What do you interpret George Santayana's quote to mean?

Question

The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be. But as it nevertheless intends all the time to be something dignified, at the next moment it corrects and checks and tries to cover up the absurd thing it was; so that a conventional world, a world of masks, is superimposed on the reality, and passes in every sphere of human interest for the reality itself. Humor is the perception of this illusion, whilst the convention continues to be maintained, as if we had not observed its absurdity.
-- George Santayana

Answer 1

An ambitious question. You'll probably get a Santayana scholar to point to my errors of interpretation, later.

But it seems to me straightforward (that quote in the details): We can't maintain for long the fictions that make us seem worthy in our own eyes, so we must keep changing the costumes that cover our unavoidable and merely human habits.

It is in the world of fashion as such that you can see this thought demonstrated most obviously. What was the height of dignified manly costume in New York in 1740? Would that costume today be anything other than laughable?

[And how long is the laughter to be held back on today's notion of dignified manly costume? I've been stifling guffaws for decades now.]

But Santayana is diving in deeper water, obviously. He means to speak of the social construction of reality--and how vain that effort to hold the fiction realer than brute reality must be finally; there is no way to stay completely blind to the frailty of the illusion that is daily manhandled by the real behaviors of muddy beasts. We see that, and it makes us laugh.

Or we might cry.

Maybe I should get around to reading this fellow. He has a nice way of putting things.

Thanks for the question.

ADDENDUM:

I'll add this, excerpted from one of my poems, that seems to touch on the same matter:

"A man can learn to hobble fictions, practice riding useful fakes,
Or swim about in sweet conventions, frolic under custom's skirt,
For once you see how thin they be, your pity holds these feeble flakes
Aloft in mind, secure against the killing contact with the dirt."

Answer 2

As I see it, George is making a point about people on many levels: Personal, individual, family, community, and ever larger communities, national, international, world. But taken at the level of the individual, this affects all the larger communities.

The idea is that we, as humans, aspire to be something greater than we percieve ourselves to be ("something dignified"). But when we fail to realize our vision, we hide what we were, or what we are from others, pretending to be something else. Humor is helpful indoing this; with humor we gloss over the pretense, the masks, so the illusion is maintained.

But there's good news: Those who see it for what it is, can never go back to living their lives that way. Even if they choose to do nothing about it, they are forever transformed.

Answer 3

Pretty much the same as he means by this quote:

"It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands."
-- George Santayana

Answer 4

It means: It ain't necessarily be true, so lighten up.