How to Live Without Irony (for Real, This Time)

Our brief Age of Irony was not only unsatisfying; it was politically destructive. I, too, indulged — and sometimes still do — in those reflexes to critique, mock or dismiss everything that rubbed me the wrong way, but it never felt good, even when my self-righteousness was justified. These were mere defensive measures to protect myself from a few uncomfortable realities: Reason cannot solve every problem; my experience of the world is not the only legitimate experience of it; politics is less about rationality and more about emotional and aesthetic preference; and people on my side sometimes do really awful things.

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Most people know these things intuitively but sublimate them. Ironic posturing — the pervasive, apolitical kind — allowed many of us to feel superior to it all without making the commitment to repair anything.

Back when I wrote the original essay, it seemed to resonate with people from a wide range of backgrounds. The most common positive response came from young people who felt alienated among their peers, unsatisfied by the hopeless swirl of pop culture references and cleverly sarcastic chatter that surrounded them. There were also quite a few hard-core leftists who wrote in support, lamenting the lack of serious engagement in political life in contemporary America. They understood that forwarding a jeering meme to people who agreed with you did not constitute political action. The final major cohort consisted of moderate conservatives and what we might call “conservative hippies” — people interested in the preservation of the past, of traditions, of manners and of family, but who also advocate peace, equality, compassion, humility and environmental stewardship. The fact that my thesis seemed to have appeal across party lines reassured me that a new post-ironic age might be on the horizon.

I wrote back in 2012, “Fundamentalists are never ironists; dictators are never ironists; people who move things in the political landscape, regardless of the sides they choose, are never ironists.” Some readers, looking at only the first two clauses, took this to mean that being an ironist is a good thing; it means you will never be a fundamentalist or a dictator. However, the second half of the sentence gets to the core of the proposition: A certain kind of seriousness is the precondition for the ascent to power. It is hard to imagine someone who has taken on the veil of irony holding a powerful role in any government. While Salena Zito’s oft-quoted article in The Atlantic, “Taking Trump Seriously, Not Literally,” suggested that the Republican nominee should not be taken at his word, he is hardly an ironist. Preferable terms might be a reality-show actor, a salesman or simply a liar.

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In our smugness and self-assuredness, many of us laughed off Trump and his supporters throughout the campaign, refusing to take them seriously. We lampooned their mobilization of what we saw as a hopeless, hate-filled movement. But the fact that we have just elected an American Berlusconi has wiped the smirks off our faces. What will we do with our newfound sobriety? At the very least, we are called to approach our circumstances with a renewed — and, I believe, ultimately beneficial — seriousness.

There are at least two types of seriousness with which our current circumstances might be answered, two ways of facing the world without the slightest trace of sarcasm or playful duplicity. The first — represented by our president-elect, who seems incapable of laughter, and some of his apologists — is the bad kind, embodied by the thirst for profit or by apocalypse fetishism, joyless ideology, and even cruelty. It is a punitive seriousness, a burn-it-all-down ethics that favors revenge over reconciliation. This is the reigning type of seriousness.

There is, however, another kind, a seriousness that is calm, diligent, and — dare I say — joyful in its efforts to defend principles like justice, solidarity, and peace. We might even describe it as monastic in nature. Incorrigibly optimistic, I think this could be a cause that we, the lost children of the Enlightenment, were lacking: to recover that kind of seriousness.

The postmodern era left us despondent and skeptical, prone to toy idly with old forms and make fun of the idiocy of some of our forebears. If religion and other foundational institutions that have lost their symbolic capital over the centuries left a seemingly unfillable void, it might come as a relief for us to realize that there actually are values that deserve to be defended, values that have become glaringly clear in the wake of the election. Young people, and the more hopeful among us, see that convictions are still possible. There is a reason to unnumb oneself from the stupor of dumb media and listicle listlessness. Life has a new, much-needed urgency that it lacked before for too many.