The Unbearable Persistence of Irony
Post-modern Detachment and the Eating of the World
The late American author David Foster Wallace made no bones about expressing his woe at the state of late twentieth century western culture. One can readily find interviews in which he laments the prevalence of an insipid strain of irony in the output of creatives, particularly writers. If you’re like me, then witnessing this shy, sensitive, intelligent person wax lyrical about our sorry predicament is a welcome balm for the soul; despite that balm being insufficient for Wallace’s own wounds. He committed suicide in 2008, when the world, in hindsight, seems to have had just a modicum of sanity left. If he had held on another decade or so, I think he would have found the current zeitgeist even less to his liking.
It seems to me that not only was Wallace onto something, but that he was a tragic prophet of our era. At least in the online company I keep, there has been much ado about this nothingness; the soul-sucking detachment, the sincerity-vacuum that is the result of the pervasive ironising of all things. It seems to me that the largest hurdle to widespread engagement faced by very well-intentioned meaning-warriors like Paul VanderKlay, Jonathan Pageau and John Vervaeke, despite the breakout success of their cultural progenitor - one Dr. J. B. Peterson - is that this ironic detachment is largely baked into every generation since, let’s say somewhat arbitrarily, the dawn of television. I am not usually prone to ‘generational speak’, nor to over-generalising such things, but putting my millennial cap on, I would venture that my cohort seems in a funny way to be situated in the eye of the storm.
I find this metaphor fitting, because there seems to be a perverse kind of tranquility here, while a hurricane rages all around. On one side the older generations, closer to traditional ways of life and to the scarcely fathomable tragedies of the twentieth century, struggle to make sense and keep pace with a swiftly dehumanising world. On the other side are the generations who - bless them - for all the world seem to be unwitting pilot prototypes for a new phase in human evolution - homo technicus, or homo cyberneticus, if you like. Stuck in the middle are Gen X and millennials, ever with one eye on the price of Freddo’s and wondering why nobody plays football in the streets anymore. Millennials and Gen X seem to stand at ground-zero of this so-called ‘meaning crisis’, generally unmoored from both established traditions and the silicone embrace of ‘brave new horizons’. That’s not to say their - our - lot is the most dire, perish the thought. But we sit in the cyclone’s eye in the sense that we’ve been anaesthetised most effectively by cultural post-modernity. Our dosage has been near-lethal. Our world is the same as our juniors, a technological, self-referential hall of mirrors, yet made all the more tragic by the childhood memory many still retain of ‘the before-times’.
This comprehensive unmooring can be read as pitiable or lucky, depending on how one feels about the attachments in question. And if pitiable, as with almost everything, blame for it cannot be placed solely at the feet of the big bad world. With our obsession with irony, we carry ourselves in all things with a certain aloof buoyancy. We present a wry smile to the world. Our lives thus often lack the salutary friction which comes from staring the human condition, and the vicissitudes of life straight in the face. No wonder perhaps, for the world is full of troubles. But that cannot be the end of it, for as our grandparents attest, human beings have lived and even flourished through worse.
I partake of the insidious cultural trend of which I speak, though I also quietly rage against it. I’m trying. You see its the easiest thing in the world to go along with. In a previous post I mentioned that my desire was to speak to those lost souls, whose ignorance of their inherited, dehumanising philosophies I see as sliding them ultimately into nihilism. I think this detached irony could well be the lubricant that quickens the slide, yet I still find myself occasionally partaking in it, by a sort of sin of omission. When given the chance to say what I really think about a matter I may privately regard as quite serious, and extremely worthy of discussion, I often just glaze over the issue with a deflecting remark or a joke.
Don’t get me wrong, I think a sense of humour in all things is tremendously important, even paramount, but I still irk myself with my seeming inability to pause, and talk sincerely for a minute. My typical self-defence would be that I often don’t perceive the fertile soil, or merely the time available for the kind of conversation I’d like to open up. My ‘clamming up’ in this way is also honest more often than not, because half the time I really don’t know what I think. Sorting that out is partly what this blog is for of course, but still, if I could sincerely defend one notion for the rest of my life, it might well be the importance of doubt.
