Irony

 

If you didn't see it, there was a terrific conversation-provoking article in the New York Times a few months back titled "How to Live Without Irony." One of our church's high school teachers was excitedly clutching it in his hand and made it the subject of their Sunday School class that morning (ed: hooray for plugged-in teachers!). The article describes and critiques irony, one of the defining attitudes for youth and young adults.

It is hard to make plain a concept as slippery as irony. "Do you know what irony is? Sure. Good, can you define it? No. That's irony." Christy Wampole's essay is fantastic in describing what irony looks like when someone takes it on as an affect for living.

I read Wampole's tone as her earnest attempt to undermine irony as a posture for living.  Here are a few key quotes:

For many Americans born in the 1980s and 1990s — members of Generation Y, or Millennials — particularly middle-class Caucasians, irony is the primary mode with which daily life is dealt.

Irony is the most self-defensive mode, as it allows a person to dodge responsibility for his or her choices, aesthetic and otherwise. To live ironically is to hide in public. It is flagrantly indirect, a form of subterfuge, which means etymologically to “secretly flee” (subter + fuge). Somehow, directness has become unbearable to us.

[Irony] stems in part from the belief that this generation has little to offer in terms of culture, that everything has already been done, or that serious commitment to any belief will eventually be subsumed by an opposing belief, rendering the first laughable at best and contemptible at worst. This kind of defensive living works as a pre-emptive surrender and takes the form of reaction rather than action.

Wampole's basic analysis is spot-on. Irony is a defensive attitude. It has destructive implications, which Wampole names: it destroys the self because it is a derivative posture--it apes other cultural forms. Over time, irony can lead to a renunciation of one's own agency and creative power. It is potentially socially-destructive because, by eroding the power of belief, it discourages people from forming cooperative associations to pursue large-scale positive changes--changes that are only possible through shared action.

I would only disagree with Wampole by defending irony a bit more than she does. My own experience is that young Americans feel defenseless against our relentlessly colonizing consumer culture. Businesses have become the most powerful forces in defining personal identity through the marketing of their products. We are what we buy (supposedly); objects are meant to stand in for ourselves. This process is so insidious, so difficult to escape, that irony--especially that kind of irony Wampole defines as "hipster" irony--is a default defense mechanism against the psychological invasion of consumer culture. Irony attempts to use objects to create alternative visions of "cool." The problem, of course, is that the consumer culture quickly identifies these alternative visions and forms, co-opts them, and markets them back to us. That, of course, leads to more ironic posturing. Vicious.

One reason I'm a Christian is that I find that the religious life is one of the more sturdy defenses against the consumer colonization/ironic defense cycle. Christianity encourages positive belief, it establishes a foundation for discerning one's personhood outside of one's things, and it is expressly social in nature.