Fighting fire with fire

The contagion of irony

“Firefight,” with a little help from Midjourney

I added a late postscript to my last post, noting that Heather Cox Richardson had remarked about how the disinformation¹ surrounding Helene had hampered relief efforts. She continued on this theme the following day, noting of TFG that “He apparently wants to make sure voters cannot base their decisions about the country’s future on facts.” Richardson also pointed out how that campaign continues to violate decades-old expectations for presidential candidates, including releasing medical and financial records, appearing on 60 Minutes, handling classified documents with any semblance of propriety or security. I’m occasionally shocked by the degree to which we’ve become numb to the deluge of falsehoods and TFG’s unwillingness to meet even the most minimal standards of qualification for the Presidency. I’m old enough to remember when campaign coverage used to debate whether candidates were sufficiently Presidential, and while I’m not sure I miss that particular line of inquiry, the alternative has been much worse.

And yet. The point of the last episode wasn’t so much the misbehaviors of one candidate or his political party, but the degree to which this was a symptom of a broader social/discursive irony. For whatever reason, after I published it, I kept coming across other pieces that I could have included and/or cited. So I thought I might share a few of them here, as kind of a roundup and a way to bookmark them for myself for later.

I’ve mentioned Samantha Rose Hill before, but her #20Tuesdays essay last week ended up being especially relevant. Specifically, she cited a passage from Hannah Arendt about how “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is…people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” Which is precisely the danger that Riesman identifies.

Hill’s essay provides a really succinct account of Arendt’s understanding of ideology, which I won’t rehearse here except to encourage you to read it. “Arendt’s point is that ideological thinking turns us away from the world of lived experience, starves the imagination, denies plurality, and destroys the space between men that allows them to relate to one another in meaningful ways.” When folks talk about the Republican campaign representing an existential threat to democracy (as Tom Nichols does in The Atlantic’s recent cover story on the implications of this election), there’s a tendency to dismiss those claims as melodramatic. But I tend to see claims like these as the latest stage in a much longer transformation—for me, irony is the term that best captures that change—and I’m a lot friendlier to that argument as a consequence.

And yet. It would be dishonest to imply (as I think I probably sometimes do) that this is a problem that exists solely with the political Right in this country. I also came across Jon Gabriel’s piece for Discourse last week, “My Feelings Don’t Care About Your Facts.” Gabriel teases out the “stark difference between the left and right when it comes to what is or isn’t a ‘fact,’” noting that there’s a depressingly large percentage of the population that struggles even to understand the difference between statements of fact and opinion. The result, he explains, is an increasingly fertile ground for conspiracy thinking. “When people believe that leaders, journalists and darn near everyone else is lying to them, they’re going to invent their own facts, sometimes downright outlandish ones.” (Like secret, government weather machines, ffs)

As many have observed, conspiracy thinking, once it’s sunk its hooks into a body, is particularly difficult to dislodge. It’s a species of magical thinking, one that allows everything to “make sense,” where anything that doesn’t fit can be waved away as disinformation produced by the shadowy authors of the conspiracy, where the absence of evidence is because THEY don’t want you to see it, etc. Conspiracism is also a route to what Rebecca Lowe describes as “moral truth” (or “moral progress”). Lowe’s introduction to her new Substack talks about the flaws with supporting something or someone 100%, an attitude that conveniently ignores the facts that people make mistakes, that circumstances change, and that we cannot know the future. The kind of absolutism that she’s critiquing is not only a feature of a great deal of conspiracism; it’s also been infecting our political discourse for a while now. Think about how many candidates for office (and sitting politicians, for that matter) have grown increasingly comfortable declaring their absolute antipathy for the other side.

NC gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson may be the worst example of this (“Some people need killing!”), but he’s far from alone in this regard. And the twisted “logic” of his remarks (“It’s not a matter of vengeance. It’s not a matter of being mean or spiteful. It’s a matter of necessity!”) speaks to the dangers of going all-in on a single perspective, person, or political party. Lowe terms this consequentialism, the attitude whereby your purpose is backed by (perceived) moral purity to the extent that any means are justified.

any goal-directed evaluatory approach that’s focused on one thing — whether moral progress, or freedom, or whatever — is overly thin. It’s overly thin because it fails to acknowledge other good things, and because it fails to acknowledge that, often, the pursuit of one of these things can come into tension with the pursuit of another….Consequentialism, in all its forms, is super-seductive. As well as embracing something of undeniable moral importance (the consequence), consequentialism seemingly offers a neat easy route to moral truth.

The examples of this approach that come most easily to mind for me are often politically right-wing (eg, the multiple programs that Congressional Republicans have killed because they don’t want Democrats to receive credit for them, the procedural hypocrisy regarding our past two SCOTUS justices, et al.), but if we’re being honest, consequentialism isn’t exclusive to one side.

I don’t want to both-sides my argument here, though, because I don’t believe that there are only two sides, nor would I claim that all sides are necessarily equal in their rush to this sort of behavior. My original motive for today’s post was to elaborate on the dangers of the sort of irony that I talked about last episode. The problem with this sort of discursive bad faith is that it provokes the same sort of approach from its opponents. The cliché of fighting fire with fire feels relevant here: when your adversaries refuse to play by the rules or engage in good faith, it’s hard to resist feeling justified in doing the same. No one wants to be the person who brings a knife (or a scimitar!) to a gunfight.

Fool me once, Dr. Jones, shame on you; fool me twice—BANG!

This isn’t irony as the “best” strategy in some kind of discursive Prisoner’s Dilemma, where we lie because we think the other person is lying, or crank up our own flamethrower when we see the flames coming at us. It’s more fundamental than that—it’s the place where rhetoric ceases to be a tool or a strategy and instead turns into a worldview. In Doppleganger, Naomi Klein draws some connection between that book and her earlier work in No Logo:

The story beneath the story [in No Logo] was the normalization of the disassociation between words from reality, which could only usher in the era of irony and flat detachment, because those seemed like the only self-respecting postures to adopt in a world in which everyone was lying all the time.

I quote this passage in one of my more direct posts about irony, which I went back to because I also mention there the Reality Bites/Ethan Hawke definition: where irony is “when the actual meaning is the complete opposite of the literal meaning.” Ian Bogost writes in Play Anything that “Not knowing and not being able to know is the meaning of irony today. Not saying or doing the opposite of what one means, but refusing to reveal whether or not one really means not to mean it” (34, my emphasis). Not knowing (the reality of experience) and not being able to know (the standards of thought).

Bogost also notes that “irony reproduces itself,” reducing everything to an “unknowing hum” where signal and noise become indistinguishable from one another. If the infectious spread of irony is one of its chief dangers, I’d argue that another is that, often, the only available strategy in an age of irony is escalation², which gives us some insight into the extent of our political polarization, the emphasis on “moral progress,” and the normalization of hyperbolic language (particularly online) in recent years.

There’s always more to say, but I think that’s enough for the moment. This post has been slowly growing for more than a week now, and I want to turn to other things.

[Note: It’s been a week since my second cataract surgery, and things seem to be going well. I hope to return to a steadier output over the next couple of weeks.]

1. This is one of those rare cases where I think it’s important to distinguish between misinformation (wrong info) and disinformation (deliberately misleading info).

2. This calls to mind another iconic movie scene/line about knives and guns, from The Untouchables: “You wanna know how to get Capone? They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue.”