Laughter In Dark Times

Arendt believed that “laughter makes available confidence in our fellow man, confidence in the human power of resistance — against ideology and terror, against obscurantism, repression, dogmatism, and despotism.” She spoke of laughter as a form of “self-sovereignty” and elsewhere of a “kind of laughing courage.” 

I’ve stood sentinel, I confess. Feeling at once the draw of the spectacle and the urge to bear witness, knowing, to some degree, the evident limits of both, and trying to embrace my own distinction between, on the one hand, having my attention captured and, on the other, attending to the world. 

We are, I think, for reasons that are not altogether clear to me, standing sentinel because we are encountering not a treasure in quite the same sense that Arendt suggests here, but something like its distant echo—the rumor of a mode of life we’ve forgotten or been denied. 

“Standing sentinel.” I can’t recall a more incisive formulation for the way many of us may experience being online at certain times. I especially appreciate the way Lockwood links this to some underlying, possibly inarticulate longing for control in what are, in fact, moments of extreme flux and disorder. This impulse may spring from the misguided ... See more