The Concept of Irony

Colbert's irony is making me re-read Kierkegaard:

Political Washington is accustomed to more direct attacks that follow the rules. We tend to like the bland buffoonery of Jay Leno or insider jokes that drop lots of names and enforce everyone's clubby self-satisfaction. (Did you hear the one about John Boehner at the tanning salon or Duke Cunningham playing poker at the Watergate?) Similarly, White House spinmeisters are used to frontal assaults on their policies, which can be rebutted with a similar set of talking points. But there is no easy answer for the ironist. "Irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function," wrote David Foster Wallace, in his seminal 1993 essay "E Unibus Pluram." "It's critical and destructive, a ground clearing." So it's no wonder that those journalists at the dinner seemed so uneasy in their seats. They had put on their tuxes to rub shoulders with the president. They were looking forward to spotting Valerie Plame and "American Idol's" Ace Young at the Bloomberg party. They invited Colbert to speak for levity, not because they wanted to be criticized. As a tribe, we journalists are all, at heart, creatures of this silly conversation. We trade in talking points and consultant speak. We too often depend on empty language for our daily bread, and -- worse -- we sometimes mistake it for reality. Colbert was attacking us as well.

Kierkegaard on Socrates:

He belonged to that species of human beings with whom one is not content to reamin with the external as such. The external always suggested an 'other', an opposite. He was not like a philosopher lecturing upon his views, wherein the very lecture itself constitutes the presence of the Idea; on the contrary, what Socrates said meant something 'other'. The outer and inner did not form a harmonious unity, for the outer was in opposition to the inner, and only through this refracted angle is he to be apprehended. Soren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony, tr. Lee M. Capel (Bloomington, Indiana; Indiana University Press 1968, 50).

The Concept of Irony was Kierkegaard's dissertation (or the equivalent thereof in the American system; the degree was granted by a Lutheran seminary). It's an interesting text because in the pseudonymous authorship S.K.'s personae praise Socrates as the most important thinker in human history. His analysis of Socrates in Irony, however, reveals just how much irony there is in that praise. For S.K. (not the pseudonyms), Socrates is not the greatest thinker, but rather the most dangerous, in human history. It is through Socrates, S.K. writes, that irony entered the world.

Here is an instructive comparison made early in the argument, a comparison of the Gospel of John and Plato's writings:

On the other hand, the observation concerning the relationship of Plaot to John is also correct if one maintains that John found and immediately saw in Christ all that he, by imposing silence upon himself, has depicted with complete objectivity, for his eyes were open to the immediate divinity in Christ; whereas Plato creates his Socrates through a poetic activity, since Socrates in his immediate existence was wholly negative. (52-53)

This is the key to irony in S.K.'s conception: it is wholly negative, and as such, wholly destructive of everything, including itself. But before we get there, consider the aptness of this observation. S.K. proceeds by considering Socrates from the point of view of three contemporaries other than Plato. One of them is the playwright Aristophanes (who mocked Socrates in his comedy Clouds). S.K. notes:

Indeed it would be a great loss if we lacked the Aristophanic evaluation of Socrates. As every development usually ends by parodying itself, and such a parody is a guarantee that this development has outlived itself, so the comic conception is also a moment when, in many ways an infinitely correcting moment, in the total illustration of a personality or tendency. (158)

Unfortunately for the world (or left blogistan), such a moment is precisely "an infinitely correcting moment," which means it never ends, never comes to a conclustion: the emperor is never revealed as stark naked and the scales never fall from the eyes of the deluded or the ignorant or the willfully blind or the just plain apathetic. We are in that moment of parody now. Stephen Colbert has portrayed it for us all, in the "real world," not safely inside a TV studio in front of a TV lens, with all the distancing that setting implies and applies. He has carried it out into the arena of the "grown ups," and shown them what they really are.

But no one recognized themselves in the mirror. No one accepted the parody as the final representation of reality, as the guarantee that this development has outlived itself," because it is an "infinitely correcting moment," and that means it never has to come to a conclusion. Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends/We're so glad you could attend, step inside, step inside.... But it is also in that infinitely correcting moment that irony strikes, and becayuse it is negative, irony is infinitely dangerous:

As irony conquers everything by seeing its disproportion to the Idea, so it also succumbs to itself, since it consistently goes beyond itself while remaining in itself.

Think of the worm Ouroboros, eating its tail. But in this conception, the worm manages to take the last swallow, and the world disappears.

Irony is always negative, and can sound no positive. Consider Swift. In all of Gullivers' Travels, the most rational and peaceful creatures he meets, are the Hounhyms, the intelligent horses, and Gulliver's despair is absolute when they reject him from their society. In "A Modest Proposal," Swift is clearly as disdainful of the Irish who suffer under the British system of absentee landlords, as he is of the British who literally feed on the flesh of the Irish. One has to remind oneself Swift was the Dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral. Still, here is S.K.'s description of what Swift may well have intended:

Irony may exhibit itself through a relation of opposition in a still more indirect fashion when it chooses the simplest and most limited human beings, not in order to mock them, but in order to mock the wise.

In all these instances irony exhibits itself most nearly as conceiving the world, as attempting to mystify the surrounding world not so much in order to conceal itself as to induce others to reveal themselves. But irony may also manifest itself when the ironist seeks to lead the outside world astray respecting himself. (268)

Swift in "A Modest Proposal." Colbert, at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. And here is the problem:

Irony...has no purpose, it's purpose is immanent in itself, a metaphysical purpose. The purpose is none other than irony itself. When an ironist exhibits himself as other than he actually is, it might seem that his purpose were to induce others to believe this. His actual purpose, however, is merely to feel free, and he is through irony.(273)

But is irony then, merely doubt? If I doubt, am I not free? No:

With doubt the subject constantly seeks to penetrate the object, and his misfortune consists in the fact that the object constantly eludes him. With irony, on the other hand, the subject is always seeking to get outside the object and this he attains by becoming conscious at every moment that the object has no reality. With doubt the subject is witness to a war of conquest in which every phenomenon is destroyed, because the essence always resides behind the phenomenon. But with irony the subject constantly retires from the field and proceeds to talk every phenomenon out of its reality in order to save himself, that is, in order to preserve himself in his negative independence of everything.
....
For irony everything becomes nothingness, but nothingness may be taken in several ways. The speculative nothingness is that which at every moment is vanishing for concretion, since it is itself the demand for the concrete...The mystical nothingness is a nothingness for representation, a nothingness which yet is as full of content as the silence of the night is eloquent for one who has ears to hear. Finally, the ironic nothingness is that deathly stillness in which irony returns to 'haunt and jest' (this last word taken wholly ambiguously.)(274-75)

This is not what the reporters object to, but it is what they should object to. Colbert was attacking "official Washington," which has come to include the White Houst Correspondents as much as it does the employees of the Federal Government. But was the attack fair? Or was it ultimately dangerous? No doubt it was necesary. But David Foster Wallace is wrong: Irony is not a "ground clearing." It is a clearing of the ground. It is a clearing of everything.

Although perhaps that is what our political discourse, at this point, needs.

Vanity of Vanities!

Stephen Hawking says there is no heaven. Which leaves me wondering: what if Stephen Hawking said the verities of love were a myth? What if Stephen Hawking said beauty is not truth, and truth is not beauty, and that is not all ye know or need to know? What if Stephen Hawking had opined on the death of Osama bin Laden, or the state of the world economy, or even British cricket? Would anybody care?

So why do we care when Stephen Hawking trots out an old chestnut about heaven=myth, and adds to it the equally old chestnut that when you die, that's it? I mean, why does this even make the news? Because Stephen Hawking said it? But what does he know about matters theological?

He may be as qualified as I am to speak on matters of the heart, but would anyone listen if he opined that love was a myth, and it was all a matter of pheromones and hormones and neurons firing? Would anyone give such statements any real attention?

And when he trots out this old canard:

In an interview published Monday in The Guardian newspaper, the 69-year-old says the human brain is a like a computer that will stop working when its components fail.

He says: "There is no heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark."

I first want to question his analogy. A computer? Really? Why isn't it like a pocket watch? Or an adding machine? Or simply a receptor for sensory impressions? All three analogies have been offered at one time or another (the last is David Hume's, and my personal favorite. I always imagine an empty room with a wall of TV screens presenting images no one is there to look at. If, as Hume said, the self is just an illusion created from all that sensory input, who is deciphering the sensory input and remembering it? It would seem a better analogy for Mr. Hawking, if he wants to be such an absolute empiricist). Why is the computer the superior comparison?

But more directly, I'd point Mr. Hawking to Socrates' discussion of the soul in the Phaedo. Socrates made an argument for the existence of the soul so compelling it persists to this day; which is not to say, however, that Socrates was right. On the other hand, if you are going to dismiss Socrates as just another person "afraid of the dark," I am going to dismiss your argument out of hand, too. And I'm going to ask myself: "Why should I care what you think on this subject?"

