapman takes the stage to sing, with hyper-white teeth, an unbearably maudlin song celebrating the good fortune of heaven’s elect. Up here, “it’s nice and warm and everyone looks smart and wears a tie.” But there’s more, including “great films on TV . . .
The Sound of Music
twice an hour, and
Jaws I
,
II
, and
III
.” All this, every day, over and over.