Off Topic

“So, what’s situational irony, guys?”

They always look terrified or enraged when I ask them direct questions about something they’re supposed to have read. The terror I understand: they hate being “put on the spot,” as though that ought never to happen to anyone. The world should be so safe and comfortable that no one ought to ask you a serious question and expect you to muster a serious answer. You know, actual evidence that you have a thought about the matter and can clearly articulate that thought, at a minimum. If you can do so artfully, that’s ambrosia.

A dwindling few can manage that without appearing to be terrified, and they either know what they are doing or are quite convinced that they do. Unfortunately, the latter group is more aggressive, for obvious reasons. The best lack all conviction (the brightest, most insightful, articulate, imaginative humans belong to the first, reluctant group). Those who think they know what they are doing are eager to make that known to others, and achieve some atavistic goal: power in some form or other (fame, grades, good gossip online) and the worst are full of passionate intensity. Yeats saw it coming: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity”(Yeats). These are the last two lines of the first stanza of his lyric poem, “The Second Coming,” which you can readily access here:

When things are quickly disintegrating in moral or ethical terms, i.e., culturally, we’re in real trouble. He identified several symptoms of that kind of entropic slide toward barbaric vulgarity.

I submit for your consideration the hypothesis that we live and move and have our being in such a time. Right now. I think it was bad before the pandemic and has gotten exponentially worse, in the ways that really matter, since said plague's ostensible conclusion. The consensus seems to be that we have heard enough about it and want to get on with our lives. While a certain amount of miserable fatigue is bound to follow when one attends carefully to whatever sources might give one a sense of what’s up with objective reality—they’re rare, but they are there (see Yeats again)—but the idea that one could get bored and want to get on with one’s life when a new and mysterious threat to it is loose in one’s vicinity and one’s fellow humans are responding in all sorts of frightening, fascinating ways—what's up with that? The impatience, the anger, the whiny vanity and greed—many of us are not good characters.

Of course, that’s what happens when you find yourself in a culture that is disintegrating. People who really know what they are doing and want to do the right thing excellently well are paralyzed by anxious indecision because a) they want to do no harm, and are exquisitely sensitive to the morbid sensitivity and perpetual anxiety of their peers and b) they are not entirely sure what the right thing is and they do not want to choose incorrectly. I think this is a manifestation of aporia of a benign, endearing kind.

But those of us who are not yet certain we are doing what is right excellently well need time to think. It’s a dizzying array of notions, many of which are entirely at odds. But those who think they know what they’re doing and really don’t? They’re deadly. All of the confidence, none of the knowledge required to earn that confidence and be judged trustworthy by both self and other. These people are not thoughtful. They perform, for they think it is all merely spectacle—a kind of entertainment, really. A game to be won.

How do people live that way?

How often do they imagine what it’s like to be other people when they do?

So, I’m a means to your ends either way. I give you what you want in a direct and immediate way (the adulation, the good grade, the “like,” as it were, the vote) or I act in a way that does so, i.e. I perform in a way that gives you some sort of satisfaction. The fact that I am also a human being, an end-in-itself and not a mere means, doesn’t occur to them. This is a digression. I apologize. You can read more about deontology here (it's not too popular at the moment, which sometimes suggests that it is worth looking into as a contribution to a discussion about ethics and morality. It's not holy or anything, but it might help):

But it does bear on the primary theme of this whole angry ramble, I suppose.

A decadent, confused culture generates awful people full of the passionate conviction that they have got shit figured out and are eager to let you know it. They storm legislatures. Ineptly. Some, believe it or not, are twenty-first century racists, which is a bit like saying that they are leech collectors or phrenologists. Outrageously outmoded and acting like it, not just keeping it to themselves like a shameful secret. It has been perfectly bloody obvious to the vast majority of ethical human beings for centuries that most human beings have no idea what they are doing, regardless of all of those bodily, corporeal matters that drive so many mad.

Some are astonishing, most are mediocre, a large contingent routinely get everything badly wrong. Having some primitive grudge against anyone by virtue of his or her or their corporeal form is both wrong and evil. Of course, making flattering assumptions on that basis alone is equally fat with peril. If they don’t know what they’re doing and you give them what they want just because of their specific physical properties, what are you thinking? Never mistake the shell for the crab.

Anyway, I think that’s why we’re surrounded by the worst, full of passionate intensity, while the best lack all conviction. I think we ought to do more of the reading, and think about it more carefully before we start shouting. But having a polite, civilized discussion about the reading, and what we make of it—that’s urgently essential. If we had a richer, more provocative, uncomfortable, hard conversation about what we are doing and whether it is right or good, we’ll get better at it.

That was the key to human flourishing for all sorts of fascinating cultures before. That’s why excellent literature is invaluable, and also why it is increasingly difficult to find. The best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity.

How many people are working on a script for a Marvel sequel right now? How many are tapping on a keyboard in a garret starving because the novel they are working on will have a transformative effect upon its readers. It will show them what they thought they understood in a completely new way, and what they don’t understand at all in a way that makes it familiar, and therefore more readily intelligible.

We’re doing important things badly and trivial things with shocking thoroughness and zeal. We’ve got to get our shit together.

Ah, yes. That’s what we were talking about. Situational irony. When the real meaning of the situation and its apparent meaning do not match. We are supposed to be human beings, striving to thrive and flourish to the best of our limited knowledge and ability, which entails helping other human beings to do so, to the best of their limited knowledge and ability. We ought to want to do what is right, excellently well, and help the yahoos get a grip too.

Instead, we are encouraged to be terribly sensitive, vain, impatient, passionate and ignorant. Easy prey for demagogues and charlatans. “Look, he’s crazy, stupid and selfish, and he had access to the nuclear codes. How bad can I be? How far can I go?”

That’s not what this was all supposed to be about. It’s monstrously ironic. Life as it is. Right now. In most parts of the world. We’ve been trying to get this right for centuries. We really have to sort it out, or we’re fucked. Soon.

So recognizing situational irony is crucial. It will completely alter your reading of the material, and the way you interpret it when you discuss it with the other humans. You might call for radical improvements to current conditions. You might persuade others that those conditions ought to change. You might be offered things you deserve, but do not demand or feel entitled to at all, when you appear to know what you are doing.

That’s actually a clear sign that you deserve them.

You don’t want to get things so much as you want to understand what is worth having and why. You are working on your character. Do not let that prevent you from having conviction when it is warranted. Do not despair. Yeats knew about you and wrote about you, seeking to reveal just how grim things will get when the last of us surrender, and he was a bloody genius.

Hang in there.