So why do we care? Why do we worship at the shrine of "science" so much that Stephen Hawking can wander freely into other fields and determine their worth and merit based on his assumptions and, frankly, ignorance. I don't know what concept of "heaven" Mr. Hawking has, but it's a fairly elementary one. And there is some kind of supreme arrogance in dismissing several millenia of human thought and experience with the statement "I don't agree (and therefor you are all fools!)." It was an acceptable enough position in 19th century Europe, when educated white males convinced themselves they were superior to people younger than them (children) and non-males, and all persons of other "races," a concept they came up with to conveniently classify the bulk of the world as inferior. Is Mr. Hawking really so arrogant as to presume he knows better and more fully than all of humankind across history? It is indeed possible that he does. But we usually call such people "cranks." We don't usually honor them with respect for and publication of their every utterance.

So why do we publish the opinions of Stephen Hawking as if they matter? Because he's so much more intelligent than we are? Anyone who dismisses Socrates without even a mention, and implicitly defines him as a child afraid of the dark, doesn't strike me as more intelligent than I am. Certainly he understands physics better than I do, but since when did physics become the bedrock and benchmark of all human knowledge?

But here is the central problem: there are arguments for, and there are arguments against. The latter don't establish a proposition, so much as try to defeat one. Kierkegaard understood this about the "Socratic method." It was, he realized, merely the application of irony to all situations, the application of the "con" argument, without any establishing "pro" to justify it. It is, as Rabbi Hirschfield points out, not the same thing to deny something, as it is to prove something doesn't exist. Arguments pro, as Kierkegaard pointed out, are very complex, and sometimes impossible, while arguments con are simple and easy to construct. But they don't actually construct anything.

Irony...has no purpose, it's purpose is immanent in itself, a metaphysical purpose. The purpose is none other than irony itself. When an ironist exhibits himself as other than he actually is, it might seem that his purpose were to induce others to believe this. His actual purpose, however, is merely to feel free, and he is through irony....

With doubt the subject constantly seeks to penetrate the object, and his misfortune consists in the fact that the object constantly eludes him. With irony, on the other hand, the subject is always seeking to get outside the object and this he attains by becoming conscious at every moment that the object has no reality. With doubt the subject is witness to a war of conquest in which every phenomenon is destroyed, because the essence always resides behind the phenomenon. But with irony the subject constantly retires from the field and proceeds to talk every phenomenon out of its reality in order to save himself, that is, in order to preserve himself in his negative independence of everything....

For irony everything becomes nothingness, but nothingness may be taken in several ways. The speculative nothingness is that which at every moment is vanishing for concretion, since it is itself the demand for the concrete...The mystical nothingness is a nothingness for representation, a nothingness which yet is as full of content as the silence of the night is eloquent for one who has ears to hear. Finally, the ironic nothingness is that deathly stillness in which irony returns to 'haunt and jest' (this last word taken wholly ambiguously.)(Soren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony, tr. Lee M. Capel (Bloomington, Indiana; Indiana University Press 1968, 273-75)

Now if Mr. Hawking wants to take that on, we can have a discussion. But so long as he wants to throw stones at other people who don't think like he does, then, in the words of that eminent 20th century philosopher Nigel Molesworth: "I diskard him."

Update: Rabbi Hirschfield was on BBC's "World Have Your Say" and acquitted himself very well. I'll admit to more than a little pleasure at listening to a person of faith discuss matters religious with a humanist, and refusing to use any of the platitudes the humanist expected to hear.

"Let's All Be a Little Less Piggy"*

I'm always fascinated by these arguments, especially when they directly reference King and/or Gandhi:

People will behave better, Nussbaum argues, if we admit our vulnerability and work to create a society where everyone experiences less fear and uncertainty, and a greater sense of positive citizenship. She takes as her model the nonviolent activism of Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi, and advocates a “mandatory program of youth national civil service” of three years’ duration. One of this program’s purposes would be to expose citizens at a relatively early age to “the diversity of people in their country,” and foster the sense that we all have a stake in each other’s well-being. She knows that most people consider such a program “politically impossible,” but “if people don’t talk about it, it certainly won’t be possible. So, I put my cards on the table.” These are the moments when Nussbaum seems most out of touch with the nation she inhabits. Even the wokest young Berner clamoring for socialism would surely balk at this prospect.

Yes, we would all balk.  This was the ideal of Brown v. Board, a Supreme Court holding now honored more in the breach than in the keeping.  The idea was that, when black and white children went to school together, racism would disappear.  Instead, white parents fled into private schools, or neighborhoods black families couldn't afford, and solved the problem of Brown by continuing the problem of Brown, even though now we have no "separate but equal" schools in America.

Nussbaum's argument reeks of Rawl's "Theory of Justice:"  if we all just understood our proper relationship to each other, we'd all realize we're in the same boat with the same problems, and we'd rationally reach a conclusion that benefits everyone equally.  Which, of course, is not at all what King and Gandhi advocated.  To begin with, while neither King nor Gandhi spurned reason, they started from a religious viewpoint:  Hinduism for Gandhi, Christianity for King.  So if we take their model of nonviolent activism, we have to take their method for making that non-violence effective, and that involves religion.  If you are going to reference King or Gandhi and say "Oh, we should do what they did!", then you have to consider what they did, and how they did it.  It wasn't just that they were non-violent, but how they were non-violent, and why they were non-violent.

I take it back:  Nussbaum's argument reeks of "Kumbayah."  You know, we all hold hands around the campfire and sing and the whole world will be healed.  Except that experience doesn't outlast the campfire, much less change hearts and minds.   I'm a bit of a cynic in the matter, actually, as I'm not sure what does change hearts and minds except relentless effort to be changed.  Dr. King described the process of his followers admitting their vulnerability:

We began a series of workshops on nonviolence, and we repeatedly asked ourselves: "Are you able to accept blows without retaliating?" "Are you able to endure the ordeal of jail?" We decided to schedule our direct action program for the Easter season, realizing that except for Christmas, this is the main shopping period of the year. Knowing that a strong economic-withdrawal program would be the by product of direct action, we felt that this would be the best time to bring pressure to bear on the merchants for the needed change.

Who among us is willing to do even that much?  Only a few people did when Dr. King was alive, but they were enough.  He died, and the non-violent movement he led died, too.  There is a huge amount of effort behind those simple words "We began a series of workshops on nonviolence."  Who among us would attend those diligently?  Much of the problem here is that Dr. King was promoting the power of powerlessness; and even the "young Berner" (Bernie supporter, I guess?) is interested in power, not powerlessness.

And the "mandatory program of youth national service."  Yeah, that'll work.  We already have a mandatory program involving youth:  it's called "public school."  I teach the products of that program every year.  Most of them appear rigidly resistant to it, and barely touched by it.  They haven't been shaped into people with open and curious minds, eager for knowledge and new ideas.  Mostly, they are resistant to even more education, even though, at the college level, education is no longer mandatory.  I know people who went through the Peace Corps; but they volunteered for that service, and were accepting of the challenges it posed to them.  Some people go to church voluntarily, and probably even today some do not (children).  Some are changed by the experience; but some are not.
Some realize, with or without church, that we have a stake in each other's well-being; some do not, and never will.  I'm not sure how we nurture that ideal, except on a very individual basis.  In the meantime, the product of a mandatory program of youth service is the very Trump supporters Nussbaum is concerned about.

If we're going to do this, we have to return to basics.  Western philosophy really began with Socrates, the teacher of Plato.  Interestingly, Socrates never espoused a program of thought that could be applied to everyone (Plato did that).  His approach was entirely personal, wholly individual.  The best dialogues are Socrates in conversation with one other person (well, except for the "Apology," where he takes on all the men of Athens; and he only persuades them to sentence him to death).  If you take his statements in "Crito" as valid, you could argue that Socrates saw himself as "work[ing] to create a society where everyone experiences less fear and uncertainty, and a greater sense of positive citizenship." (No, not Nussbaum's words, so I'm being a bit unfair to her.)  But Socrates did that on a personal basis, not on the basis of a described ideal everyone would subscribe to once they heard it.  In the "Euthyphro" Socrates destroys the idea that there is an "ideal" which can be known by all (or by anyone), and yet in "Crito" he avers that every individual must have an ideal that is the raison d'être of the individual's life.  But that is for the individual, not for the community.  But must we all follow the example of Socrates in order to live a just life in a just society?  And how would we do that?  How would we change our hearts and minds order to be as ironic as Socrates?  No, that certainly wouldn't work out well:

Irony...has no purpose, it's purpose is immanent in itself, a metaphysical purpose. The purpose is none other than irony itself. When an ironist exhibits himself as other than he actually is, it might seem that his purpose were to induce others to believe this. His actual purpose, however, is merely to feel free, and he is through irony....

