April 01, 2001
On the positive uses of irony
From the February 15 lecture at Emory.
I want to talk with you about irony. You know that word refers to a contradiction between the literal meaning of words or actions and their meaning in the context where they take place.
But that definition doesn't capture the mood of irony. As we tend to use it, irony is a way of getting distance from a situation, a theme, a personality, an incident. It's also a kind of self-protection. If you asked me, "Has your heart ever been broken," and I answered, "Yes, when they kicked Marilyn off of Survivor last week," I would be denying you access to a part of me. By answering an intimate question with televised melodrama, I would also be setting myself apart both from your question and from the pop culture that I use to answer it. By making the question appear vaguely ridiculous, I can avoid addressing it by making myself superior to it.
This is the way I want to talk about irony: not mainly as a literary or rhetorical technique, but instead as an attitude, a form of personality, a way of approaching other people and yourself. I will argue that, these days, we are all tempted to become ironic-detached, superior, remote, and—we imagine—untouchable. I think this is because certain features of our experience make this ironic attitude attractive: our savviness, our deep-seated skepticism about human nature, and our disappointment in politics. I'll spend some time talking about each of these. But, I want to say that our irony is not a very healthy or fruitful kind. But happily, it's also not the only kind. There's a better way of being ironic, which doesn't draw us away from other people and the world, but brings us closer-only in a more perceptive and intelligent way. This kind of irony is beautifully expressed in the work of Michel de Montaigne and Shakespeare, and I'm going to talk about each of them as I defend this older version of irony.
So, let me begin by talking about today's irony. I should say a few things first about what that discussion is not. It is not a description of a population of people who are The Ironic Ones, to be contrasted with the naïve and the earnest. It's also not an up-to-the-minute report on the newest cultural formation. It's not cultural trend-watching. It is an attempt to reflect on a way of understanding and thinking about oneself—and by extension about other people—that's been around for a long time. It seems to me to be one of the more or less perpetual features of our experience. Talking about it means describing a part of the soul, I would say, or if you prefer, an aspect of the self.
This irony is a refined mistrust: of ourselves, of other people, of institutions, of ideas, even of language. The style of this mistrust is not embittered, skulking, or skittish. It is playful, complacent, and knowing. It is oddly secure in the confidence that, if we trust in nothing, nothing can betray us. That inoculation against betrayal is the main thing in today's irony. It's pre-emptive mistrust as a trick of self-preservation.
This mistrust means a quiet refusal to believe in the depth of relationships, in the sincerity of motivation, or in the truth of speech. An endless joke runs through the culture of irony, not exactly at anyone's expense, but rather at the expense of the idea that anyone might take the whole affair seriously.
So, why does this attitude seem so compelling to us today? It seems to me that many of the things we might want to take a chance on now strike us as very thin and unreliable. For one thing, living in a sophisticated culture of media and advertising has made us almost debilitatingly savvy. We've all spent years watching, in movies, on television, in commercials, idealized portrayals of the moments that make our lives unique to us: falling in love, marrying, making love, reuniting with an estranged father, saying goodbye to an old grandmother. These portrayals draw on the power of intimate moments, but the relationship is parasitic. As become more sophisticated viewers of entertainment, we also become more sophisticated observers of our own words and acts. We hear how we echo someone else's marketing pitch, their catch-phrase, or their treacly dialogue. Our own words sound like plagiarism, like faking it, like selling something. Irony can be a genuine act of self-preservation, holding all of this at bay, to ensure that whatever is left, whatever we let through our verbal and psychological checkpoints, is really ours.
Then there's our insistence on knowing everything. The great conservative Edmund Burke, who was also a special kind of liberal, remarked that social and political life was possible because of what he called "pleasing illusions." People could believe in shared principles, and the goodness of their institutions, and the worthiness of their leaders not because these things were true, but because everyone shared in believing them. By contrast, today we feel entitled to do without all illusions, to know the basest, ugliest, and most disappointing facts about any public person's life. We should ask ourselves whether Martin Luther King, Jr., could have achieved what he did if people knew about him the kind of thing we have recently and casually learned about Jesse Jackson. Or whether John F. Kennedy could have been Kennedy under the scrutiny of the same media that has publicly undressed Bill Clinton. Or did a certain kind of public greatness depend on our not feeling entitled to know everything about the lives of public people?
