Were Dostoevsky living at this hour, he might well ask whether the American reduction of nearly every aspect of human existence, including religion itself, to either entertainment or commodification constitutes a yet worse kind of herd - existence than the one Ivan
describes — a subtler and therefore
deadlier attempt to relieve humanity of its suffering and
sin, and thus of its real character and interest.
Similarly, former Justice Kirby
describes one of the
deadly courtroom
sins as «failing to laugh appropriately at judicial humour, injected deftly to relieve the tension or tedium of the court».