With doubt the subject constantly seeks to penetrate the object, and his misfortune consists in the fact that the object constantly eludes him. With irony, on the other hand, the subject is always seeking to get outside the object and this he attains by becoming conscious at every moment that the object has no reality. With doubt the subject is witness to a war of conquest in which every phenomenon is destroyed, because the essence always resides behind the phenomenon. But with irony the subject constantly retires from the field and proceeds to talk every phenomenon out of its reality in order to save himself, that is, in order to preserve himself in his negative independence of everything....

For irony everything becomes nothingness, but nothingness may be taken in several ways. The speculative nothingness is that which at every moment is vanishing for concretion, since it is itself the demand for the concrete...The mystical nothingness is a nothingness for representation, a nothingness which yet is as full of content as the silence of the night is eloquent for one who has ears to hear. Finally, the ironic nothingness is that deathly stillness in which irony returns to 'haunt and jest' (this last word taken wholly ambiguously.)(Soren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony, tr. Lee M. Capel (Bloomington, Indiana; Indiana University Press 1968, 273-75)

"Whole sight; or all the rest is desolation."  And irony is certainly not about whole sight; but religion, arguably, is.  It doesn't have to be; it is certainly used to be exclusive as much as it is used to be inclusive.  But the statement "let us reason together" is radically exclusive, as "reason" in that phrase is a highly restricted term. The reasoning of Aquinas is not the reasoning of Russell (as Wittgenstein well understood, though Russell didn't). Can religion bring us together? No; it can bring some of us, but certainly not all of us. But then, bring us together to do what? Wield power over Trump supporters? Or to effect the power of powerlessness?  The latter is more likely to increase the positive sense if our nation's diversity and foster a sense that we actually are all in this together. But how do you see that the first will be last and the last first outside of a vision of the basileia tou theou and the God of Mary's Magnificat who will reveal the hearts of the proud and cast the mighty from their thrones?

*Richard Nixon's Council of Economic Advisors pitiful attempt to rein in inflation by appealing to the angels of our better nature.

The Irony of American History

Alberto Gonzales tried to take the moral high ground yesterday, responding to Sen. Graham's questions by saying, first: "We are nothing like our enemy."

The Christian understanding of human nature, of course, is that we are always like our enemy. Reinhold Niebuhr called it the "Christian idea of the ambiguity of human virtue." Writing about America's response to Communism during the Cold War, Niebuhr noted the irony of our opposition to Communism:

John Adams in his warnings to Thomas Jefferson would
seem to have had a premonition of this kind of politics. "Power," he wrote, "always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God's service when it is violating all His laws. Our passions, ambitions, avarice, love and resentment, etc., possess so much metaphysical subtlety and so much overpowering eloquence that they insinuate themselves into the understanding and the conscience and convert both to their party." Adams's understanding of the power of the self's passions and ambitions to corrupt the self's reason is a simple recognition of the facts of life which refute all theories, whether liberal or Marxist, about the possibility of a completely disinterested self. Adams, as every Christian understanding of man has done, nicely anticipated the Marxist theory of an "ideological taint" in reason when men reason about each other's affairs and arrive at conclusions about each other's virtues, interests and motives. The crowning irony of the Marxist theory of ideology is that it foolishly and self-righteously confined the source of this taint to economic interest and to a particular class. It was, therefore, incapable of recognizing all the corruptions of ambition and power which would creep inevitably into its paradise of innocency.
In any event we have to deal with a vast religious-political movement which generates more extravagant forms of political injustice and cruelty out of the pretensions of innocency than we have ever known in human history.

Niebuhr was writing about the tendency of America to become like the Marxist system it then fiercely opposed, often with the same language of facing a "new enemy" in a "perpetual war." But he was optimistic that matters would not decay to the point that the Marxist systems would become indistinguishable from the American one:

The liberal world which opposes this monstrous evil is filled ironically with milder forms of the same pretension. Fortunately they have not resulted in the same evils, partly because they are not as consistently held; and partly because we have not invested our ostensible "innocents" with inordinate power. Though a tremendous amount of illusion about human nature expresses itself in American culture, our political institutions contain many of the safeguards against the selfish abuse of power which our Calvinist fathers insisted upon. According to the accepted theory, our democracy owes everything to the believers in the innocency and perfectibility of man and little to the reservations about human nature which emanated from the Christianity of New England. But fortunately there are quite a few accents in our constitution which spell out the warning of John Cotton: "Let all the world give mortall man no greater power than they are content they shall use, for use it they will. . . . And they that have the liberty to speak great things you will find that they will speak: great blasphemies."

The irony now is, in the name of that same Calvinism, the current Administration is hell-bent on tearing apart all of those safeguards against the selfish abuse of power. Niebuhr saw it as The Irony of American History. What he couldn't foresee was just how ironic American history would become, and just how much like our enemy we could be, when we put our minds to it.


(Quotations are from The Irony of American History, by Reinhold Niebuhr. Charles Scribners' Sons, New York, 1952.)

"Man the master, ingenious past all measure"--Sophocles

The liberal culture has been informed by similar hopes since the eighteenth century. It has been as impatient as Marxism with the seeming limitations of human wisdom in discerning the total pattern of destiny in which human actions take place, and the failure of human power to bring the total pattern under the dominion of the human will. "If man can predict with almost complete certainty," asked Condorcet, "the phenomena of which he knows the laws, if...from the experience of the past he can forecast with such probability the events of the future, why should one regard it is a chimerical undertaking to trace with some likeness the future destiny of the human species in accordance with the facts of history?" Condorcet was not only certain the future could be known but that he knew it. "Our hopes for the future state of the human species," he continued, "may be reduced to three important points: the destruction of inequality between nations, the progress of equality among the common people, and the growth of man toward perfection" required no more than that "the vast distance which divides the most enlightened people...such as the French and the Anglo-Americans" from those people who are "in servitude to kings" should "gradually disappear."

Obviously the idea of the abolition of the institution of monarchy as the most important strategy for the redemption of mankind was characteristic of the peculiar prejudices of middle-class life as the idea of the abolition of the institution of property was of the unique viewpoint of the propertyless proletariat. In each case they identified all evil with the type of power from which they suffered and which they did not control; and they regarded particular sources of particular social evils as the final source of all evil in history. Neither Condorcet, nor Comte in his subsequent elaborations of similar hopes, placed all their trust in this single strategy. The liberal world has always oscillated between the hope of creating perfect men by eliminating the sources of social evil and the hope of so purifying human "reason" by educational techniques that all social institutions would gradually become the bearers of a universal human will, informed by a universal human mind. These ambiguities, which have saved the Messianic dreams of the liberal culture from breeding the cruelties of communism, must be considered more fully presently. At the moment it is worth recording that the Frenchman, Condorcet, envisaged the French and the "Anglo-Americans" as the Messianic nations. Here we have in embryo what has become the ironic situation of our own day. The French Enlightenment consistently saw the American Revolution and the founding of the new American nation as a harbinger of the perfect world which was in the making. Though Comte, almost a century later, rigorously clung to the idea of French hegemony in the coming utopia and fondly hoped that French would be its universal language, France has fallen by the wayside as a nation with a Messianic consciousness, its present mood being characterized by extreme skepticism rather than apocalyptic hopes.

--Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons 1952), pp. 66-68.

Though it doesn't appear strongly here, it is impossible to read Niebuhr on the irony of American history without reflecting on the irony of the history about to be made when he published these lectures, and which is wholly lacking even as a storm cloud on the horizon on his analysis.

Writing from the vantage point of 1952, Niebuhr is concerned with global conflicts, and concerned far less with justice than with order (which, in the classic American construction, proceeds from law. Contrast that with the end of Sophocles' "hymn to reason" in "Antigone," where law clearly comes from human endeavor (not Aquinas' "nature") and justice from the gods. By Niebuhr, we have neatly divorced the two, and law imposes order, which eventually gives rise to justice. It is that divorce that is the root of our modern problem, at least where Christian theology and politics are concerned.) Niebuhr goes so far as to state that Americans are not accustomed to using power, and so are unaccustomed to the abuses of power, a sentiment that would have been quite a surprise to the Native Americans (Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee) or African Americans (the Civil Rights Movement, which would begin only a few years after Neibuhr published this book), or even gay and lesbian Americans, who started their own effort for justice a few decades after Irony was published. And, of course, there is also the Church Commission Report; the revelation of the Tuskegee Experiments; the history of US involvement in Central and South America; even Twain's work denouncing US involvement in the Phillipines ("The War Prayer" is a direct response to that involvement). Not so long ago, I'd have cited that list and said "We will never be so innocent again" about Niebuhr's perspective. Now I'm convinced it's a permanent condition of American culture, something else I'm not sure Niebuhr saw.