Now, defending illusions is a difficult position. So is defending secrecy that enables great men to manipulate and misuse women. But I think it's possible to avoid those extreme positions and still believe that we make a mistake today when we act as if the basest thing about a person were also the most basic, the ugliest fact were also the most true, and the most disappointing revelation the only really important one. It is now almost a doctrine of common sense that you can understand whatever people do in terms of crude self-interest: their search for more money, more fame, more sex. What is disturbing about this is not that we're willing to confront the fact that people are motivated by these aims, but the comprehensive and crude way we reduce everything to these appetites. We level our complicated motivations to their lowest elements.
Another source of our irony is the decline of politics as something worth believing in. The past two centuries have been full of, and in some ways animated by, extraordinary political ambitions. Just in living memory, and just in this country, the labor movement of the thirties and the civil rights movement of the sixties put basic questions about how we would live together up for dramatic public dispute. People staked their lives on those disputes because the stakes were worth the danger. And America was the least of it. In much of this century, it was possible or even inescapable to believe, as Thomas Mann put it, that "in our time, the question of man's destiny presents itself in political terms." That is, to decide what you thought about being human, you had to come to terms with the claims of liberalism, the counter-attacks of communism and fascism, the question of whether justice could be achieved at all in this world, and, if so, how. You were not a serious person if you hadn't wrestled with these questions.
And now all of that seems so remote that it 's almost irretrievable. Once politics was the lever that would move the world. Now, it has become an impotent exercise, a form of entertainment with low production values. As W.H. Auden wrote of poetry, it makes nothing happen. It attracts bad characters and low motivations. It doesn't promise to change much beyond the details of the tax code. The question of man's destiny has moved over to technology, and popular culture, and finance, and politics looks more and more like a tedious anachronism. Anyone who looked at politics as a way of giving shape and sense to her life, or as something worth staking herself on, would seem charmingly naïve at best, and at worst a sucker.
So these are some of the origins of our contemporary irony: our savvy mistrust of our own emotions, words, and experience; our belief that debunking and tearing down character are the ways to reveal truth; and our inability to believe in politics the way that people recently, and fervidly, did. And I would say that there is one further thing: the ironic self is a very fragile self. It's so delicate that it needs to be protected from life's many possible disappointments, hidden away in a maze of its own cleverness and insight so that it can't be reached, touched, and betrayed. I don't why we've come to think of ourselves this way; but I would guess that it has to do with the three things I've just mentioned, our savviness, our debunking, and our lack of faith in politics. When nothing outside us seems worth taking a chance on, it's that much easier to withdraw inward and try to keep our delicate selves safe.
None of what I'm describing requires us to become ironists, obviously; but every piece makes the whole more plausible, more obvious, more inescapable.
Montaigne against high-mindedness
But this grim picture doesn't mean—to my mind, anyway—that we should become anti-ironists. We don't need to be crusaders for earnestness and plain speech. The way we use irony is not the best, but it has other uses, and we can learn from them. Two of its best practitioners are Montaigne and Shakespeare, and getting to know their ironic spirit is a way of improving our own.
Montaigne may have been the first modern ironist. He's also one of the finest examples of a healthy ironic manner. To present him, I need to say a little about his life and the world he lived in.
He lived in the sixteenth century, in southwestern France. He was a minor aristocrat, but not from a noble family. He was Jewish by descent on his mother's side, but he seems to have been some sort of Catholic—a skeptical one. His father raised him speaking only Latin until he was seven, then sent him to live with a peasant family, where he learned the vernacular tongue and vernacular living. He spent several decades in public life, including several terms as mayor of Bordeaux, and then retired to his small stone keep, where he spent his last years writing his great work, titled simply the Essays.
