These Ironic Times

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Our contemporary irony has some of these qualities—notably in The Simpsons and Michael Moore's slack-jawed yet incisive interviews. Our irony is a response partly to the proliferation of cant in private life, where emotions have come to attract relentless and often unmeaning concern in recent decades, and to the confessional culture of talk shows that make that concern unabashedly public. The young ironist rightly feels that sincerity is more honored in the breach than in the observance. Today's irony also reacts to a curious conjunction in public life between the rhetoric of evangelical revival and the behavior of low vaudeville; Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker sometimes seem to have formed the mold for the public figures of the past decade. This perception is heightened by the frequently observed fact that a media by turns ironic and self-righteously cynical has stripped politics of what Edmund Burke long ago called "the pleasing illusions" that lend public figures a measure of moral authority.

This cultural acid bath has much to do with the distinctive tone of contemporary irony. It is a truism that the credibility of what we say depends as much on who we are as on our words themselves. Particularly when a person declares a moral commitment, we must be able to believe that he is the sort of person who might be able to act by that commitment. Exhortations to chastity don't mean much from a philanderer, nor does praise of patriotism from a quisling. Realizing this, we have long walked a crooked and not entirely fair line between honest skepticism and studied obtuseness.

Somewhere along the line, though, we adopted two ideas that together make it difficult for us to take anyone's seriousness very seriously. Self-aware in the extreme, we are permeated by Freud's view that "we are all ill," that everyone's motivations are in some measure selfish, ignoble, or neurotic. From Shakespeare to Joyce, good minds have always been able to perceive the base in the trappings of nobility; but more and more, the debunker's language is our vocabulary of first resort.

This idea has combined with a mainly unspoken presumption, not universal but increasingly widespread, that "values" are not unchanging, impersonal standards. Instead they are intensely personal guideposts, selected because they help us to shape our lives at particular times, then are replaced as we grow and move on. According to this view, in professing a value someone does not so much acknowledge an objective demand as say something about the shape that he has given his life.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print