There isn't a glimmer of any of those things in Niebuhr's analysis, which is perhaps the greatest irony of all. He is focussed solely on foreign affairs, and despite being the preacher from Detroit he always thought of himself as, missed entirely any anticipation of those justice issues. To further the irony, none of those movements had to do with party politics. They were political, in that they were taken that way. But King and the Civil Rights Movement and the American Indian Movement and the gay rights movement, were all concerned with justice, not political power. They did not associate themselves with a political party, the political parties eventually associated themselves with the movements. Perhaps the most effective one was the civil rights movement, which was grounded in Christianity, never sought politial party affiliation (King's break with the Vietnam War earned him a new round of enemies, including supporters of civil rights), and focussed solely on justice. Niebuhr, on the other hand, warned his own daughter about the dangers of a Republican administration.

Despite that, there is a great deal in this passage that speaks to our current situation, and even to the reaction to it in left blogistan. Niebuhr was right: "Modern democracy requires a more realistic philosophical and religious basis." It requires both, and I'm less and less convinced either of those are the province of a particular political party, or that the defeat of the worse party means the rise of the better party. Democrats, after all, are running right now pretty much on the platform of: "We're not the GOP!"

Which is not the same thing as saying they are an improvement; or that politics and faith truly live in a creative tension with one another. Politics, after all, is about winning power. Faith is about how one lives one's life. Religion and faith speak to the question of evil, which in turn encompasses the realm of politics.

And that perspective is the source of a very creative tension, indeed.

The Irony of American History

The announcer on Marketplace this morning almost casually mentioned that disaster has a way of realigning national priorities. He referred to Katrina, in America, and then the earthquake in Pakistan and India, which is making those countries reconsider cutting corners on buildings that could easily be made strong enough to survive a quake, but weren't, resulting in what this morning was announced to be an estimated 35,000 to 40,000 deaths.

My first thought was of the irony of George W. Bush, rising to power not with his election, but with the destruction of the World Trade Center in 2001, and falling as rapidly from power with the destruction of the city of New Orleans. I say New Orleans becase, lets be honest, had New Orleans been spared, Katrina would be largely a political footnote by now. despite the destruction in southern Louisiana and Mississippi. Case in point:

"We've had a stunning reversal in just a few weeks," said Robert Greenstein, director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal advocacy group in Washington. "We've gone from a situation in which we might have a long-overdue debate on deep poverty to the possibility, perhaps even the likelihood, that low-income people will be asked to bear the costs. I would find it unimaginable if it wasn't actually happening."

Mr. Greenstein's comments were echoed by Representative Rosa DeLauro, Democrat of Connecticut: "Poor people are going to get the short end of the stick, despite all the public sympathy. That's a great irony."

But many conservatives see logic, not irony, at work. If the storm exposed great poverty, they say, it also exposed the problems of the very policies that liberals have supported.

"This is not the time to expand the programs that were failing anyway," said Stuart M. Butler, a vice president of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research and advocacy group influential on Capitol Hill.

While the right has proposed alternatives including tax-free zones for businesses and school vouchers for students, Mr. Butler said, "the left has just talked up the old paradigm: 'let's expand what's failed before.' "

Doubt about the effectiveness of some programs is only one factor shaping the current antipoverty debate. Another is political muscle: poor people do not make campaign contributions. Many do not even vote.

A third factor is the federal deficit, which leaves little money for new initiatives. And a fourth is the continuing support for tax cuts, including those aimed at the wealthiest Americans, which further limits spending on social programs.

Indeed, even as he was calling for deep spending cuts last week, Representative Mike Pence, Republican of Indiana, who leads the conservative caucus, called tax reductions for the prosperous a key to fighting poverty.

"Raising taxes in the wake of a national catastrophe would imperil the very economic growth we need to bring the Gulf Coast back," Mr. Pence said. "I'm mindful of what a pipe fitter once said to President Reagan: 'I've never been hired by a poor man.' A growing economy is in the interest of every working American, regardless of their income."

This is, of course, the hair of the dog solution; but whose dog? Were "liberal" policies doing all that much for the Lower Ninth Ward? And yet, does anyone really believe that more tax cuts for the wealthy going to "trickle down" to water the ghettos of New Orleans and bring a flowering of new life there?

As usual in America we are looking at two camps talking past each other. The "liberals" quoted here wanted a debate. The "conservatives," who, after all, are still in power, wave that away with a dismissive: "Been there. Done that." Well, we've been through your response, too. It was called the Great Depression; and it was largely due to FDR that we didn't face social revolution. Ironically, in fact, some of the very levees that protected New Orleans were built by the WPA.

This is almost precisely the "Irony of American History" Niebuhr noted: the conflict between our high ideals, and our base actions, our abandonment of the Christian idea of human ambiguity. Perhaps this is why we can't have this kind of discussion in America. Maybe it's simply a harsh reality that all discussions about the public weal revolve around political power: who has it, and who doesn't it.

Which would be why only the destitute are innocent.

Can we first define "evil"?

The nominee for Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in February, 2007:

In his opening remarks, Mullen, a Vietnam War veteran, told Pearl Harbor sailors: “I honestly believe this is the most dangerous time in my life.

“The enemy now is basically evil and fundamentally hates everything we are — the democratic principles for which we stand … This war is going to go on for a long time. It’s a generational war.”

Jeane Kirkpatrick, apparently without irony, would label this attitude "making war to keep peace." And, apparently, it really is all about "how we comprehend evil." So let's consider, outside a religious context, if we can, what "evil" means.

Is it slasher films and "gorenography"? There is more than a passing connection. "Hostel II" is, once again, set in Europe. Americans have always known, implicitly now, but explicitly before, that Europe was "decadent," so the premise of the films is easily accepted in that setting. Then again, all the victims are unpleasant and deserving of punishment (just as in the slasher films, where the teenagers who engage in hot sex for our prurient viewing, are the first to die at the hands of the maniac killer); so we get to eat our cake and have it, too. Just as easily, we can believe (though this is not a chicken or egg proposition vis a vis horror films) that the world outside our borders is decadent (just as it once was inside our borders, until we "pacified" the natives by exterminating them) and so we must make war in order to assure peace.

It's not that I don't think evil is a real concept, names a true thing, has, as we loosely say, "existence." But evil should be, always was, extraordinary; it was a word set aside for the worst imaginable. Adolf Hitler was evil, we were told. The Holocaust was evil. It was so evil, we had to coin a new word for it: genocide. Extraordinary Evil: Why Genocide Happens, a book coming out in the fall, captures that meaning, almost preserves it, now. Because evil is on its way to becoming banal, when it isn't linked to religion. And it's hard to argue that claiming the people killing in the name of, on behalf of, because of, or simply for the reason of, a religion, is not itself a religious use of the word. Moreover, it makes the conflict of "good" (us) and "evil" (them) religious as well. No one doubted when we took on the Axis powers that they were evil (if only because they were agressors); but no one cast the battle in explicitly, or even implicit, religious terms. Any who did were clearly marginalized at the time, and by history. But now we've come to rely on evil as our good. We need evil in order to justify our violence. This is an old song in American history, but it can only carry us for so long. Having declared Hitler evil, how do we go higher? When evil is no longer evil enough, what do we look for then?

There are two ways to approach this: one is philosophical/theological, and abstract. The "irony of American history," if you will; the idea of a pure nation (America) in a fallen world (everybody else). We cling to that one whether it is in our foreign policy, or our choice of horror films. What Adm. Mullen wants to claim is an exalted status for us, one that sets us apart from our enemies in every way. No surprise: Alberto Gonzales has made the same claim. Niebuhr, as I said before, saw this. Niebuhr, as it turns out, was also too much of an optimist, and not enough of a Calvinist:

"The Christian understanding of human nature, of course, is that we are always like our enemy. Reinhold Niebuhr called it the "Christian idea of the ambiguity of human virtue." Writing about America's response to Communism during the Cold War, Niebuhr noted the irony of our opposition to Communism:

John Adams in his warnings to Thomas Jefferson would seem to have had a premonition of this kind of politics. "Power," he wrote, "always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God's service when it is violating all His laws. Our passions, ambitions, avarice, love and resentment, etc., possess so much metaphysical subtlety and so much overpowering eloquence that they insinuate themselves into the understanding and the conscience and convert both to their party." Adams's understanding of the power of the self's passions and ambitions to corrupt the self's reason is a simple recognition of the facts of life which refute all theories, whether liberal or Marxist, about the possibility of a completely disinterested self. Adams, as every Christian understanding of man has done, nicely anticipated the Marxist theory of an "ideological taint" in reason when men reason about each other's affairs and arrive at conclusions about each other's virtues, interests and motives. The crowning irony of the Marxist theory of ideology is that it foolishly and self-righteously confined the source of this taint to economic interest and to a particular class. It was, therefore, incapable of recognizing all the corruptions of ambition and power which would creep inevitably into its paradise of innocency. In any event we have to deal with a vast religious-political movement which generates more extravagant forms of political injustice and cruelty out of the pretensions of innocency than we have ever known in human history.