They're still a singular piece of reflection: they're grave and impudent, they're vulgar and precise, they're meandering and they're terribly pointed. They made him a hero to people who are arguably the founders of our time: Shakespeare read him, Rousseau called him the first man to study humanity by examining the individual heart, Nietzsche thought he was one of the thinkers who could teach us to live cheerfully with ourselves. Ralph Waldo Emerson, who is a representative American if anyone is, called Montaigne one of history's "representative men," one the people who have taught us how to be the way we now are.
Montaigne also lived through the Wars of Religion, when Europe was split between the old Catholicism and the new Protestantism. Regions and villages and families were at each other's throats. Montaigne's own family was split. He was horrified by the cruelty and the moral arrogance that he saw all around him. He was disgusted by the violence that people committed in the name of holiness. And he became a kind of ironist.
But his irony was not an excuse for withdrawing. It was a keen blade for slicing between sense and nonsense, seeing when the emperor was naked, and when pearls were falling before swine. In this spirit, Montaigne was both severe and generous. Severe in his keen perceptions, generous in accepting that the human world is imperfect, and that many imperfections are better accepted than damned.
He hated high-mindedness. He wrote, "there are two things that I have always observed to be in accord: supercelestial thought and subterranean conduct." That is, the higher a man's professed principles, the lower Montaigne expected his behavior to be. Like today's ironists, he saw politics as a symptom, an expression of pride, ambition, and self-righteousness, dressed up as conviction. He believed that the worst thing he could say of someone was often the most true.
So, as an ironist, he set himself against people who believed too readily in ideas, in parties and movements, or in themselves. His characteristic essay is an unsettling assault on certainty. He sets off one view against another, careening among them bewilderingly, making each seem as plausible as the last, but no more than the next. The upshot of these performances is a lingering, accusatory question: Why should you think you are right? Are you not just being arrogant and prideful? And if you are, what harm are you going to do, while you're drunk on your self-certainty?
But for Montaigne, this ironic contempt for the self-certain and the credulous and the proud was a moral project. He repudiated those attitudes because he saw that they were dangerous. And his irony was not a way of rejecting the world, but a technique for living in it without becoming dangerous.
He was intensely interested in how to participate in politics without bowing to fanaticism. His answer was a salutary, corrective irony, a constant wariness of his own capacity for excessive conviction. He wrote, "It is right that things should touch us, providing they do not possess us. He maintained his conviction "without penetrating and mortgaging commitments" that would compromise his own judgment and conscience. He wrote about the danger of partisanship to the heart: "We have no need to harden our hearts with plates of steel. It is enough to harden our shoulders. It is enough to dip our pens into ink, without dipping them into blood." He insisted on not identifying himself morally with any party or program. He insisted on always being more admiring of his opponents and skeptical of his allies than the reverse. This seemed to him to be the only way to join in politics without drowning in it. Politics needed irony—not a detached and disengaged irony, but a disciplined and rigorous mistrust of politics' own claims.
So today's ironist would look at this and say, fine: politics needs irony. But why does irony need politics? Montaigne's answer was that we are not good enough to do without it. People are too cruel, too ambitious, too proud. We need the discipline of common institutions to keep us halfway decent. The fact that some of our worst passions are channeled through politics doesn't mean that, if we got rid of politics, we could escape those passions. Instead, government more often than not stands between us and a blood-soaked world.
Montaigne was a pessimist about humanity as a whole, although he could be wonderfully hopeful about particular people. You don't have to stop with his view that government just makes the world less dark and bloody-although one version of the recent events in Sierra Leone, Rwanda, and Congo suggests that he might be right. You can put your stake on government because it's our most reliable way to feed the poor, to ensure universal education, to slow the forces of economic rapacity and ecological violence, or even to let free people decide together how they want to live. I tend more toward the second version. But either way, I think we have to accept Montaigne's proposal that life without irony can be dangerous-more to the point, it can make us dangerous. We live in a complicated world that we're forever tempted to make simple, and the value of irony is to alert us, over and over, to the complicated nature of things.
And what about Shakespeare?
