“The Ironist: Irony–Part 2” is the conclusion of a two-part discussion on irony itself. We recommend you read part 1 first.
The Ironist: Irony- Part 2
The modern world has suffered in the past century, and into the present one, from the tyranny of monomaniac politicians, from murdering monsters of depravity like Hitler, Stalin, and Chairman Mao, to narcissistic demagogues infected with the arrogance of privilege. Many of these are self-serving egotists, often ideologues possessed of the ‘single vision’ of their own blinkered ideologies or pet theories, blind to nuance, compromise, and, inevitably, common sense. They spend others’ money like drunken sailors, and make promises they don’t keep. Too often infatuated with high-sounding utopian plans to redeem the human race, they play to the madding crowd of their deluded followers, and are prey to flatterers; they demonize those who disagree with them, and reward compliant followers. Too many of them are victims of a lack of insight into their own conditions as they strut and fret their hour upon the stage, and then, mercifully, most are heard no more. Ambition, fame, adulation, or mere circumstance have erased any latent humility and exaggerated their self-importance. These “emperors” have no clothes. They are victims of illusion, prisoners of the almighty Self.
For all those afflicted with this single vision, the poet Robert Burns’ To A Louse is a corrective to such self-centredness. In the poem, Burns is seated on a church pew behind a woman blissfully unaware that a louse is climbing up her hair in front of him. The sight causes him to utter a fervent prayer: ‘O if some Power gave us the gift / To see ourselves as others see us / It would free us from many a blunder and foolish notion.” To be able to do this, to put oneself simultaneously in the position of the unknowing beheld as well as the beholder himself is a gift that would provide the beholder with the ability to see things as they are, and not as wishful thinking, to see beyond ideology, above the mob’s simple-mindedness and the secular culture’s uncritical gaze, to be in possession of an elevated perspective rather than mere ‘single vision.’ This double vision is the preserve of the ironist. And, speaking of “seeing”…
“Get thee glass eyes,” Shakespeare’s King Lear tells blind Gloucester, “and like a scurvy politician, seem to see the things thou dost not.” Politicians could not be trusted then; they should not be trusted today. Politics has always been downstream of culture; the further upstream, the higher the culture. The river flows pure and natural until it encounters muddied human mediocrity. Like Gloucester’s blindness, the blindness of politicians is due to defective vision. They cannot see themselves as we see them. All too often, they suffer from the ethical blindness of their ‘single’ vision: surrounded by sycophants to whom they owe favours, their commitment to the truth is suspect, so confident are they in their own preening self-satisfaction. Most damagingly, they lack a sense of irony. There is hope, however, as a higher species exists: a virtuous public servant better described as a statesman or stateswoman can possess the ironic vision, and serve the truth with integrity. Sadly, there are too few of these.
Ironists are not mere politicians, but among ironists are thinkers, artists, novelists, dramatists, teachers, academic, medical and legal professionals, philosophers and literary critics. They are not ideologues. They are all familiar with what the great novelist Thomas Hardy called ‘life’s little ironies.’ Truth, they know, both from their education and life experience, is seldom simple, rarely black or white, more often composed of various shades of grey, deserving of thoughtful debate and counsel, and requiring freedom of speech both to hear dissent and to voice it. In fact, central to all forms of irony, whether as a technique or as a moral perspective, is a dual, or ‘double’, vision, a surface meaning accompanied by a deeper concealed meaning that is at variance with it, or even in flat contradiction of it, “the bringing in of the opposite,” in order to focus understanding. The following are some simple illustrations of this phenomenon.