"Niebuhr was writing about the tendency of America to become like the Marxist system it then fiercely opposed, often with the same language of facing a "new enemy" in a "perpetual war." But he was optimistic that matters would not decay to the point that the Marxist systems would become indistinguishable from the American one:

The liberal world which opposes this monstrous evil is filled ironically with milder forms of the same pretension. Fortunately they have not resulted in the same evils, partly because they are not as consistently held; and partly because we have not invested our ostensible "innocents" with inordinate power. Though a tremendous amount of illusion about human nature expresses itself in American culture, our political institutions contain many of the safeguards against the selfish abuse of power which our Calvinist fathers insisted upon. According to the accepted theory, our democracy owes everything to the believers in the innocency and perfectibility of man and little to the reservations about human nature which emanated from the Christianity of New England. But fortunately there are quite a few accents in our constitution which spell out the warning of John Cotton: "Let all the world give mortall man no greater power than they are content they shall use, for use it they will. . . . And they that have the liberty to speak great things you will find that they will speak: great blasphemies."

"The irony now is, in the name of that same Calvinism, the current Administration is hell-bent on tearing apart all of those safeguards against the selfish abuse of power. Niebuhr saw it as The Irony of American History. What he couldn't foresee was just how ironic American history would become, and just how much like our enemy." Niebuhr was more optimistic than that. Interestingly, Al Gore, using Niebuhr, recognizes it:

"Our founders," Gore told [Arianna Huffington], "had an incredibly sophisticated understanding of human nature. They believed that there is the potential for good and bad in all of us. They had a view very similar to the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, Martin Luther King's guru, who put forth the idea that we all have the potential for good and bad and that the ways in which we relate to one another, and the conditions within which we live our lives, have a big impact on whether our vulnerabilities for bad or abusive behavior increase or decrease."

I would note, as Gore does, that you don't have to be a theologian to understand that human nature is complex, human motivation ambiguous, and that "the conditions within which we live our lives, have a big impact on whether our vulnerabilities for bad or abusive behavior increase or decrease." The Founding Fathers, after all, weren't running a seminary. And, as Auden observed: "I and the public know/what all schoolchildren learn/Those to whom violence is done/Do Violence in return."

The other way to respond to this is concrete. Chris Hedges has a book scheduled for release at the end of the year: Collateral Damage: America's War Against Iraqi Civilians. I have no more than the catalog copy on it, but it tells you something:

Collateral Damage is organized around key military operations on the battlefield — Convoys, Checkpoints, Detentions, Raids, Suppressive Fire, and “Hearts and Minds.” Hedges and Al-Arian uncover how the very conduct of the war and occupation have turned the American forces into agents of terror for most Iraqis. The military convoys that speed through the centers of towns, often driving on the wrong side of the street or on sidewalks, have become trains of death. Soldiers fire upon Iraqi vehicles with impunity at checkpoints; pregnant women being rushed to hospital have been killed at roadblocks when their husbands failed to slow down and children have watched in horror as their parents have been killed.

Hedges and Al-Arian show how this widespread pattern of civilian killing has fueled the insurgency in Iraq, giving rise to instability, sectarian violence, and total chaos.

I read that, and I think of the "ordinary American" I saw on a panel on CNN yesterday, who kept saying we need to "remove the restrictions" on our military, so they can win. Because, after all, the greatest military power in the world can't be defeated except by its leadership, right? What all schoolchildren learn, and yet some of us still can't learn it. Now can we talk honestly about "evil"? Because those to whom violence is done, have their own understanding of who is "evil."

POWELL: They are. Guantanamo has become a major, a major problem for America’s perception — as it’s seen, the way the world perceives America. And if it was up to me, I would close Guantanamo — not tomorrow, this afternoon. I’d close it. And I’d not let any of those people go. I would simply move them to the United States and put them into our federal legal system. The concern was, well, then they’ll have access to lawyers, then they’ll have access to writs of habeas corpus. So what? Let them. Isn’t that what our system’s all about? And by the way, America, unfortunately, has too many people in jail, all of whom had lawyers and access to writs of habeas corpus. And so we can handle bad people in our system. And so I would get rid of Guantanamo and I’d get rid of the military commissions system, and use established procedures in federal law or in the manual for courts martial. I would do that because it’s more equatable and it’s more understandable in constitutional terms. But I’d also do it because every morning I pick up a paper and some authoritarian figure, some person somewhere, is using Guantanamo to hide their own misdeeds. So essentially we have shaken the belief that the world had in America’s justice system by keeping a place like Guantanamo open and creating things like the military commission. We don’t need it, and it’s causing us far more damage than any good we get for it. But remember what I started this discussion saying, don’t let any of them go. Put them in a different system, a system that is experienced, that knows how to handle people like this.

And this, of course, is all just the public narrative, the secular one. These are the arguments you pile up in response to the guy who says the military is "restricted" and could "win" if we'd "just let them." He was quite explicit in what he meant, this unknown gentleman: "Wipe 'em all out, that'll stop 'em," are not his exact words, but very close. "Kill 'em all," the priest allegedly said, "God will know his own." Interestingly, one argument for the historical validity of those words is that they are peculiarly Christian:

The idea of "Killing them all" and leaving it to God to sort out the souls of the dead is a popular one among traditionalist Christians. Indeed it is characteristically Christian. It only makes sense to those who believe in heaven and an afterlife. The phrase would be meaningless to an atheist.

Or, for that matter, to any adherent to any other religion which did not accept the fundamentally Platonic doctrine of immortality. Such is the ambiguity of human nature which Christians are called to witness to. As God says to Jeremiah: "The human heart is devious; who can fathom it? I, God, test the heart...." When even God is not sure what human beings will do next, or why, who are we to be sure we can know, and identify, "evil" in others?

It's an interesting concept, "evil," for a number of reasons. It assumes there is an opposing force in the world, which limits the power of God. There is a problem right there, especially for an omnipotent God. If God allows evil to exist, then perhaps Gloucester is right, as "As flies to wanton boys, so are we to the gods." But if all things come from God, must we now, as Job admonishes his wife, accept ill as well as good? Either God is the author of all we know in this life, or God abdicates a certain portion of it to an evil power who sports with us. It's a bit of a theodicial trap.

So let's back up from evil a moment, and reconsider the thoroughly debased Romantic ideal that it is all about us. That's hard to discard, because it's also the basis of existentialism and, while few of us may claim to be existentialists, or even now understand just what the philosophy espouses, we are hard-pressed to propose another theory of existence that we can subscribe to, a valid alternative that explains "the meaning of life" to us. We are all, in Western culture at least, Romantics through and through. Even questioning "why am I here" is a question of radical self-importance that would have been literally unthinkable earlier than the 19th century in Europe. We like to imagine that is a universal question, but you will search in vain for it in the stories of Chaucer's pilgrims, among Beowulf and his warriors, or in the Iliad or Sophocles' greatest tragedies. If anyone ever earned the right to ask "Why am I here?", it would be Oedipus, yet the question never crosses his lips. Seek it in the Bible; you won't find it there. Even the Westminster Catechism, written long before Wordsworth and Coleridge set pen to paper to re-invent poetry and being creating the modern world, doesn't cast it's first question in terms of "Why am I here?," but speaks of the chief end of humanity. And what is that chief end? "To glorify God and enjoy him sic forever." Not much Romantic purpose, there; not much to validate my individual existence. But that affirmation is part of the narrative of Romanticism, of Western European culture since the 19th century; the narrative of the authors of the catechism was another narrative, a different narrative, a narrative bound up with a confession of faith. And the question is: what happens when you remove that confession of faith from the narrative, but maintain the vocabulary? The authors of the Westminster Catechism were no doubt quite comfortable speaking of "evil." But we are no longer comfortable using their narrative. We like their vocabulary, though. It's familiar, and we think we know what it means. The problem is, of course, we don't; and it's leading us into nightmare.