One of Shakespeare's most wonderful qualities is his intensely felt sense of the disorderly character of human life. Henry Adams described him—aptly—as "the evangel of conservative Christian anarchy—not very conservative, not very Christian, but stupendously anarchic." I suspect this is one reason that he adapts so well to a time that's heavily aware of its potential for social, cultural, ethical, and sexual chaos. Some eras have bowdlerized Shakespeare to make him a great teacher of virtue. We welcome him as a messy brother, one of our own.
But Shakespeare's disorder is artful. He's a master of the ironist's favorite technique: seeing what is said within the light of who says it and in what setting. The power of ideas even as they are pronounced is called into question because the speaker is someone who manifestly fails to live up to them. But at the same time, their eloquence and rightness can't be denied. So the audience lives in the tension between doubt and belief.
Take two of the great speeches from the play I know best, The Merchant of Venice. They both belong to Shylock, the Jewish money-lender who has a contractual right to a pound of flesh from Antonio, a Christian merchant. Antonio despises Shylock. He has mocked him and spat on him in the streets. Now, Shylock has his chance for revenge. But as he contemplates the years of abuse that Antonio has given him, he produces one of literature's great reflections on the universality of common humanity. He evokes that elementary Christian principle beautifully and powerfully to remind his audience that, in every respect, the oppressed Jew is no less a human being than his Christian oppressor - and, because he is not the oppressor, the Jew is—maybe—a better Christian than the Christian himself.
Antonio has taunted and humiliated him, he says, and "What is his reason? I am a Jew. Hath a Jew not eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, shall we not die?"
But then the speech takes a terrible turn. Shylock continues: "If you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be, by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction."
The speech is a defense of Shylock's intent to join in the same abuses that he seems to be decrying. He will outdo his teachers, the Christians, in cruelty, not to make a point, but because he is in fact no better than they are: he is simply the subordinate come suddenly to power.
We see the same turn in Shylock's great riposte to Christian self-righteousness. Shylock is now at trial. He has gone to court to ask the Duke of Venice, acting as judge of the local law, to enforce his contract. Shylock is asked to show mercy to Antonio. He is warned, in a glimpse of things to come, that he who shows no mercy may receive none, either. He responds by hoisting Christian arrogance on its own petard: is he not, he asks, playing by the same rules the Christians have written? "What judgment should I dread, doing no wrong? You have among you many a purchased slave, which, like your asses and your dogs and mules, you use in abject and in slavish parts, because you bought them. Shall I say to you, let them be free, marry them to your heirs? Why sweat they under burdens? Let their beds be made as soft as yours, and let their palates be seasoned with such viands? You will answer: "The slaves are ours." : So do I answer you: The pound of flesh which I demand of him, is dearly bought. 'Tis mine, and I shall have it!"
Brilliant. Devastating. The Christians' moral self-importance is in ruins. Their claim to be the special caretakers of charity is shown up as a vast lie. This is what is now called an ideological unmasking, a cynical disclosure of hypocrisy worthy of Brecht. With our modern ears, we can hardly help hearing Shylock as an Abolitionist. He strikes us as a moral crusader who shows us our own cruelty.
And he does that. But Shylock is no abolitionist. He fully intends, until he is stopped within an inch of the act, to cut out a man's heart as payment for an overdue debt. In a play full of small cruelties, he attempts the only act of concentrated, premeditated evil. He is the villain of the play. Human cruelty is not the villain, but the defining fact. Cruelty is the first law of motivational physics for the play.
Speeches of such great moral power as Shylock's could go to attractive characters, at least to nominal heroes. Then, the play would approve some character, pull him out from the common herd to be the judge and the emblem of righteousness. He would be the abolitionist that we can hardly help imagining Shylock to be. That would also allow the reader or audience to identify with him, to align themselves with the bearer of the right denouncing the wrong. This could be achieved by making Shylock a genuine hero, or by giving his speeches to someone who is not the cruelest character in a pageant of cruelty.
