These Ironic Times

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The ironic stance also doubts the depth of human relationships. Management guru Tom Peters urges the young and ambitious to "brand" themselves, to advance their lives as they would market a new product. This advice chimes eerily with the contemporary mood. There is a suspicion afoot that marketing is not a bad metaphor for what most of us do, most of the time. Doubting the depth of relationships comes with doubting the depth of personalities, and we are skeptical of the idea that people have anything like a "core self," a bedrock of character and belief where, if we can just reach it, we can stand with confidence. Instead, we more and more suppose that we are quantum spin, all the way down. In this view, irony is not a cop-out from deeper risks and relationships, but the only honest attitude.

Peters' doctrine has rather grand predecessors, notably Oscar Wilde, who declared, "The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has as yet discovered." But Wilde drew from wells that are now mostly dry. Despite his talk of artificiality, he was in some measure a romantic who believed that he displayed his true identity by flouting convention; his was not exactly a quantum self. Moreover, his eccentricities had the charge and thrill of dramatic dissent in a conventional era. Now, as cultural commentators ceaselessly observe, the fashions of dissent are on sale at specialty boutiques.

Irony is no unmixed blight; perhaps it need not be a blight at all. For centuries, it has consistently been a friend of the human spirit. After the classical world, the founding ironist was the Renaissance Frenchman Michel de Montaigne, also the creator of the essay in its modern form. Writing in a Europe torn apart by religious wars following the Protestant Reformation, Montaigne saw high-mindedness and self-righteousness as sources of hatred and bloodshed. Against a violent cacophony of competing truths, he blended Christian humility, Socratic skepticism, and the earthy humor of classical figures like Aristophanes in devising an attitude whose dictum, famously inscribed on the ceiling of his private library, read "I reserve judgment."

This is a lightness that is subtly aware of its moral weight, and in Montaigne's tradition followed great satirists like Jonathan Swift and hard-nosed debunkers like Samuel Johnson. Mark Twain could be devastating in his irony, as could Will Rogers in this century. All were, in their effect if not always in their sentiments, friends of decency, enemies of cruelty and irresponsible power.

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