Three dead ends

I stole that subject line from Brett McKay. It goes with a great post, he writes a lot of great posts. What I am going write here is more or less the same thing only I will be less specific.

Irony

Irony is supposed to mean saying one thing while meaning the opposite. There is more to it than that but that is the base notion out of which all other understandings of irony come from.

At some point, I don't know when, irony became a debating position. A debating position is a view you don't believe but adopt because it's defensible in debate. Agnosticism and deism are both debating positions. No one ever held either with anything even vaguely resembling passion but they are easily defensible  positions, safe harbours you can hide in while waiting for a war to end knowing that your positions is so difficult to assail and of so little strategic value that no one would bother.

"Irony" has come to mean taking stands you clearly don't really believe in "ironically". It is to say, "I know this all bullshit and you can tell because I'm just playing at it." Hipsters are hated for holding this position but it's commonplace since it was sold to the mass market by the two Davids (Letterman and Byrne) in the 1980s. The position is unassailable because there it never allows an argument to go to the final step.

Here is crude example of how it works. A friend of mine was a top student in philosophy in the early 1980s and she was being courted by big schools. One day a philosopher from Oxford tried to convince her to go there. Tatiana had just been talking to someone from the Sorbonne a short while before and said she was tempted to go there. The Oxford guy started to bad mouth the Sorbonne saying that it was living on its reputation and that it hadn't been a leading school in decades. Tatiana said, "But couldn't someone say the same of Oxford?" And the Oxford man, rather than argue the point, immediately conceded that the school had declined a lot in recent decades but added, "But at least we know it." Tatiana waited for him to go on and say something about what they were doing to reverse the decline but the man said nothing. Somehow, he thought that being full of crap but knowing that you were was better than being full of crap and not knowing it.

And if you can do that you never have to answer for being full of crap.

It's closely related to the Alinsky position by the way. It allows you to criticize others using their moral standards while having none yourself.

[If we look at McKay's first position, we can see how it is ironic. "Accept that masculinity is a cultural construct and choose to live a “re-defined” masculinity (or eschew masculinity as a goal altogether)." Right from the get-go, this position states that there is no such thing as masculinity. What a person who holds this view adopts as their masculinity will be, therefore, always something of an inside joke. Pushed, they will say not only that they don't real mean but that this some how grants them some sort of moral superiority because they know they are full of shit.]

Authenticity

The authentic view is that we already have the thing we need to become inside us and that what we need to do is strip off the various accretions that prevent us from being it. Like irony, it seems to have no core. In The Authentic Swing, for example, Steven Pressfield has his hero try to shake off all distractions even treating his conscious efforts to swing the golf club correctly so that his authentic swing, the one he came equipped with naturally, will be able to come out. In his famous essay Sincerity and Authenticy, Lionel Trilling describes authenticity by pointing to a character in a Wordsworth poem who is so overcome with grief that he is utterly unaware of anything around him.

Not surprisingly, this strategy of arriving at what is most legitimate by subtracting things is pretty much useless in real life. Again, this can become just a debating position, you criticize what you don't like but avoid having to defend what you do  like because it is defended entirely in terms of what is absent. Unlike the ironist, however, the believe in authenticity claims to have a position they cling to but claims that it can only become clear by removing the obstacles that keep it from being realized.

[In McKay's essay, the authenticity merchants blame feminism rather than advance a view of masculinity to follow: "many men who take this stance, though they say that manhood isn’t about women, are consumed with thinking about them! The focus of their lives is all about women – why they’re angry at them, why they’re not as good as they used to be, and how to pick them up and have sex with them (because while women are awful, they’re still good for one thing). Though manhood should be all about men – how men test and sharpen each other, what men need from each other in dire times, what men respect in each other – for these men their pursuit of manhood revolves around women."]

Sincerity

Sincerity, according to a recent book, is where all the problems begin. It's author argues that authenticity is really a form of sincerity. I'd argue that, paradoxical as this may seem, so is irony.

Sincerity is an attempt to solve a problem not unlike Dr. Johnson arguing that he really knows a rock exists by kicking it. You can get a sense of the strategy by imagining that someone is asked to prove that he really loves a woman he has just fallen in love with. A year ago he said he was in love with another woman and now that is over. How can he prove this time is different? He has no history he can appeal to because he has just fallen in love with her. All he has is a feeling"inside" and all he can do is keep reasserting that feeling more and more forcefully.

Wittgenstein used to illustrate this by scrunching up his face somewhat like someone passing a difficult stool and saying, "See, I really mean it now." It's a strategy that occurs to every twelve year old who asks for a puppy and promises his mother that he will take care of it. She, quite reasonably, asks how she can be sure he will keep that promise and he screws up his face and says, "Because, I really, really, really, ..., really mean it!!!!!"

People who push sincerity rarely realize how ridiculous they are because they are certain they have something "inside" that they can refer to. Bill never doubts that he loves Lisa because he knows that love is inside because he can feel it. It never occurs to Bill that what really drives him is a desire for sex, a fear of being alone or a combination of the two because the "it" is soooo strong. But the only strong thing is the forcefulness with which he declares this.

Wittgenstein would say, and he would be right, that sincerity arises because it looks like we can go straight to the place we want to go to. I'm here and it's right there in plain sight so I should be able to go straight there. But any attempt to do so fails because there is no road from here to there. All we have is the feeling that it must be possible.

[In McKay's essay, the sincere are the men who hold the fight club position, those who are willing to go even to the end of civilization to demonstrate how real their position is. "Recognizing patriarchy’s incompatibility with the modern, techno-industrial world, these men offer another more radical solution: blow up civilization (like in Fight Club) or try to hasten its demise by opt-ing out of contributing to it, and return to a stateless, dangerous world in which primal manliness is once again needed." Hiding in that view is sincerity, a belief that what they hold to is so strong that even after everything else is destroyed it will still be real. (And you can see how sincerity morphs into authenticity here). The difference between the two comes in terms of implied forcefulness: "Ha," says the sincere man, "authenticity guy just wants to ditch feminism but I'm so sure of what I have inside me that I'm willing to destroy civilization."]