Evil connected to religion, at least "evil" as traditional Christian doctrine understands it, is not "them" and something "over there." It is the state of human nature, the condition of human existence. But when evil is then reserved for Adolf Hitler and Pol Pot, for genocide and terrorism, we quickly remove it from ourselves, convinced we aren't that bad. And we aren't; evil is too easily turned into a club to beat others with, another weapon of our power, our need for control. But then we lose control of "evil," too, and it no longer does our bidding. If only "they" are evil, then only "they" deserve to die, and "wiping them all out" to solve the problem becomes the only solution to every perceived international problem (and national; that same sentiment lies at the heart of the immigration debate today). But if we take evil back into ourselves, if we recognize our complicity in the violence of the world, if we stop thinking of ourselves as "innocent nation" in a "decadent world," perhaps we could start to make a change in the world. For Christians, being "in the world, but not of the world," means recognizing a struggle; Israel called it the "struggle with God." Muslims, as I understand, call it the "jihad," the struggles of the spirit. If those of us who are Christians would start to understand that evil is us, too, perhaps we would start to recognize the struggle is in us, not aimed at us. And the rest of us could at least recognize the religious basis of our vocabulary, and begin to choose our words, as well as our wars, a bit more carefully.

UPDATE:

Robert - I don't know if you heard my story a little while back. This truly stunned me.

I was just reading Christ Stopped at Eboli, which is Carlo Levi's account of his year in exile in Lucania - the back of beyond - in Italy under Mussolini. During that year Italy declared war on Abbyssinia. Word for word, this is what Levi tells the reader Mussolini told Italians:

"Abyssinia hates us for our freedom."

I about stroked out when I read that. Word for word.
Tena

Perhaps the only reason we were the "good guys" in WWII is because we weren't the "bad guys."

UPDATE II:

I feel the need to clarify: When Rick (my grate gud frend, as Molesworth would put it) says this:

"The idea of "Killing them all" and leaving it to God to sort out the souls of the dead is a popular one among traditionalist Christians."

This is certainly news to me.

But of course you are right that the first duty to "fight evil" is to fight it within, to struggle against my own evil. That doesn't relieve me of any obligation to recognize that good and evil are capable of gradation and that greater and lesser evils require differing responses. The fact that my motives are always mixed may still require that I take a stand against an external evil. But a failure to sufficiently recognize the ubiquity of original sin, a failure to see that there is no essential difference between myself and an Osama bin Laden, can lead us to become his miror image (and to a large extent, has).

The difficulty is in navigating between the extremes, between, on the one hand, thinking only the other is evil, and, on the other, thinking my own evil is so ingrained that I refuse to confront it outside myself. To act righteously we need both self-knowledge and self-criticism. Our heart is dark, but it's the only thing we've got.
Rick Allen

And I say this:

"The idea of "Killing them all" and leaving it to God to sort out the souls of the dead is a popular one among traditionalist Christians."

I don't accept it, either, nor do I consider it Christian. But then, my Christianity makes me a pacifist, which is also a position at odds with "traditionalist Christians," at least as judged by history. And then there is the question of whether I am permitted to do evil in order to oppose evil. Just because the heart is all we've got, doesn't excuse us from responsibility for doing evil.

I don't meant to be critical or issue a rebuke. But morality is something of a zero-sum game for me; you can't excuse your evil by appealing to good intentions. We're right back, in other words, to the question of power. Is it okay for me to wield power, if I intend to do good? That's the usual excuse, but I think the teachings of Jesus undercut every effort we make in that direction. Faith is radical, and radically individual, and it requires a radical trust ("faith") in God, a trust which may appear to be sheer lunacy. Certainly the early church had to struggle for a long time to make sense of the crucifixion.

That ambiguity and lack of clarity is truly at the heart of Christianity. As Paul said, Christians must work out our own salvation with fear and trembling, in the apousia, not parousia, of our Lord. It is, indeed, a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.

It's The 100th Anniversary of "The Waste Land"

“In ‘The Waste Land,’ I wasn’t even bothering whether I understood what I was saying,” T. S. Eliot, who was born on this day in 1888, told an interviewer.https://t.co/o5Omp3dPqI

— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) September 26, 2022

Let the amusing anecdotes fly.

I knew decades ago that Eliot dismissed his most famous poem as "a bit of rhythmic grumbling," mostly because it overshadowed the rest of his life and work, and he got heartily sick of it.  Everyone wanted to (and still does) crack it like a particularly intricate puzzle in order to get the "meaning" hidden somewhere inside.  It was the rise of literary studies as a kind of detective pursuit ("Find the meaning! Find it!") and Eliot fell into it, or fed it (depending on your point of view) with his odd and arcane poem.  But I'm here to converse with Anthony Lane's take on the poem; or maybe, more precisely, to discuss mine (briefly) and use Mr. Lane's essay as a foil.

Because you can read Mr. Lane's, if you like.  Where I want to start is with the absolute absence of any reference in any of the articles popping up in my Google feed (did I mention it's the 100th anniversary of this poem?) to Robert Browning.

That's right:  Mr. Elizabeth Barrett Browning.  The teller of the tale of the Pied Pier of Hamelin.  The neo-gothic romanticist of "Porphyria's Lover."  I'm getting closer to the reason I mention Mr. Browning, but that reason is another poem; and actually, the classification of poems themselves.

Poetry is the oldest form or literature, I used to tell my students in a literature class.  It began simply as a mnemonic device.  Some pattern to the words and lines (end rhyme came late to the game, so don't start there) made it easier to remember them, although remembering them exactly was not the point.  There was no text to score against, there was only the memory of the story, and the story was all.  The poet was the memory keeper, the explainer, the signifier of what was important (Beowulf's courage, strength, bravery; in the end his selflessness.  He travels to Heorot to show off, basically; but he stays to finish the job when he has to tackle Grendel's mother, as well; and that's a harder task.  When he returns home he refuses to take the crown until it is forced on him, and he dies defending his people when his warriors flee the danger of the dragon.  Of course by dying he leaves his people defenseless; but it was the neighboring tribes or the dragon, so....).  The poet kept these long poems in mind through patterns of speech we now identify as rhyme or meter.  We came along later and categorized and classified these things.  Much, much later.  We ossified it into set pieces.

And we divided poetry on the Greek terms:  lyric for poems expressing emotion (because the Greeks sang/chanted them to the music of the lyre.  Think of it as a Greek guitar, and you aren't far off.  Now if you suddenly think of James Taylor singing "Fire and Rain" ("Just yesterday morning they let me know you were gone./Suzanne the plans they made put an end to you./I walked out this morning and I wrote down this song."), you aren't far off again.).  Narrative for; well, for everything else.  Narrative poems tell stories.  They may express or induce emotional responses (I have several emotional responses to "Beowulf"), but their purpose is to tell a story.  The purpose of a lyric poem is to express an emotion; or several.

Narrative is the grand category, the other side of the dividing line from lyric poetry.  But narrative poetry has categories within it, the grandest of them being the epic.  No need to detail the terms of that category:  we can settle for poems that tell a long story.  And until Robert Browning in Victorian England, those were the accepted categories of poems.  Then Browning invented a new one.

It's curious he doesn't get more credit for it.  Shakespeare invented the English sonnet, but his was just a stanza and meter variation on the Petrarchan; and it didn't really take.  English poets still primarily write Petrarchan sonnets, when they do (W.H. Auden's are some of the best in the language).  Browning, however, invented a new type of poem out of whole cloth, a poem so unique and different it created a new class of narrative poem.  Browning created the dramatic monologue.

"Dramatic" in part because Browning wanted to be a playwright; but he was a better poet than that.  Dramatic, too, because one of the elements of the dramatic monologue is dramatic irony.  That kind of irony is usually seen on stage:  one character reveals something the other characters don't know about; but the audience, watching invisibly and silently behind the "fourth wall," does.  That irony, that "we" know something "they" don't know, can fuel the tension of the plot until the climax, when all is finally revealed. Handled well, it can be thrilling and satisfying; handled poorly, it can be disastrous.  Browning was never very good as a playwright but at handling dramatic irony he is without peer.

"Monologue" is also a term that comes from the stage.  Plays don't have a narrator, someone who can explain the inner thoughts of a character to the reader/audience. (Even "Our Town's" narrator doesn't do that.)  When the playwright needs to clue the audience in, a monologue is used.  In "Othello," in the final scene of act I, Iago tells the audience what his plans are; that he will deceive everyone, including Roderigo who thinks he is Iago's partner in crime; and he will have Desdemona for his own.  It's a bit of dramatic irony, then, as we watch Iago lie to Othello and Cassio and Desdemona (who isn't fooled!) and Roderigo and work his treachery across the tragedy.

But the more famous Shakespearean monologues belong to "Hamlet," as the young prince tries to decide if he can commit regicide and parricide (well, by marriage) and...I'm sure there's a term for killing one's uncle, but you get the idea...all on the word of a ghost who may be his dead father, or may be a demon trying to torment him.  And do it in cold blood, no less. Hamlet's soliloquies, or monologues, are his inner thoughts as he wrestles with these dilemmas.  And here perhaps we should distinquish between the soliloquy, spoken by one character on stage alone, and the monologue, spoken by a character without interruption or intervention by another character.  The distinction, it occurs, is important in the case of a dramatic monologue, because ofen the narrator is not alone with his/her thoughts.