Polemic in a Minor Key
Healthy doubt, however, is not scepticism, much less cynicism. Cynicism, along with post-modern irony, and let’s add unashamed historical ignorance. These things are the dust from which we create our malignant golem of soul-oppression. I will never forget an irksome habit an old friend of mine had. He would sporadically insert references to ‘God’ and ‘Jesus’ into ostensibly unrelated conversations. He did this in a way that intended a sort of ironic, ‘wacky’ humour; the underlying joke being, for those in the know, that such things were the meaningless contrivances of insane or stupid people, for this friend was a particularly staunch atheist. It came up often when someone was regaling the group with the story of some strange or extraordinary occurrence. “That there’s God”, would come the sly remark, effectively severing us from any sense of mystery or further discussion. These rather petulant interjections were invariably followed by a tumbleweed drifting lamely about the place.
This typical personal experience, I hope, goes a way to illustrate our strange cultural moment. Indeed, it is most prevalently matters of faith, and religion, though also related matters of intellect, like philosophy, that are turned to stone under the Medusa’s gaze of post-modern irony. It seems to put an invisible ceiling over what constitutes acceptable conversation. For if we can, and often do, reduce Jesus Christ himself to a sly remark or a silly meme then we are indeed hopelessly adrift. Here is a man, whatever you may think about him, the consequences of whose life arguably shaped and sustained a civilisation for two millennia. There are few appropriate superlatives in English for the scale of his cultural and spiritual importance, and he is a very real presence in the lives of billions of people, whatever the ontological status you permit him. When one sees the all-pervasive debasement of his name and image, one doesn’t have to be a pious Catholic to find the word ‘blasphemy’ somewhat appropriate.
This is obviously one of the more egregious examples of irony’s choke-hold on our imaginations. But this is merely the brutal, snow-capped peak of a formidable mountain of excrement. The hall of mirrors mentioned above is exactly what one sees when one looks to almost any given popular cultural output. Everything is a reference to something that came before, an ‘in-joke', a wink and a nudge. Nothing, however sacred, seems to be safe. Holograms of long-dead musicians ‘join’ live ones on stage. Classic characters must be similarly reincarnated to join their comparatively one-dimensional counterparts in soul-less re-hashings of once relevant and beloved movie sagas. So many, starved of better alternatives, seem to fall for it. Nostalgic hook. Famous line. Sinking feeling.
Which ‘phase’ of the Marvel Cinematic Universe are we onto? Will the next phase consist of our heroes simply gathering round to watch the original Iron Man? It’s an obvious whipping boy but it’s worth mentioning again that Hollywood has been stuck in this imaginatively bankrupt merry-go-round for two decades. It’s one of the machine-like operations of our present culture to hoover up everything that was once sincere, once novel, once vital and meaningful, and run it through the post-modern sausage grinder, until it all comes out the other end in the artistic equivalent of Soylent Green. We get quality meat now and again, but the degree to which the noble exceptions are fawned over stands as testament to their rarity, and many end up being damningly oversold. Kids (re: many adults) these days seem more than willing to consume any old mince.
It doesn’t end there. Byrne Power, aka The Anadromist has made some excellent videos treating the subject of ‘cuteness’. This word, this phenomenon, is everywhere. Why does it seem like everything is being cute-ified? It’s like any and all rough edges have to be smoothed off, again, made frictionless, like cheap sausage. Presumably no animated film gets the green light unless it features that little cute entity with the huge eyes and sweet voice. Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger and Leatherface are now cuddly toys and punk rock archetype Jonny Rotten sells butter on the TV. K-pop is probably the most successful ‘genre’ of music of this millennium. I do not feel it merely a function of my age (I’m only 35) that these facts trouble me somewhat. Some things I’ve mentioned may fall a little further from my general point about irony, but I do feel that the irony is there if you attend just a little closer. There is vacuity here, and flatness in the presentation of so many things; to list them all would likely make me seem more resentful than I really am. I do not wield a fist of indignation so much as a head hung low in mournful sorrow. Do an image search for ‘cute Jesus’ and it may all sadly hang together.