As it is, though, the contrast is too great to allow us any stable judgment. Shylock's indictment of Christian hypocrisy stands, but it indicts both the speaker and the people (and the culture) that he denounces. Wherever we stand, we are also implicated in it. There is great moral power present here, but it is immunized from the great seduction of the moral invocation: the temptation to the speaker and listener to identify themselves with what is right and good. That would mean taking these great speeches as occasions for complacency, rather than extreme discomfiture. Instead, Shakespeare ensures that the ideals remain, but no person can lay perfect claim to them.
Instead, they have a claim, imperfectly realized, on all of us. These ideals govern a human world that is pervasively flawed, fraught with base desire, ambition, selfishness, and, always and everywhere, double-dealing and deceit. Shakespeare's world is as rife with these as any contemporary fictional world. Yet, for all that, it does not become morally flat. It is a world that remains, in some measure, morally answerable-and because no one can claim to be the avatar, the evangel, of the principles to which it must answer, no one is excused from answering to them.
Irony and hope
So, I have been praising a legacy of irony. But what good does it do to say admiring things about a few old books?
I believe that how we think matters intensely. If we are habitually sloppy and credulous, we will believe and act ineptly. We will end up disappointed and frustrated at being let down. We may be tempted to give up on thinking altogether.
But if we can think clearly about what is important to do, about what our true motives are, about what is necessary, what's possible, and what's mere fantasy, then we will at least be halfway prepared for a life of urgent questions and disproportionately few obvious answers.
And I know of only two ways to learn to think—that is, to learn to see, and judge, and even act, with a little bit of clarity, and a sense of how important clarity is. One is to know well, and grow older with, people who have this clarity. They teach it through participation, the way you might teach a craft or a dance. The other is through books that, like Montaigne's and Shakespeare's, are repositories of personality, ways of knowing people who are both exceptional and deeply representative.
Most of all, these figures, and their personalities that are also ways of approaching the world, give us something to hold in contrast to our contemporary irony. They form a counterpoint to the ironic manner that I criticized earlier, because they know everything that our contemporary ironist knows, but—and with much more experience of the world than most of us—they resist his despair. Their irony is not refined suspicion and cultivated mistrust, deployed to defend our very delicate selves. Their skepticism and wariness and playfulness are ways of coming to terms with life in order to live it well. Although they were much more aware than we are of history and its terrible repetitions, that awareness don't make their existences less vivid. Even though they know all about the back rooms and undercurrents of human motivation, they don't believe that the most disappointing thing we can say about anybody must also be the truest thing about him. And Montaigne, at least, believed strongly enough in politics that he participated honorably in it through most of his life, even though he knew full well that it was full of arrogance, selfish ambition, and barely disciplined violence.
So, the ironist that we meet in these books sees everything that is distressful, alarming, and just disappointing about people and politics. He does not indulge in pleasing illusions. But neither does he let his world become flat and barren. He does not believe that distressful, alarming, and disappointing truths are also the only truths. He stays alert to the things in people that are good, and everything that is necessary, whether it's good or bad.
This ironist is the enemy of hypocrites and fanatics, people absurdly confident of their own goodness. He is also—and this is more likely to get overlooked—the enemy of nihilism. This ironist does not believe in nothing. Instead, he does his best to believe in those things that deserve his belief. For him, unreflective skepticism—dogmatic, dismissive skepticism toward everything and everybody—is as naïve and inadequate as gape-mouthed credulity.
At the heart of this ironist's attitude is the suspicion that the highest and noblest human hopes can never be consummated in this world. The things we most avidly wish for—flawless and universal love, perfect justice, an untainted good—are also things we cannot achieve. Yet if we stopped wishing for them, we would be lesser creatures than we are: more resigned, poorer in possibility, inclined to despair. The only way to keep these wishes alive is to maintain a severe and comic gaze that withers fatuous uplift and mocks away easy fantasies. This is the good work of irony, to keep things complicated rather than simple, varied rather than flat, to keep us aware of our own confusion, in the interest of imperfect, transient, and indispensable clarity.
Editorial note:
Jedediah Purdy, meet Thomas Frank. Enjoy the cartoon adventure "Me & My Shadow of Irony: An American Tragedy" and try to hold both Gen-X authors in your mind at the same time.
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