Browning's best (by far) dramatic monologue is "My Last Duchess."  It is a monologue, not a soliloquy (which, technically, "Porphyria's Lover" is).  There is a silent, anonymous audience of one to the Duke's tale:  "Will't please you sit and look at her?"  He reveals a painting of his last Duchess to this solitary viewer, and tells her story.  It becomes clear to the reader, and the viewer in the poem, that the Duke was pricked by his last wife's largeness of heart and kindness toward all, a kindness and beneficence he obviously doesn't share. Just as light reveals dark places, her shining example of a good person was too much for the Duke to bear, because he was outshone (one thinks, fleetingly, of Donald Trump, who can never bear to be publicly upstaged).  "...This grew; I gave commands;/Then all smiles stopped at once."  Yes.  He executed her for making him feel bad about himself.

Having finished his story, he makes sure you get his meaning with one last reference to the painting:

There she stands

As if alive. Will’t please you rise? We’ll meet

The company below, then. I repeat,

The Count your master’s known munificence

Is ample warrant that no just pretense

Of mine for dowry will be disallowed;

Though his fair daughter’s self, as I avowed

At starting, is my object. Nay, we’ll go

Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though,

Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,

Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!

And now you, the reader, get the point of Browning's tale:  the silent audience of one is not mute; his statements are insignificant, they simply don't register on the Duke's ear.  It's all about him, and it always will be. The audience of one is an agent of the Count, sent to negotiate the last details of the terms of the dowry in preparation for the marriage of the Count's daughter to the Duke.  But the agent realizes now the Duke is a monster and if the Count loves his daughter at all, must call off this marriage before it's too late.  He tries to leave the Duke upstairs and rush down to get the Count's attention, but the Duke is oblivious to his concerns and quite sure he (the Duke) is being magnanimous to treat this servant as an equal:  "Nay, we'll go/Together down, sir."  And what does he speak of, after this unspeakable tale?  His art collection, to which he has already added his last Duchess.

Does the Duke realize what his monologue has revealed to us?  No.  And that's the dramatic irony.  We are left hoping the Count is warned in time, and equally left revolted by this self-involved and self-important monster.  This is an absolutely perfect example of the form:  we are left with a clear understanding of the Duke which he himself does not have and would never reveal to another if he did.

So there you have the two elements that set a narrative poem apart from a dramatic monologue.  But what does this have to do with "The Waste Land"?

Before that poem, Eliot was famous for his first long poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."  It was a "modernist" poem, wandering somewhere between end rhyme (lots of couplets!) and free verse, but above all it was a brilliant revival of the dramatic monologue.  The narrator is Prufrock, not Eliot.  And he reveals his desires, his needs, his wants, his wishes, his failures and his despair precisely "as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen".  He is the creature of his dissociated, discommuned age: "Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets/And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes/Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?"  He is also, at least within the frame of the dramatic monologue, self-aware: "No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be". But even that revelation doesn't break the isenglass of the monologue, and he continues to soliloquize in part because he is the reverse of the Duke of Ferrara.  Prufrock is self-absorbed, too, but no one wants to talk to him.  The Duke is the stony center of his universe; Prufrock is the empty vacuum at the enter of his.

"Prufrock" may be a lyric expression of the emotions of T.S. Eliot; but it seems more reasonable to see him as a figure of the "modern man" when projectors were still "magic lanterns" and social life was tea and time spent in "a closed car" if it rained.  This is a description of a modern world leaving many people behind and outside the walls of human society, much as the Industrial Revolution did to English country villages 100 years before Eliot wrote his poem.  (I, too, can connect nothing with nothing.)  It's in the understanding of the poem that way, that we can see what Eliot was trying to do, and did, with "The Waste Land."  Especially if we keep in mind that Eliot's original title for the poem was a line from Dickens:  "He do the police in different voices."

Eliot tried his hand at plays, too, in the end.  They hardly rival Shakespeare; and, if anything, indicate the British desire to achieve the highwater mark of British letters:  playwright (i.e., Shakespeare).  Auden did the same, as did Yeats.  They are all better remembered as poets.  But before Eliot got to plays (and having fallen back on lyric poetry for the rest of his output), he tried his hand at expanding the dramatic monologue to cover all of Europe, and to capture the entirety of life between the wars that was European civilization and society.

So he goes back to Greece, he comes forward to patrons in an English pub discussing demobilization of the troops, he wanders through French and German and across the European map:

Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.

Frisch weht der Wind

Der Heimat zu

Mein Irisch Kind,

Wo weilest du?

“You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!”

Et O ces voix d’enfants, chantant dans la coupole! 

It's no accident that the scene in the pub is introduced by:

O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag—

It’s so elegant

So intelligent

In the middle of the monologue already drawing to a close ("What are you thinking?  What thinking? What?") that portrays the alienation between a husband and a wife (Eliot and Vivienne?  Many think so.).

And Margate sands; and Phlebas the Phoenician ("Who was once as young and fair as you") and Madame Sosostris with her "wicked pack of cards" bringing in the pseudo-mystical that the Victorians clung so tenaciously to even as they eradicated it from local culture with industrialization and "modernization" (AC Doyle created the absolutely scientifically minded Holmes, but clung absolutely to a belief in fairies, one aided by the very scientific advance of: photography.) to Carthage, to:

Jerusalem Athens Alexandria

Vienna London

Unreal

Some scenes call back to others:

A woman drew her long black hair out tight

And fiddled whisper music on those strings

And bats with baby faces in the violet light

Whistled, and beat their wings

And crawled head downward down a blackened wall

And upside down in air were towers

Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours

And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.

Which, to me, echoes the previous monologue by the wife to her husband.  

To India to the Thames to London Bridge falling down:

Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves

Waited for rain, while the black clouds

Gathered far distant, over Himavant.

The jungle crouched, humped in silence.

Then spoke the thunder

DA

Datta: what have we given?

My friend, blood shaking my heart

The awful daring of a moment’s surrender

Which an age of prudence can never retract

By this, and this only, we have existed

Which is not to be found in our obituaries

Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider

Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor

In our empty rooms

DA

Dayadhvam: I have heard the key

Turn in the door once and turn once only

We think of the key, each in his prison

Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison

Only at nightfall, aethereal rumours

Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus

DA

Damyata: The boat responded

Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar

The sea was calm, your heart would have responded

Gaily, when invited, beating obedient

To controlling hands

 

                                    I sat upon the shore

Fishing, with the arid plain behind me

Shall I at least set my lands in order?

London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down

Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina

Quando fiam uti chelidon—O swallow swallow

Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie

These fragments I have shored against my ruins

Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.

Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.

                  Shantih     shantih     shantih

Fragments shored against the ruins.  A personal expression? An historical one?  A cultural one?  A personal one?

I'm not here to give the poem a final meaning.  I find it interesting that Mr. Lake relates a reading of the poem by Frumious Bandersnatch (I jest in respect) accompanied by music, not of the lyre, but composed by Anthony Burgess, the novelist (and why didn't I know this music existed!??!).  Not sure about the instrumentation, but lacking full information seems appropriate to this poem.  If you see it was a deconstructed dramatic monologue, or perhaps more accurately as an exploded one, the sausage casing unable in the end to contain all the stuffing, it begins to fit together, and what is revealed in the dramatic irony is what we most work to conceal: i.e., the unity of "western civilization," the notion of a Europa somehow joined even as it constantly tries to fly apart (this was between the wars, after all; the notion of a peaceful Europe after the war to end all wars was just the wishful hope of those most tired of war.  It was never a reality.).  It’s a cacophony of voices trying to find, again, the one voice of history. But “history” is a moving target. The settled events of the past were once the chaos of the present. The more we look for certainty, the closer we are to chaos. Stability is built on the backs of people without voices or, especially in the case of the English, those unvoiced by foreign tongues. (Again, no accident the poem begins a childhood spent at the arch-duke’s in the mountains of Europe and ends by the banks of (perhaps?) the Thames "Fishing, with the arid plain behind me". High to low, and all in between, as it were.)

Eliot’s magnum opus is the dramatic monologue of Europe, in the interregnum between discarding its past (through violence and social/industrial change) and creating its future (also birthed in violence). The ultimate irony is that, in the monologue, Europe can neither speak, nor listen, to itself.

Or it’s just a bunch of rhythmic grumbling in five parts.

The wee small voice in the corner

says, "No duh!"

I think quite a few people who are deeply against the war realize that getting out may not be easy or quick. The issue is starting -- not considering starting in six months, or a month, or after the Iraqis stop killing each other or after the Sunnis and Shia work out their differences about Ali and the family of the Prophet or anything else. All of those equal never because a clear-eyed look at the situation tells you that leaving is never going to be easy or free of bloodshed or, perhaps most importantly, free of the need to recognize that the whole thing was a terrible idea, a war built on deception and deceit at every level.

