Chic Ironic Bitterness

4. Irony and Civic Trust

chapter four Irony and Civic Trust p Irony tends to dissolve all belief in the possibility of positive political actions. In its apprehension of the essential folly or absurdity of the human condition, it tends to engender belief in the “madness” of civilization itself and to inspire a Mandarin-like disdain for those seeking to grasp the nature of social reality in either science or art. —Hayden White, Metahistory (1973) Oh heavens, irony! Guard yourself . . . from taking on this mental attitude. [It] makes for depravity, it becomes a drawback to civilization . . . a vice. —Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain (1924) The men believe not in the women, nor the women in the men . . . and the aim of the litterateurs is to ‹nd something to make fun of. . . . Genuine belief has left us. —Walt Whitman, 1866 Since the inception in the late eighteenth century of serious dialogue about irony as a social attitude, it has been conceived of as corrosive to social life, seen as an ethical show-stopper, brandished as a poor—if not impossible—neighbor and con‹dante. This belief has often originated from the perspective of a religiously rooted moral commitment to public well-being. As the spiritually curious, seeking, Scottish 111 essayist and critic Thomas Carlyle wrote in 1833 in the autobiographical Sartor Resartus: Often, notwithstanding, was I blamed for my so-called Hardness, my Indifferentism towards men; and the seemingly ironic tone I had adopted, as my favorite dialect in conversation. Alas, the panoply of Sarcasm was but a buckram case, wherein I had striven to envelope myself; that so my own poor Person might live safe there, and in all friendliness, being no longer exasperated by wounds. Sarcasm I now see to be, in general, the language of the Devil; for which reason I have long since as good as renounced it. But how many individuals did I, in those days, provoke into some degree of hostility thereby! An ironic man, with his sly stillness, and ambuscading ways, more especially a young ironic man, from whom it is least expected, may be viewed as a pest to society.1 Speaking in part through the ‹gure of Professor Dr. Herr Diogenes Teufelsdröckh,* and in part through Teufelsdröckh’s “editor,” Carlyle Chic Ironic Bitterness 112 *Teufelsdröckh translates alliteratively and poignantly as “Devil’s dung.” The use of the name Diogenes references the ‹gure of Diogenes of Sinope (ca. 412/403–324/321 BC), the ancient Greek philosopher-in-a-tub who remains, with Crates of Thebes (c. 368/365–288/285 BC), an oft-cited (and, in the modern period, obligatorily nodded to) ‹gure of the Cynic (Gr. “dog-like”) movement in philosophy. Its founder, however, Antisthenes (ca. 445–after 366 BC) was throughout antiquity held as the founder of the Cynics; he was also the only “member” present at Socrates’ death—a ‹gure and event that had important in›uence on the Cynical impulse and its rhetorical methods. Though not technically a school (there were no Cynic classes, for example, as there were with Stoics, Pythagoreans, or the Platonists in the Academy), the Cynic movement was in›uential by means of mimesis, by those wishing to espouse its principles copying the character of older Cynics. As with all things in antiquity, literary myth and parable have more solidly secured the ‹gure of Diogenes as a staple of the Western philosophical repertoire. His actual teachings, however—like many contemporaneous Greek schools— tells of his woes in love and confusions in religion. He was confronted with what he saw as an outdated Christian church that was out of touch with the moral and social complexities ushered in by modern social structure and industrialization. Carlyle—who had moved to a remote farm for six years to escape the city and his success within it, who translated Goethe and was friends with Emerson (his American Irony and Civic Trust 113 were primarily concerned with moral instruction for human happiness, or eudaemonia (eÙdaimon…a). Among the principles Diogenes espoused and promoted to this end were (1) that there was an observable ethical norm seen cross-culturally and among animals (2) that Greek society was at odds with nature and therefore produced false values (3) that human beings needed rigorous exercise and discipline (4) that the goal of this discipline was to promote a happy life, freedom, and self-suf‹ciency, and (5) that in order to...