These bizarre phenomena seem to attest to a general infantilisation going on. They partake of the post-modern ironic by being unserious, even flippant, and above all shallow. The weight, the depth and the texture of real life and real art is missing from them. At best we are left with only a thin veneer of sentiment, not true emotional complexity or artistry. At worst we get Family Guy, a cartoon whose widely-acknowledged obsession with meaningless ironic reference borders on the scatological. It may be good for a thin, icy laugh, but it will never, shall we say, pay the spiritual bills that have long been accruing. I might be showing my age with the reference, but I’m sure I’m not alone in having little desire to watch any of Family Guy’s would-be successors. At least The Simpsons at its best displayed some cultural insight, and had a genuine beating heart. But we’ve come a long way since then. I wholeheartedly defend ‘low’ art alongside the ‘high’, but does the former kind have to be so very low? It seems so often to insult human intelligence to the point, again, of dehumanisation.
But these observations, fun as they are to make, are about as close to a ‘hot-take’ as you’ll get from me. Time to bring it all home.
The Consumption
What does this all mean? What have I been at pains to describe here? Am I just venting? What is common to the phenomena I’ve drawn attention to? Perhaps nothing. But bear with me. I think that in order to approach an answer, I need to point to a further, and in my view much more damaging way that detached irony is often used today. It may illustrate a general tendency that connects everything mentioned above. It has everything to do with ‘meme-ification’, and to describe it I must, unfortunately, talk about politics; more specifically, how we tend to talk politics.
You see, political ideologies are complex things, or rather, the degree of their hold on any given individual is a complex thing. That is to say that human beings are complex. You’d think this was obvious, but the way certain words are currently being thrown around would suggest that it is not. How many times have you heard someone of one given political persuasion lambast someone of an opposing persuasion as ‘just a stupid Tory’, or ‘just a lib-tard’, or ‘just a filthy commie’ or any number of similar epithets? How many online ‘arguments’ are presumed to be heroically and categorically ‘won’ by the insertion of a woefully simple meme posted in a comment thread? How many potential friends are written off by a wave of the hand and the imposition on them of a one-dimensional label of one form or another? How many important conversations are stopped in their tracks by the meme-ification, and thus waving away, of one or another legitimate opinion about public policy?
Perhaps, when we use labels and memes in this way, when we reduce the complexity of reality to a simple, easily communicable point of reference, and the polyphony of the world to a singularity, we lose everything that is of crucial importance. In a meme, sidesplittingly hilarious though they can be, we make of the world a bite-sized chunk which we can easily consume and regurgitate. Further, the presumed stance from which the ironic mode draws its power, is in a sense one not of understanding, but of 'over-standing’. The detachment required to ‘get it’, to see the irony, creates with it a certain presumption of omnipotence or at least superiority to - a standing-over - that which is ‘ironised’. We stand above it, detached. It is but a gnat or play-thing. Before the post-modern turn you might say, we beheld the infinite world, ‘stood under’ it to understand it. In the case of my old atheist friend, the ironic register of his attempts at humour were in exact contradiction to what we call humility. Where this is lacking we feel we can grasp a thing, however mighty and full of mystery, manipulate it, play with it as we like. It is a small thing, a mere resource, and we can take it into our great big powerful selves. We can eat it; are we not so often said to be consumers all?
We don’t much make art anymore, we make ‘content’ and consume it. In place of meaning we make shallow reference to things past and kill the meaning they may once have held. We chew everything up and it comes out smooth and devitalised. I used the image of a sausage grinder; I’ll leave you with a short poem in case you hadn’t already made the more appropriate metaphorical leap. But what of ‘cuteness’ you might ask?
Well, we do say “that’s so cute I could just eat it up”.
So ends the age of Pisces, oh, what a tasty dish
Contorting all realities, which, gutted like a fish
Come out beyond Uranus, to fill our greedy plate
Digested all and nothing left, but coprophagic fate
God Bless
WL