I know I said a long time back, when discussion of withdrawal was just getting publicly started (but who listens to a D-list blogger? Even Kathy Griffin doesn't know my name) that we had broken Iraq, and we had bought it. That withdrawal was the only option (we cannot keep asking other people's children to die for this foreign policy, which is a debacle), and that abandoning Iraq was also not an option (we are responsible for our actions as a country, whether we like the leadership or not). So now we're down to paralysis, or, as I keep putting it, running 'round and 'round the perimeter of the circular room looking for the corner we've been told we'll be safe in.

It's ultimately a question of responsibility. Which is, in full measure, the current "irony of American history:"

John Adams in his warnings to Thomas Jefferson would seem to have had a premonition of this kind of politics. "Power," he wrote, "always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God's service when it is violating all His laws. Our passions, ambitions, avarice, love and resentment, etc., possess so much metaphysical subtlety and so much overpowering eloquence that they insinuate themselves into the understanding and the conscience and convert both to their party." Adams's understanding of the power of the self's passions and ambitions to corrupt the self's reason is a simple recognition of the facts of life which refute all theories, whether liberal or Marxist, about the possibility of a completely disinterested self. Adams, as every Christian understanding of man has done, nicely anticipated the Marxist theory of an "ideological taint" in reason when men reason about each other's affairs and arrive at conclusions about each other's virtues, interests and motives. The crowning irony of the Marxist theory of ideology is that it foolishly and self-righteously confined the source of this taint to economic interest and to a particular class. It was, therefore, incapable of recognizing all the corruptions of ambition and power which would creep inevitably into its paradise of innocency.

In any event we have to deal with a vast religious-political movement which generates more extravagant forms of political injustice and cruelty out of the pretensions of innocency than we have ever known in human history.

Niebuhr was talking about Marxism, but the "innocency" he worried about is now peculiarly American. We are, after all, the "good guys," and we maintain that reputation by insisting on a level of abstraction and distance from harsh reality that assures us that: "The majority of people understand we treat people with dignity and respect, but there are cases where we have to detain them,: even as we kick their doors in, or murder their mothers, or terrorize their fathers. "So it is a delicate balance." And the balance is all due to "The crowning irony of the [American] theory of ideology ...that... foolishly and self-righteously confine[s] the source of this taint to [the other] and...[is] therefore incapable of recognizing all the corruptions of ambition and power which would creep inevitably into its paradise of innocency." My country, right or wrong. And we learn once again the lessons of power:

The liberal world which opposes this monstrous evil is filled ironically with milder forms of the same pretension. Fortunately they have not resulted in the same evils, partly because they are not as consistently held; and partly because we have not invested our ostensible "innocents" with inordinate power. Though a tremendous amount of illusion about human nature expresses itself in American culture, our political institutions contain many of the safeguards against the selfish abuse of power which our Calvinist fathers insisted upon. According to the accepted theory, our democracy owes everything to the believers in the innocency and perfectibility of man and little to the reservations about human nature which emanated from the Christianity of New England. But fortunately there are quite a few accents in our constitution which spell out the warning of John Cotton: "Let all the world give mortall man no greater power than they are content they shall use, for use it they will. . . . And they that have the liberty to speak great things you will find that they will speak: great blasphemies."

That "liberal world" Niebuhr described is now the "neo-con" world of Bush and Cheney, who reportedly don't trust any successor to "deal" with Iran, and so will take care of that problem, too (just as they have "taken care" of the Taliban, al Qaeda, Afghanistan, Iraq, New Orleans....). We have ignored the warning of John Cotton, and forgotten that "the system" (O machine! O machine!) will not save us from ourselves, will not limit the power any one person will aggregate unto themselves. We have to be the limitations on that power. Our representatives have to be the limitation on that power. Ironic that religion, which many blame for the abuses of power of the last decade, is the source of the lesson about the dangers of that abuse. Ironic that, as we must learn once again to shoulder responsibility ourselves, one lesson that could be learned is: "Religion is responsibility, or it is nothing at all."

Isn't that the kerygma of the parousia?

Return to the Irony of American History

This story on NPR was simply so good, it deserves special mention.

Maybe because, when it started in on a new production of "Inherit the Wind," I expected the same old distortions about the Scopes Monkey Trial. But suddenly the story turned on the fact that the playwrights were addressing McCarthyism, not the teaching of evolution. And then Brian Dennehy, who plays the William Jennings Bryan character in the play, noted that Bryan was concerned with Social Darwinism, with the forced sterilization cases in America at the time of the original trial, and other matters that would appall many of us today.

And I thought of the irony of American history, again. Not the way Niebuhr meant it, but the way it often works out. The writers of "Inherit the Wind," as the NPR report notes, probably never imagined teaching Darwin's theory would be controversial (it actually wasn't that controversial in the days of the original trial. That was a manufactured controversy.). But their image of William Jennings Bryan as a benighted and ultimately wrong-headed figure has become accepted as the historical report on the man. The irony? The man who could write these words is still generally regarded as a beacon of reason and wisdom:

The attack is not upon the procedure but upon the substantive law. It seems to be contended that in no circumstances could such an order be justified. It certainly is contended that the order cannot be justified upon the existing grounds. The judgment finds the facts that have been recited and that Carrie Buck "is the probable potential parent of socially inadequate offspring, likewise afflicted, that she may be sexually sterilized without detriment to her general health and that her welfare and that of society will be promoted by her sterilization," and thereupon makes the order. In view of the general declarations of the legislature and the specific findings of the Court, obviously we cannot say as matter of law that the grounds do not exist, and if they exist they justify the result. We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

That's one of the sterilization cases Bryan would have been concerned about. That's Oliver Wendell Holmes, in 1927. That's the enlightened view of Social Darwinism at work. Holmes is considered a leading light of his age, while Bryan is regarded, after the success of the play, as a japing fool with a medieval worldview. Read those words again, and consider who has the "medieval" view of the world.

What, by the way, is the story on Carrie Buck?

Current scholarship shows that Carrie Buck's sterilization relied on a false diagnosis premised on the now discredited science of eugenics. It is likely that Carrie's mother, Emma Buck, was committed to a state institution because she was considered sexually promiscuous, that the same diagnosis was made about Carrie when she became an unwed mother at the age of 17 due to being raped, and that her daughter Vivian was diagnosed as “not quite normal” at the age of six months largely in support of the legal effort to sterilize Carrie.

Which doesn't mean Bryan was right in the Scopes Monkey Trial. But, as Dennehy says, his position was complex. And we do ourselves, and him, and even Darrow, a disservice, to simplify the debate for our own purposes.

Addendum to the Pinker Post

School shooting in Texas. Early reports not looking good. God bless all!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 18, 2018

More to the point:  what he hell does he mean by it?

I teach composition and rhetoric, and one of the things I teach is rhetorical analysis (in one week!  No, we don't cover it deeply).  I usually focus on the phrase "God Bless America," asking my students to consider what it means and what it even is.  Is it a command, an imperative, requiring God to "bless" America (I'll explain the quotes in a minute)?  It is a plea, with the "Please" or "May" implied but unspoken?  And what, I always ask, does "bless" mean?  We use it almost entirely in a religious context.  Christians churches  ask for the blessings of God, or speak of the blessed poor, the blessed meek, the blessed mourners; but what does "bless" mean?  Good things from God?  That's one.  But how are the meek "blessed"?  Or the mourners?

Or is it even perforative language, meant by the expression to create a state of affairs?

Outside the religious context, does the word "bless" have any meaning at all?  "Bless your heart" is a Southern phrase that is meant both as a benediction and as a euphemism.  In the right context it is the most polite way of taking pity on a fool that one can muster; but it can also mean to be a comfort, and it's sometimes hard to be sure which is meant.  But there isn't necessarily a religious connotation in it, especially when its used as the most anodyne of insults.

Which brings me, in far too roundabout a fashion, to this:

Of course, Pinker’s confidence in the righteousness of his own cause may come across as similarly beatific (he’s an atheist who’s confident enough to use the word “blessed” without a hint of irony), but as he repeatedly tells us, the evidence is on his side.

I do wonder what Pinker means.  I don't have the context.  I presume it's in his new book.  I understand the reference to irony, but is it essential?  I understand the idea of a blessing; but I have to say I find "Congratulations!" a lot more straightforward and understandable.  The more I think about "bless" or "blessed" or "blessing," the more I wonder if I know what I should be expecting, or if I've just been told I'm a benighted fool who doesn't even understand the insult.*

*I was reminded last night of the other use of "blessing," that given by an authority figure (a father, The Godfather) to those under that authority.  Which is the real irony of Pinker's use of the word.  Where does the blessing he thinks has been dispensed (he uses the past tense) come from?  The Enlightenment, one presumes?  Huh.  You know, real philosophers are more careful about their language than that.